Christianity Trumps Science

Humans of the world are facing oblivion through man-made super-fast global warming and the real possibility of a final nuclear shoot-out, although a collapse of the US-dominated monetary system may come first. When it happens even the global middle classes will be in a position as bad as the Yemeni peasant. Urgently needed is a leader who will tackle these inter-nation issues with a modern, enlightened approach, applying logic and reason.

Trump, with his Bible-focused agenda, is not that man.

The dream team

Trump began his assault on science with the appointment of conservative Christian Scott Pruitt [3] as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. He is known for his ‘extreme anti-environmental positions’, for suing the EPA multiple times and his calls for the deregulation of the fossil fuel industry.[4]

Then came Tillerson into the powerful position of Secretary of State. An ex-CEO of Exon-Mobil, he is described as a ‘classic Establishment Protestant’ with a lot of scorn for climate change. ‘It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions’, he’s been known to say.[5]

The likelihood of further regression is real with the choice of Betsy as Education Secretary. She is the daughter of for-profit schools advocate Richard De Vos [6]. DeVos (and her Amway family [7]) believes ‘Trump is much more likely to bring Christ into the world’ and her ‘… desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's kingdom.’[8] She is paired with creationist Jerry Falwell Jr., he chosen to lead a task force reviewing higher education [9].

Multimillionaire Perdue (to the important environment and poverty post of Secretary of Agriculture [10]) became the 9th Evangelical. Ted Cruz, the ultra-right Christian presidential hopeful, couldn’t have sorted a more biased bunch.

Seventh-day Adventist Ben Carson, another Republican presidential nominee-turned-Trump supporter, got the Senate’s approval to be Housing Secretary. His blockbuster opinions go from dismissing climate change to the deep gutter, to a comment where he compares women who terminate their unwanted pregnancies to slaveowners who ‘thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave.’[11] He fits the Trump don’t-think-we’ll-tell-you-what-to-do mould perfectly.

War is decided inside the Oval Office where Trump is advised by chief strategist Steven Bannon, recently of the right-wing Christian Breitbart News. [12] He’s the dude who forecast he and Trump will take the war over to the South China Sea within the next 10 years. The nuclear war-heads around today are 3,000 times as powerful [13] as the bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" dropped on Japan.

Reince Priebus, the Bible study and prayer group leader, [14] is Trump’s chief of staff. We should be worried.

As the documentary ‘Waiting for Armageddon’ explored, there are millions of bright Americans with very odd foundations in faith. They’re praying ‘all good Christians disappear from earth and rematerialize in the clouds (alongside the loving god Jesus) as chaos (wrought by the hateful Jesus) seizes the world’ [15] destroying all who weren’t born into Christian circumstances. 

The spectre of a nuke-war was bad enough when the war-expander Obama (for all 8 years [16]) was in front of the button, but historically the more there are people who believe in a tall, handsome and blue-eyed US-English speaking Jesus, the greater the likelihood the world will be blown up.

The Trump administration almost went to war with Iran at the start of February. [17] The same Iran which the EU ‘forgave’ and welcomed back for trade well over a year ago. [18]

The most dangerous organisation in the world is the CIA. There Trump appointed Mike Pompeo. He believes ‘Jesus Christ our Savior is truly the only solution for our world’ [19]. He is ok with all the Obama enhanced stuff: torture, Guantanamo Bay, defending America in Iraq, the NSA spying on Americans [20] and in continuing to support and seek support from Saudi Arabia [21]] – its export is Wahhabism, identified by the European parliament in Strasborg as the main source of global terrorism. [22]

With this dream-team in place expect a slew of anti-LGBT rights, toilet access and women’s right bills, plus the need to fight inequality ignored. More important, expect these tactics to dominate the media, effectively deflecting attention from continued war-mongering and, the most dangerous of all, profit-making in direct contravention of climate change science.

The opposition

Thankfully it is not the US that leads the moral argument for the world. Europe and its substantially better educated public are leading the pack. Christianity is at last dying in Europe, including the UK. [23] Last year the Spectator wrote the ‘decline of Christianity is perhaps the biggest single change in Britain over the past century’. [24]

Where Christianity declared ‘there is the big picture and the gods followed by Trump and his men made it all, love them or go to hell’, Europeans (particularly the young) are applying logic and reasoning. They’re opening double doors to knowledge through enquiry, discovering truth piece by tiny piece as they proceed to understand for us all a puzzle-picture of billions of years.

Brexit was a demonstration of undiluted anger directed at the advance on Greed Capitalism started by Thatchernomics of the 1980s. The British aren’t crying alone. France has just had the biggest ever (mostly ignored by mainstream media) protest marches. The 31 March 2016 march connected 400,000 well educated, mostly white and well-off, and not just in France.

‘It is about re-appropriating politics in general by the people, for the people,’ says interviewed protestor Yann Le Moullec. [25] ‘Democracy is failing,’ says Armand Degue.

The protests involved ‘tens of millions of people across the European Union’ wrote The Telegraph, continuing, ‘it is a fear for the future that can be felt from Athens to Amsterdam, from Warsaw to Watford. They are fed up.’

It has been gathering momentum for almost 10 years. An austerity backlash mixed in with protest over anger at environment destruction and elitism – exactly what Trump and the Christian cabinet is about.

This dramatic shift in public awakening that has been happening over the last 20 years or so in Europe (including the UK) away from the two pillars of ultimate corruption and abuse, [26] Capitalism and Christianity, has finally reached the US. 

Where in the USA 7/10 of the old white folks (65 +) are Christian, only 3/10 of the young (18 to 29) call Jesus their personal saviour. [27]

And the young are the thinkers, the group that is increasingly standing up and saying ‘no!’ They are the super-sharp scalpel that will cut away the cancer and save the world. Activist Lawrence Krauss reminds (in a supportive educational environment) that it takes only one decade for change to happen.

But can the world wait for them to grow-up? A maniacal group has power now. Analyst Chris Hedges wrote that 'The Trump kleptocrats are political arsonists. They are carting cans of gasoline into government agencies and Congress to burn down any structure or program that promotes the common good and impedes corporate profit.'

The Twin Towers: Capitalism & Christianity

In this war between Science and Religion the true purpose behind Trump’s Christian cabinet can be found.

‘You don’t appoint a cabinet of billionaires to be taking on the establishment’, said Bernie Sanders on ‘Face The Nation’. Trump’s new cabinet is a perfect reflection of the current establishment, at least, the establishment that today’s Greed America needs to continue unopposed. It takes blind belief to nurture religion, and the same for today’s incarnation of Capitalism.

Capitalism is a pyramid structure. It works by creating new markets and industries at ground level, with profits from there travelling up to board room level, where they should be re-invested into business and into the people of business.

But profits are not re-invested. They stay at the top, disappear into havens, which means more industries and markets have to be found at ground level for more profit to be siphoned up. But new industries and markets will eventually run out.

Like an alcoholic, in order to continue the system has to deny that there is a problem. That the raw materials that feed it are finite, that production and consumption are polluting. America and the West rely on stripping profit from their own disadvantaged and third world markets in order to bolster coffers at home.

Christianity has been a money making enterprise nearly since the beginning. Today the Vatican is worth hundreds of billions. [28] Isn’t that enough to solve the world’s poverty problems? It would be, if that were the true intention of the Church.

Religion is a model that engenders blind belief, allowing those in power to continue unimpeded. The world of logic and science is a direct threat to leadership structures looking to continue the current model of elite money making and world destruction.

Slippery slope

Regulations that limit corporates and their freedom to exploit people and the natural environment are obstacles that have to be removed, explains Joel Bakan. 

On 28 March 2017, Trump signed an order undoing most of the restrictions around coal and put a major dent in internet privacy. [29] He is acting in (presidential) accordance with the Corporacy.

Trump’s working on the home-front where just a few months before Obama did the identical but through international trade agreements. Profit as a driver is right – sustainable. Profit (after the quite ridiculous salaries and bonuses are met) at unreasonable levels to reward shareholders no matter the cost to the environment is the time bomb.

Trump and his Christian team isn’t that different from presidents past. Where Obama’s cabinet had its wealthy, [30] Trump’s cabinet and outer support staff are choc-full of men and women of amazing success. Paupers who made it to No 2 in Goldman Sachs, became President Medal winning neurosurgeons, a dyslexic who turned broke companies into billion-dollar winners. [31] His cabinet has been favourably compared to Reagan, an all-time favourite president, the one who added the Greed ingredient to the Capitalism cake bake. But, where does the loyalty of these people lie? With profits, or the earth?

The fossil fuel industry is hastening the world toward climactic collapse; both Stephen Hawking and lesser known Australian Professor Fenner give humans 100 years. Wall Street and its colleague agencies like the IMF and World Bank are the number one cause of ballooning billionaires in places exotic and poverty in the third world, but that is not our biggest immediate concern. The derivative snowball the private banks have created since Clinton set in motion deregulation is set to plunge the world into an economic collapse that will make 2008 seem like a normal day.

We of the Affluent have had the choice to oppose this president (and those of the past) but instead, since around 1950, we have risen blowing bugles, quaffing champagne, releasing balloons and getting unbelievably fat and sick. We live beyond the wildest dreams of just 100 years ago but it has come at the cost of the environment. In getting there, under the slogan ‘that’s their problem’ we’ve sentenced billions to poverty. But we’re the ignorant ones. Their poverty adds hugely to climate change’s tipping point. Think for a moment of how the poor live. Think of how rising temperatures and icy-chills create more poor: Inequality not only adds to climate change, climate change translates into greater inequality. [32]

The future

Trump infers his belief in Jesus is not a recent political move but that it started way back. When he was sworn in, the Bible [33] his Mummy gave him in 1955 was used (Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration Bible was back up). ‘Trump is humbled to place his hand on Bibles that hold special meaning both to his family and to our country’, [34] said his PR machine.

Fuzzy, and cute, but what of life?

The threats ‘we now face are the most severe that have ever arisen in human history … nuclear war, environmental catastrophe’, Chomsky said in an interview in December with Democracynow. ‘… the stated goal of the president-elect, who regards climate change as a hoax and whose policy, if he pursues it, is to maximize the use of fossil fuels, end environmental regulations … and, in other ways, accelerate the race to destruction …[35]

What we urgently need are not fairytales but an education system worldwide that has as a base, as an absolute starting point at kindergarten level, documentaries like ‘The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey’ [36] and ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey’, to introduce an elementary understanding of the real world and our inter-dependency on nature. We should be closing down the like of the Bush initiated, millions wasted, Creation Museum, moving Christianity instruction to a neutral safe place alongside Greek Mythology.

We need to teach science and maths,[38] have as set book for moral orientation for 12 year-olds the Humanists’ Bible,[39] and for environment appreciation ‘The greatest show on earth’.[40]

We’ve problems out there – for example skewed objectives see the deaths daily of some 25,000 kids [41] though the neglect of basics like food.

The problem with climate change conditions to send the world tipping into human oblivion have already happened. We’re waiting for them to take effect. Prayers are useful only as a basic improbability exercise in a junior arithmetic-fun class.

‘Religion and science both offer explanations for why life and the universe exist.’ [42] Far from being filled with morality, saying ‘sorry, we weren’t equipped to know better’ religion and Trump’s Christians aren’t apologising for their failure to dump myth and the destruction it has caused – they’re going on ahead to make it worse. Far from joining hands with our scientists Trump has proceeded at a tangent and engineered the backing of the ardent Catholic [43] Koch Brothers [44], Mr and Mr Fossil Fuel America.

Trump and the likeminded of the Corporacy enthusiastically join with science in one sector – colonising space. Just as throughout the Western world the middle class has deemed it its right to barricade itself from the growing poverty classes, so the super-rich, the elite and cronies likely see safety in space communities. Instead of sitting next to Jesus from space stations orbiting the moon they could look down on a frying, exploding earth. [45]

There is so far no heaven, only this one-off life. No longer is it plausible to instruct people to work for the profit of corporates or to go willy-nilly to die for the politician sitting warming himself before the fire. Under Trump, evangelical USA is happy to bring Jesus to open all Christian graves, as Armageddon sounds.

* A former soldier and district commissioner in then Rhodesia, Douglas Schorr is today a committed critic of capitalism and colonial legacies, citing them as the source of poverty in Africa. His first book, The Myth of Smith, is available for sale on Amazon Kindle as are the short stories Mr Boomslang & 7 Other Rhodesian Fireside Tales. Schorr blogs at www.douglasschorr.com. Follow him on Facebook for regular updates.

End notes

[1] They claim 220 million listeners in 155 nations.

[2] ‘He did accept a relationship with Christ.’ http://www.dailywire.com/news/6944/dr-james-dobson-trump-recently-accep…

[3] ‘He is a deacon at First Baptist Church in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and on the board of trustees of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, part of the conservative Southern Baptist denomination, which claims over 15 million members” … http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/23/trump-s-epa-pick-blend…

[4] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/23/trump-s-epa-pick-blend…

[5] http://religionnews.com/2016/12/14/rex-tillerson-establishment-protesta… And ‘Tillerson, now secretary of state, used the email pseudonym Wayne Tracker to communicate with Exxon Mobil board members. – the emails over CC have disappeared - see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/exxon-mobil-rex-tillerson-emails-lo…

[6] The Corporation by Joel Bakan. The promotion of education as a new growth industry not with the objective of broadening and deepening the scope knowledge but to make money out of a necessity that is as important as water was given new impetus under Bush Jnr. It was achieved through political positioning and money muscle. The mill-stone hanging around the necks of current students and those who went through or attempted to, over the last 20 -30 years bears testimony to the blackmail of for-profit education. 

[7] The basis of the business model is to work as cohesive family units, isolated – no sharing- form others of lesser opinion. It is in a sense a private group pyramid scheme. Here is another view … https://www.luckscout.com/amway-pyramid-scheme/

[8] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/betsy-devos-christian-schoo…

[9] https://www.au.org/.../trump-appoints-creationist-jerry-falwell-jr-to-l…...

[10] Agricultural policies, in association with gangsters like the IMF, have done huge damage to poor and developing countries abilities to feed themselves. My first lesson in this area came from Chossudovsky.

[11] https://thinkprogress.org/13-ridiculous-things-ben-carson-actually-beli…

[12] Many sites – here’s one. http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a8288455/who-is-steve-bannon-trump…

[13] http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a23306/nuclear-bombs-powerful-…

[14] http://religionnews.com/2016/12/13/trumps-advisers-the-faith-factor/

[15] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-heilbroner/evangelicals-israel-and-…

[16] www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/ … Jan 13, 2017

[17] Political analyst Hasan @ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46568.htm

[18] www.irishtimes.com/.../europe/eu-welcomes-iran-breakthrough-and-eyes-en…...

[19] Jan 18, 2016 - European Union officials will visit Iran as early as next month to explore possible energy links, the EU's energy commissioner said yesterday, ...

[20] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/cia-dir-pompeo-je…

[21] http://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/election/article1…

[22] There is little to doubt about the King’s visit to Malaysia last being, primarily, on CIA’s behalf to warn Najiba about Chinese investment.

[23] ‘In July 2013, Wahhabism was identified by the European Parliament in Strasbourg as the main source of global terrorism.’ … http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/29/what-is-wahhabism-the-reacti…

[24] (2015) ‘…about six percent of Danes attend church weekly compared to about 11 percent in Germany and France. In the United Kingdom the figure is about 22 percent, with the number rising to 26 percent in Spain and 30 percent in the Netherlands.’ See http://www.christianexaminer.com/article/abandoned.by.missionary.agenci…

[25] And the picture is exacerbated by the fact that for the ‘first time in modern history, Europe’s deaths have exceed births’. … https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/europe-turns-a-fatal-corner-deaths…

[26] http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/britain-really-is-ceasing-to-be-a-ch…

[27] http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/europe-ref-fed-up-vote/

[28] Christianity and Capitalism are the twins who, since the stealing of the peasants’ lands in the century or two before the fullness of the Industrial Revolution bit and marching on through the arrogant centuries of colonial theft, have made the world such an unequal place.

[29] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/15/white-chr…

[30] Nobody knows the worth of the Catholic Church, possibly a  trillion. And they get involved in all sorts of investments outside of its 'holy mission' ... https://www.thestreet.com/story/13295788/1/how-rich-is-the-catholic-chu…

[31] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/us/coal-miners-hope-trumps-order-wil… and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/28/the-house-…

[32] http://allenwestrepublic.com/oh-my-word-weve-never-had-wealthy-cabinet-…

[33] http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/310103-a-tale-…

[44] www.un.org/.../blog/2016/.../report-inequalities-exacerbate-climate-imp… Oct 3, 2016, and see https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603158/hotter-days-will-drive-global… Dec 20, 2016

[35] Of the Bible Trump declared ‘The Bible is certainly, it is THE book. … I think religion is a wonderful thing. I think my religion is a wonderful religion.’ http://hollowverse.com/donald-trump

[36] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/01/18/the-symbo…

[37] https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/2/noam_chomsky_with_trump_election_…

[38] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_xTG6VXlIQ

[39] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lMzJ8rbBOI

[40] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRT5RyL0nq8

[41] At least we know this was written by AC Graylin with a workable world in mind.

[42] Richard Dawkins

[43] https://www.unicef.org/factoftheweek/index_53356.html ... 25,000

[44] Ibid Lorna Salzman

[45] ‘The Koch brothers are Catholic. Though their last name is Jewish in origin, the Koch brothers have pledged over $3 million to the Catholic University of America.’ … https://www.reference.com/

[46] A family who put money before all else, particularly, for example, before Stalin a nd Hitler to make more money … http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34413-jane-mayer-reveals-history-of-…

[47] Privately-owned space stations could be orbiting the moon by 2020' so presumably space homes for the super-rich won't be far off. https://sputniknews.com/science/201703091051424941-private-space-statio…