Salt City Sinner

  The very stupidest piece of common wisdom regarding religion is a hard pick to make. There are many worthy contenders. For my money, “there are no atheists in foxholes” may be the winner. 

  Perhaps you were lucky enough to grow up without a religious background. Perhaps your guardians were either hardened, borscht-swilling atheist Marxists or the type of enlightened freethinkers one might find at a local Universalist Unitarian meeting – you know, the type who let their children name themselves and pick their own spiritual path. Perhaps you did grow up with a hand-me-down religion, but perhaps it was Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religion available in this great big world.

posted on 2/6/2021 by Charles R. Bernard To the Editors of the Salt Lake Tribune, When I saw in my podcast feed that Mormon Land would be covering so-called “#DezNat” extremists, I tuned in with great interest. I study (and often write about ) cultic movements, far right ideology, and online extremism, so naturally #DezNat is a phenomenon I became aware of a few years ago. It currently exists at the confluence of many of the powerful forces that drive American politics in 2021.  

Posted on 11/23/2019 by the Salt City Sinner What does it mean to love God, what does it mean to love power, and what does it mean to love Donald Trump? Are these separate questions, or have they become scrambled together? Given that 81% of Evangelicals voted for Trump , it’s safe to conclude that the latter is the case. Unpacking the tangled webbing of fear, greed, superstition, and credulity that binds white Evangelicals to Donald J. Trump, the most profane and libertine President in United States history, will be the project of generations. Religious conservatives didn’t get here overnight, and it’s an odd place for them to have arrived at, but the journey isn’t as mysterious as it might seem at first glance. A good place to start is Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump , by John Fea . Fea’s book is an attempt to answer these questions in a serious way, and from the standpoint of one who shares many of the values and presuppositions of the average parish...

posted on 6/25/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist recently wrote about one particularly hateful character, Cheryl K. Chumley. Ms. Chumley boasts the hilarious title of “online opinion editor” at the Washington Times, where she wrote this :   Nothing shows cultural degradation like a nation that was forged by Christian faithfuls on a quest for religious freedom and built by Judeo-Christian principles being torn asunder and cast into judicial, legislative and cultural confusion by the likes of group that hails Satan during a prayer moment at a government get-together. … The First Amendment is being twisted and turned inward and used as a weapon of cultural and political destruction against America by cockroaches that, just a few short years ago, were constrained to dark corners. And they were constrained to dark corners because the moral majority wouldn’t tolerate it otherwise. Mehta does a great job of taking apart Chumley’s idiotic argu...

posted on 7/26/2015 by the Salt City Sinner (In part one of this post , I very briefly addressed some of the historic witch hunts, both literal and figurative, that Christians in the West have engaged in. Today we're going to focus in a little closer on literal, 'get him/her, she/he's a witch' witch hunts. ) To be fair, it’s not just Christians in the West (or “Christendom,” as some right-wing Christians have adorably taken to calling it again) who have engaged in this type of hideous nonsense. Listverse compiled ’ 10 Modern Attempts to Police the Occult  -- a fascinating and quick read that is completely worth checking out, by the way -- and only two of the entries on the list are from the West; one example from the United Kingdom and one to Canada. Given the content coming up in the third and final installment of this post, leaving the U.S. off the list strikes me as a little weird. Also, it’s worth noting that Islam is at least as unhinged as Christianity w...

posted on 7/3/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  There are two definitions of “witch hunt,” one literal and one figurative. Literal witch hunts still go on in America and abroad (primarily in Africa and the Middle East). They happen when a community succumbs to collective insanity and goes searching for “witches” (practitioners of magick or the occult) and/or evidence of witchcraft, blaming everything from failed crops to moral transgressions by “upstanding” community members or outbreaks of contagion on suspected witches. The victims of these hunts are often, but not always, people who have absolutely nothing to do with witchcraft – and who are certainly innocent of causing the harm they are held responsible for in either case. Figurative witch hunts follow the same pattern of moral panic, a frenetic search for a conspiracy, and the persecution of people perceived to be members of a hated minority, but can happen when angry, panicked idiots set their sights on just about a...

posted on 5/11/2015 by the Salt City Sinner One year that I attended college in Arkansas, my girlfriend at the time and I used to hang out in Little Rock with friends of hers, including one friend we'll call “Rob.” Rob was ex-military, and politically on the conservative side, so needless to say he and I spent a good deal of time arguing about politics. We also spent a a not-insignificant amount of time arguing about religion, because Rob was definitely a God person, whereas I, since the last time I attended mass as a tween, have decidedly not been a God person. Our political arguments were often heated but there was a certain amount of mutual respect. When Rob talked about Jesus, on the other hand,his lips would curl into a gloating little smile and his voice would take on a condescending timbre as he said, for the hundredth or three hundredth time, “you'd understand if you'd ever been in the military or seen combat. There are no atheists in foxholes.” This wou...

posted on 4/19/2015 by the Salt City Sinner  The drunk pack of sports fans at the football game do it when they don “war paint” and headdresses and cheer for the crude, stereotypical “Indian” that is their team's mascot. That insufferable white college freshman does it when he shows up for class inexplicably clad in a dashiki. It's called cultural appropriation, and it's one of the favored pastimes of dominant groups in this, the poisoned fever dream of late-stage capitalism. Wikipedia has a pretty good working definition of the phenomenon, which it describes as “the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group, especially if the adoption is without the consent of the originating culture, and when the appropriating group has historically oppressed members of the originating culture. ” This brings us to the modern Evangelical yen for Judaism, and the related (in a limited sense) topic of Messianic Judaism. Now, this post is specif...

posted on 10/30/2013 by the Salt City Sinner  Happy Devil's Night and preemptive Halloween, ye servants of darkness! It is by this point quite apparent, I would think, that I have a low-grade obsession with Joseph Farah's WND (formerly “WorldNetDaily”), which I think is probably the most insane right-wing website on planet Earth – certainly the most insane site that generates such a volume of traffic, anyway. It's impossible to know how many WND readers are there looking for their version of legitimate “news” and how many are, like me, lookie-loos attracted to the most ghastly political freak-show this side of Alex Jones, but the numbers are pretty impressive (1.680 in traffic worldwide, 454 in the US, according to Alexa ). Lest you think this is just a depressing measure of the size of the proverbial fever swamps, it's worth noting WND's email list has been purchased by the Republican National Committee for outreach efforts in the past. This lends Farah...

posted on 8/16/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Happy Friday, ye godless, begodded and many-godded pilgrims! The sun came up in the East this morning, gravity apparently still works, and water is still wet, and thus homophobes are still engaging in contortions of screwball logic and epic bouts of sulky wailing about their supposed persecution at the daintily manicured hands of the gays. The fact that most Christians – that is to say, those who are not affiliated with the likes of Big Joe Farah or Pat Roberson – do NOT feel the iron boot of Hitler / Stalin / Obama on their necks doesn't faze these wild-eyed true believers, who see themselves as beleaguered heroes desperately trying to warn an ignorantly sleeping population of God-fearing Americans that they are done for. The Supreme Court's DOMA ruling prompted what was probably the apex of this screeching so far ( jeepers! ), but it is anti-discrimination laws – the slowly evolving legal framework that, in some places ...

posted on 5/12/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Mitt "Mittens" Romney! Didn't everybody enjoy his last turn in the bucket ? After getting soundly trounced by ancient desert reptile John McCain in the 2008 Republican primary, Romney is back for more. His entire primary campaign so far (which is, thanks to Texas Armadillo Ron Paul , not technically over) has been like the Republican version of the John Kerry candidacy in 2004 - nobody seems to like him, he was virtually nobody's first choice, but there he is, last man standing, about as welcome as a breakfast of thin gruel and tepid water. In an apparent attempt to add some red meat to said sad breakfast, and also to dislodge the persistent and unfortunate belief among the Republican base that Romney is a cult member rather than a True Christian *, Romney delivered today's commencement address at Liberty University, an impressively insane "college" founded by Jerry Falwell. Liberty University is n...

Alright!  I'll tell you, I'm NOT a republican.  I have been a registered Democrat since I became a registered voter.  Through my desire to try and find change for my family, and community I changed my registration and am now "Unaffiliated".  I was too ill to attend the Democratic Caucus on Tuesday evening.  Thursday evening approached much faster than I had anticipated, and attending the meeting was something I found myself truly dreading.  We, (my nine year old daughter and myself) arrived at Kearns High School approximately 30 minutes before the meeting was to begin and entered a packed parking lot, eventually making our way back out of the parking lot to find a space on the side of the road.  Having signed up the night before I knew which district I was located in and found my place in the many lines formed for the different districts.  After "signing in" we eventually found our way up the stairs, around the corner, and tucked aw...