Archive for December 12th, 2004

While You Were Sleeping

Posted by Bob in How Things Work, Politics on 12/12/2004

Let me tell you a little secret about politics. You know those “both sides” everybody talks about? While you are sleeping, they are getting together.

You don’t actually have to be sleeping. You can be going nuts over Prayers in Schools or Six Day Evolution or the Holiness of a Single Cell, but meantime, “Both Sides” are quietly selling you out. I worked on Capitol Hill. I watched it happen all the time.

Issues like this give your so-called “leaders” a wonderful chance to keep your eye on the Golden Ball while they make their deals with no interference from you.

Conservative “leaders” march forth and thunder that they love one-celled “unborn babies” as much as they do their own children, that they stand for prayers in school, despite all the pressures against them (WHAT pressures?) and that they demand the right for creationism be taught in schools.

Liberals yell for the other side.

These things are a godsend for politicians.

The wonderful thing about your wasting your entire political life on that stuff is the attitude of everybody who actually has any power is:

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

So while you are proud of yourself for marching boldly in favor of holly to decorate your school, the education establishment is working out a nice deal where it will eventually compromise and allow the right a few harmless school vouchers, while shouting all the way. The universities will still use your money to run their liberal seminaries.

While you obsess over Iraq’s borders and Israel’s borders, the third world will pour over yours. But they will be able to pray in your schools. Ain’t that great?

While you are talking about freedom, the right wants to take your freedom away by “protecting the children” from pornography and the left want to censor anything it decides to call “Hate.” Since the right wants to convince the left that it is more anti-racist than the left is, rightists will be proud to join the left in heavy censorship to stop both pornography and anything the left chooses to call “Hate.”

People in real politics like the way you think. While you worry about Creationism and Holy One Cells, they’ll take care of the stuff that matters.

Creationism? One-cell humans? Prayers in schools? The establishment would be far more frightened by one copy of Why Johnny Can’t Think: America’s Professor-Priesthood in a school than by ten thousand prayers, and you know it.

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12/11/04 Insider Letter

Posted by Bob in Insider Letter Archive on 12/12/2004

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

(reprinted to the Blog from 12/11/04)

Since we are getting close to Christmas, I want to point out another group that needs the message in Why Johnny Can’t Think: Home Schoolers. More and more people are pulling out of the public schools, which is easy to understand. Sending a child to these schools is tantamount to child abuse.

One thing I hear from people is that Why Johnny Can’t Think may offend the home school crowd because of my use of three or four bad words in the book. This was an oversight on my part, but it brings up an important point. This is a point that is crucial to understanding why so much of “conservatism” has been a dismal failure.

There is only one type of home schooler I can respect for this outlook: Those who refuse to send their kids to public schools because of their values, and who are consistent enough to understand that colleges and universities are just more of the same.

What I can’t stomach are the “respectable conservative” home schoolers, which my staff refers to as “prissies,” those who don’t want Johnny to read my book because of a few bad words, or to read it themselves because they might be “offended.” Yet these same people are willing to send little Johnny off to college to a moral cesspool completely unprepared.

To send a child to college from that environment without brutally honest preparation is about as smart as sending your teenage daughter on a road trip with an NBA basketball team. It is mind-boggling. It is “respectable.” It is damned foolish.

I can take criticism of Why Johnny Can’t Think because of bad writing, or typographical errors, or quibbles about details in some of my historical examples. What I cannot abide is moral cowardice. I don’t think Jesus let people off the hook on technicalities.

Why Johnny Can’t Think is not perfect, nor is it for everybody. But it IS, and we need it out there. PLEASE get a copy for someone you care about today!

We are making it easy for you to do. We’ll even gift wrap it, and put a little note in there from you, and send it directly to whomever you want us to — all for the same cost. (note: we can’t split discounted multiple book orders to different addresses, due to mailing costs).

We are now offering express shipping to make sure the books arrive in time for Christmas.

READBOB.COM

Bob

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Modernist Religion is Dead

Posted by Bob in History, How Things Work, Politics on 12/12/2004

The main line churches are all rotting away and waiting to be buried.

They get a little kick from the backlash of evangelical success from time to time, but the only thing that really keeps the United Methodist Church and the like from disappearing tomorrow is the tradition, reputation and the cold cash it inherited.

Modernist churches had a huge crash in membership since the 1960s, but it never bothered them at all. They don’t need ANY members. They have plenty of cash reserves to feed their preachers while they preach to empty seats about Social Progress and Integration and how Marx was actually just like Christ.

If you want to see the future of America’s mainline churches, go to England. There you can sit in a giant cathedral on Sunday with maybe a dozen other people and the preacher, who draws a governmet salary and money from centuries of gifts. He’ll be there next Sunday, and most of them don’t give a rip whether anybody else is there or not.

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Mtihraism and Zoroastrianism

Posted by Bob in History on 12/12/2004

Mithraism came long, long, long after Zoroatrianism, which is now agreed to have begun before 1200 BC.

Historians tried for centuries to push it up to 600 BC so it wouldn’t be older than the written Old Testament, but that’s out now.

Mithraism seems to have been a very late outgrowth of Zoroastrianism. It was a serious competitor with Christianity in the early stages, so historians have to talk about it a little.

Mathraism used a ceremony of bread of wine and preached a savior. Second-century Christians, who were as ignorant of history as today’s Jehovists, but with more excuse, naturally insisted these were stolen from Christianity. Actually both ideas had been part of Zoroastrianism log, long before they appeared in the Old Testament, and the Messiah preached in the Old Testametn was a Jewish nationalists, whereas the Zoroastrian one was a close parallel to Jesus.

Islam and Jehovists have called Zoroastrianism “duotheistic.” But the Jehovists, Islamic and Jewish, who do not call themselves Christians say that Christianity is polytheistic: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Jehovists call Zoroastrianism duotheistic because it has the Good God and the Devil. Again, this is a rather desperate attempt to be perfect Jehovists and to insist tha the only religion Cyrus ever had, the Cyrus that the Old Testament says “did God’s work,” the only religion the Magi ever had, was not God’s religion.

Believing in both God and Satan is not polytheism, or else Islam and Christianity are duotheistic.

This debate causd a HUGE problem for Islam. When they conquered Persia, they faced a population that was solidly Zoroastrianism.

The story that Islam is “tolerant” is nonsense. Medieval Christianity allowed only Jews to survive, but it put them under special restrictions. Islam allows Christians and Jews to survive, but it puts them under special restrictions. It had to. The areas Islam conquered had too many Christians and Jews to kill out.

Under Islam, anybody else died, just like under Medieval Christianity.

Islam ran into the same problem in Persia. It couldn’t just massacre most of the Persian population that wouldn’t give up Zoroastrianism. So Islam declared Zoroastrianism to be a religion on the same par with Christianity and Judaism.

Officially, many Moslems wanted to burn the Zoroastrians, but it just wasn’t practical. They called Christians “infidels,” too, which put them in the burning catagory, but it wasn’t practical. Zoroastrianism was subject to heavy legal penalties and was, in well over a thousand years, ALMOST wiped out. There are still some left in Iran.

No one talks about them because any study of Zoroastrianism busts up both Jehovist and secular history.

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