TRUMP AS MOB BOSS

           The Daily Beast reported that in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos former FBI Director James Comey called President Donald Trump “a mob boss” and left everyone present in the room “stunned.” This did not stun me at all. Before he (somehow) became president, Trump was a big-time real estate developer in New York. It is not hard to imagine that Trump had frequent dealings with the Mob in New York—the real organized Mob—and that perhaps was a sort of capo himself.

I was reminded of this when I read an article in The New Yorker Magazine about John Feeley, former Ambassador to Panama, who resigned because he could no longer support the policies of Donald Trump. The article described Feeley’s first visit to the Oval Office to advise the president about matters in Panama. As Feeley took a seat, Trump asked “So tell me, what do we get from Panama? What’s in it for us?” Feeley described the many benefits we get from Panama, and when he finished, Trump chuckled and said, “Who knew?” Trump then turned the conversation into questions he had about a hotel he owned in Panama. To me this sounds like the behavior of a Mob Boss.

Comey, who was Director of the FBI from 2013 until his dismissal by Trump in May 2017, and was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from January 2002 to December 2003, and subsequently the United States Deputy Attorney General from December 2003 to August 2005, would not use the words “Mob Boss” lightly. I’m sure that as a leading law enforcement officer he would be very familiar with the behavior of mob bosses. They are not like the character on the Godfather in Pizza commercials. They are a sinister bunch of thugs who have historically controlled unions and construction companies in the New York real estate development industry. It is hard to imagine that Trump could have run his real estate business without dealing with and placating the mob.

PolitiFact reports that La Cosa Nostra had a virtual monopoly on concrete in New York at the time Trump was adding his name to its skyline in the 1980s. And the Mafia’s control over building supplies and labor unions meant that the crime families had a hand in most construction projects in Manhattan. Trump and other major developers “had to adapt to that situation or build elsewhere,” said James B. Jacobs, a mafia expert. “That was the fact of life, that was the way it was,” he told PolitiFact. “The contractors and developers weren’t pure victims. You could bribe the mob-controlled union leaders and get relief from the more arduous conflicts. But we had no information that Trump was any different.”  

According to Fortune, Trump was first tied to the mafia in the 1980s, when a $7.8 million subcontract for Trump Plaza was awarded to S&A Concrete. That company was partially owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family. Trump himself acknowledged as much in a December 2015 interview with the Wall Street Journal, admitting that S&A Concrete was “supposedly associated with the mob.” “Virtually every building that was built was built with these companies,” he said, adding, “These guys were excellent contractors. They were phenomenal. They could do three floors a week in concrete. Nobody else in the world could do three floors a week. I mean they were unbelievable. Trump Tower, other buildings.” When Salerno was indicted in 1986, the charges specifically mentioned Trump Plaza. 
Trump World Tower, supported by the Quadrozzi Concrete Company, is also related to La Cosa Nostra. The head of the company, John Quadrozzi Sr., was tied to the Lucchese crime family and indicted for making illegal payoffs to the mob in 1992.

Trump’s alleged mob dealings were not confined to New York. According to reports from the Huffington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer Trump made a deal in Atlantic City with Kenneth Shapiro, an associate of mob boss Nicky Scarfo, and mob-connected labor boss Daniel Sullivan. Trump was aware of this, calling Shapiro "a third-rate, local real estate Mafia" and Sullivan "the guy who killed Jimmy Hoffa." Nonetheless, in 1981, Trump leased a portion of the land for Trump Plaza and Casino from a company the two men controlled, according a report by New Jersey gaming regulators.

There are many other facts about Trump’s dealings with the Mafia. Just look at the report online by PolitiFact. As the above article in The New Yorker shows, Trump’s behavior is not like that of a distinguished Head of State. It is the behavior of a mob boss.
I believe that this explains many things about Donald Trump. Several people have accused Trump of being amoral or immoral. They note that he doesn't seem to have compassion or decency. That's the kind of character you would expect from a Mafia type. They have been willing to execute people who disagree with them. In order to reach the top they must show no emotion about whacking somebody. Trump has that king of character.

There many other accusations one could make about Trump. He wants to get the Nobel Prize for his dealings with North Korea. But the Nobel Prize Committee should note not only his immorality, ruthlessness, bigotry, egotism, mendacity, hypocrisy, cruelty, and megalomania, but also his sleazy dealings with the underworld.

WHY DO THEY LOVE TRUMP

            Why do they love him? Let me count the ways. They love him to the depth, and breadth, and height the mind can reach because he has promised to return the White Race to preeminence in America. Of all the reasons why Trump supporters love their guy, this is the biggest. When he proclaimed that the Latin-American immigrants were rapists and criminals, right-wing Republicans perked-up their ears and thought “I love this guy.” When he said that some of the Neo-Nazis, KKK, and White Supremacists in Charlottesville were “Very fine people” they loved it. When he lambasted Black football players for kneeling during the National Anthem, they cheered.  Hillary Clinton called many of the Trump supporters “Deplorables.” I call them bigots.

            These people have heard or read that eventually white people will become a minority in America. This really scares them. They are frightened that people of color will become a majority and that they will take places with whites. Trump has not-so-subtly argued that he will prevent that.

            Some years ago when I was talking with a group of young Republicans, they asked me why I was a Democrat. I told them that I had been brought-up as a Republican but that I was converted to the Democratic party by John Kennedy. I said that Kennedy was the first president to forcefully oppose racial segregation in America. They looked blankly at me and said “So?” To them that was hardly a reason to switch from Republican to Democrat. They did not feel anything for the terrible prejudice faced by African Americans in the 1960s. Those were the days of Jim Crow, lynchings, burnings, hangings, and separation of the races, particularly in schools and throughout the South. They were unconcerned about the suffering of Blacks from official and unofficial bigotry in both the North and the South.

            While subsequent presidents have opposed racial discrimination, the first African American president brought the issue to the forefront, and apparently that outraged the Republicans who continue to despise Blacks. They had never imagined that a Black man could become president. They considered African Americans a inferior race and assumed that one could never assume the presidency. They found themselves voting for Donald Trump, a New York real estate developer who made it clear that he did not support the rights of minorities.

            The second great reason for the love Trump supporters have for their president is partially connected to the first. The great outpouring of care and concern for the rights of African Americans during the past seventy years has been by political liberals. Although liberals have been found in both parties, after the presidency of John Kennedy they began to drift toward the Democratic Party. Likewise, the conservatives drifted into the Republican Party.

Liberals tend to be better educated and more affluent than Republicans. A look at post-electoral maps indicate that less prosperous parts of America, such as Southern states and farm states, were the places most strongly for Donald Trump. He won North-Eastern states like Wisconsin and Ohio because the less-educated blue-collar voters, who were previously Democrat voters, strongly supported Trump. Those voters liked it that Trump seemed to be sticking a thumb into the eyes of the “Elites.” They appreciated that Trump attacked political correctness. Those people resented the elites because they perceived that the elites looked down on the less educated and less privileged working class Americans. They perceived that Hillary Clinton was an elite.

A third reason why Trump has so many supporters is that a very large group of people consider abortion the most important issue in America. There is, of course, an overlap with the people described above, but anti-abortionists are probably the most avid Trump supporters because he has signaled his opposition to abortion and his intent to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court.

Many liberals contend that the war against aborting is really a war against the rights of women. Demographics indicate that the strongest group against former president Obama was white men. Likewise, white women were among his strongest supporters. Many liberals feel that the effort to stop abortion is part of the effort to get women barefoot and back in the kitchen. Many men and some women resent the highly educated career-oriented women.

The evangelical crowd overlaps with the anti-abortionists and could be considered the fourth large group of devoted Trump supporters. They are also anti-abortion, but their concerns go beyond abortion. They strongly oppose modern feminism, and can quote for the Bible Paul’s instructions for wives to be subservient to their husbands. Evangelicals believe that all of the problems in America are being caused by the absence of religion. They believe America was founded as a Christian nation and that other religions should not have the same rights as Christians under the First Amendment. They want to be able to practice Christianity in public places. They have been sharply restricted by the courts in their public profession of faith. They want prayer in the schools, but the Supreme Court has declared such prayers unconstitutional. Trump has spoken-up for their concerns and they look to him to support their desire to cram Christianity down the throats of all Americans.

These Trump supporters do not care whether Trump has the skill or ability to be a good president. They do not care if he is in cahoots with Vladimir Putin, or if he was taken-in by Kim Jong Un. They do not care if he lies repeatedly, or if he demonstrates ignorance of important facts. They do not care that he is a bully. They do not care that he is egotistical, paranoid, megalomaniacal, and mean spirited. They do not care that he had illicit affairs with a porn star and a former Playboy Bunny, lied about them, and had the women paid-off. They do not care that Trump has fired most of his original cabinet and staff members and taken on right-wing extremists in their place. They care about the issues described above.

TRUMP THE WEAKLING

            Throughout his “Let’s make America Great Again” campaign for the presidency, Trump repeatedly implied that President Obama had been weak in international affairs. The recent announcement by Trump at the Helsinki Summit that Russia and Putin did not interfere in the U.S. 2016 election was a craven act of pandering and appeasement far worse than anything done by Chamberlain at Munich. It is hard to say what drove Trump to this act of cowardice, but perhaps Putin has blackmail video evidence of Trump’s cavorting with bed-wetting prostitutes in Moscow.

            Trumps capitulation to Putin in Moscow gave rise to stunned response from both Democrats and Republicans. They are aware that the entire U.S. intelligence administration has found that the Russians did, in fact, hack-into and interfere with the 2016 election. Even conservative George Will asserted that Trump colluded with Putin during the 2016 election. Trump is contradicting every department of intelligence in the U.S. Government. For some personal reason, Trump is betraying his own intelligence departments and coming to the support of a Russian dictator who wants only the destruction of American democracy.

            When Neville Chamberlin gave-in to Hitler in Munich, he used as an excuse that surrendering the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to the German Wehrmacht was a way to maintain “Peace in our time.” Trump used the same kind of language to justify his spineless submission to Putin. In effect, he said that he would rather maintain the peace by having good relations with Russia than rely on the intelligence departments of his own government.    

It is hard to decipher the motive for Trump’s gutless proclamation. Surely it was not to preserve the peace. Chamberlain was at least trying to avoid war at a time when England was unprepared. Right now, the United States is militarily strong and certainly stronger than Russia. No, the reason for Trump’s treasonable behavior is probably either that Putin has good blackmail material on him, or that Trump has important financial relations with Putin and the Russian Oligarchs, or that Trump is obsessed with avoiding the claim that he won the election with Russia’s help.

            You would think that millions of Trump’s supporters would be chastened by this revelation of his weakness, but they did not vote for him on account of foreign affairs. They voted for Trump as a form of class conflict. They wanted him to attack the  educated elites who run the media, the universities, the professions, and other institutions which employ educated people. The very name given to the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other such governmental entities, “Intelligence,” forces the average uneducated blue collar voters to deal with something they do not have. Those same supporters also wanted him to confront African Americans, immigrants, and other minorities, a demand he has met to their satisfaction. If you include the anti-abortionist voters who care mainly about Trump’s appointment of Supreme Court justices, Trump supporters will continue to vote for him no matter what he does with Putin.

            One hopes that for some of the people who supported Trump simply because he was the Republican candidate, this act will make them realize that he is a fraud and that he will not make America great again. He will diminish the reputation of America so that nations around the world will neither rely on us nor fear us.

TRUMP THE CLOWN

 After the election of Donald Trump as President I felt as if I had fallen asleep and awakened into a dystopian America where Trump, The Clown, was in charge of a bizarre circus called the Government. It seemed like a bad dream. I have a feeling that millions of other people have experienced the same sensation.

            When Trump announced that he was running for President I, along with millions of other people, thought it was some kind of hoax. Trump had distinguished himself as a “Birther” by declaring that President Obama was not born in the United States and was not eligible to be President. Trump showed no embarrassment when Obama released his birth certificate and proved that he was born in Hawaii and that Trump was an idiot. At that point the conservative columnist, George Will, described Trump as a “Bloviating Ignoramus.” That expression is one of the best I have ever read.

I had always considered Trump to be a loud-mouthed, publicity-seeking, jerk, and could not imagine him as a serious candidate for the White House. I guess I pretty much thought that Jeb Bush of Florida would be the Republican candidate (That shows how much I knew). When a Trump supporter asked me what I thought about Trump I sneered that Trump was a “Joke.” My acquaintance was shocked.

I think that millions of intelligent Americans still can’t believe that this ignorant, crude, bullying, jackass actually won enough votes to be elected. We were relying on polls that showed a majority of votes for Hillary Clinton. We didn’t comprehend the mysteries of the Electoral College. We didn’t understand the class-resentment that motivated so many uneducated blue-collar people to vote for Trump. Some of the people I know who are Trump supporters actually graduated from college. But if you were to inspect their homes you would be hard-put to find a book. Many people graduate from college and that is the end of all efforts at learning. Many colleges and universities grind-out alumni who are virtually illiterate.

As a brilliant writer and artist I know (My brother) said: “What we are experiencing is an anti-intellectual uprising by ignorant people who wildly resent the fact that they are not taken seriously (hence Trump's ‘elite’ references in his speeches).  They may be educated but they have no curiosity or interest in learning anything new. You might recall Josef Goebbels' speech at the 1933 burning of books in which he said that the age of Jewish intellectualism was at an end (substitute coastal elites for Jewish).  They love Trump because he does not read or pursue intellectual ideas and so he gives them permission to be stupid.” 

There is something clownish about Trump. He looks like a clown with his orange hair implants and his red face. When he speaks it seems like the speech of a high-school class clown. He does not use the manner of speech we are used to hearing from dignified international statesmen like Barack Obama. He likes to send daily messages on Twitter, but he does not employ correct vocabulary, syntax, or grammar. It appears that he is virtually illiterate. When he speaks, it is hard to tell whether he is serious or not. Some speeches wander all over the place as if he was mentally impaired. A number of his most outlandish statements have had to be recalled by the White House on the assurance that he was only joking. One observer described Trump’s behavior at the G-7 Summit as clowning around.

The New Yorker magazine portrayed Trump as a “Dangerous Clown” on its October 30, 2017, issue. The New York Daily News cover on Independence Day showed Trump wearing clown makeup and a broken crown. In The Week, Noah Millman wrote a piece describing Trump as a “Sad Clown.” One wonders whether the movie “IT,” with its scary monstrous clown, was meant to refer to Trump.

All of this would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that he is the president of the most powerful nation on Earth. I doubt that his supporters carefully considered the likely results of having such a clown as President.

           Now I've described Trump as a Clown, a Nazi, and a Mob Boss. The question is, which is he? The 

answer is that there is a little bit, maybe more than a little bit of each about him.

HEIL TRUMP

            Donald Trump is no Hitler and his supporters are not Nazis. But there are some frightening aspects of the Trump phenomenon that evoke similarities to the rise of Hitler. Trump is an unstable egotist who obviously wants to amass as much power as he can. People compare him to Hitler mostly out of opposition to his policies and his personality. But there are real concerns for thinking people who know history.

            Perhaps the most glaring similarity to the policies of Hitler is Trump’s singling-out of a minority group for special opprobrium. While Trump may not envision the wholesale murder of undocumented aliens, he surely mirrors Hitler’s desire to expel millions of people of a particular ethnic group from his nation. Hitler initially called for the Jews’ deportation and resettlement, preferably in someplace like Palestine. Trump seeks to send all undocumented aliens back to Latin America. Trump’s campaign for the presidency really took-off when he first attacked the Latin-American immigrants with the lie that they were mostly criminals and rapists. Trump has described the entry of illegal aliens into the U.S. as an “infestation.” This is how he views Latin Americans, as vermin. With this kind of racism he has attracted the support of large numbers of uneducated and blue collar Americans. Hitler rose to prominence by appealing to the hatred uneducated proletarian workers felt toward the Jews. Both men played the demagogue by catering to the bigotries of lower-class people.

            Another Hitler-like attribute of Trump is his grandiosity. Trump held a meeting of his cabinet at which he went around the table and had members praise him and speak like sycophants of the benefits of working in his administration. Many commentators thought it looked like a meeting of the lieutenants of a despot like Hitler. History records that Hitler’s toadies fawned over him and even established as a national greeting the salute, “Heil Hitler.” Recently, after returning from his meeting with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Trump said of Kim "He speaks and his people sit-up at attention. I want my people to do the same." Trump wasn't being sarcastic. He meant it. That is a clear sign of grandiosity, pomposity, arrogance, and egotism. It may also be a sign of mental illness.

            Another troubling similarity to Hitler is Trump’s proclivity for lying. Hitler was one of the men who inspired the term “Big Lie.” Hitler lied all the time. Sometimes his lies were world-shaking, like his assurances to Chamberlain that he wanted no more of Czechoslovakia than the Sudetenland. But any reading of history tells you that Hitler was a chronic and habitual liar. Likewise, Trump is a congenital and inveterate liar. As former FBI Director James Comey has pointed out, Trump lies about everything big and small. While it may be understandable that a leader may occasionally need to give misleading facts for national security, there is no need for the high level of mendacity displayed by Donald Trump.

            Hitler liked pageantry. Many of the pictures we see of him are at huge rallies and parades. There is no doubt that the giant assemblies with adoring crowds swelled Hitler’s ego and gave him a feeling of God-like power. Trump saw a parade on Bastille Day in Paris and it appealed to him so much that he announced that he wanted to have one in the United States. He did not select a national holiday for this exhibition. He merely said that he wanted a parade. Obviously the purpose of the parade would not be to honor America. It would be to celebrate the glory of Trump.

            The most recent exhibit of Trump malevolence is the ugly specter of American ICE officials separating children from their illegal alien parents at the border with Mexico. This is the kind of thing done by the Nazis to the Jews upon arrival at Hitler’s concentration camps. Under overwhelming pressure, and purely for political purposes, Trump reversed the practice.

            Trump may not be a Nazi, but he is applauded by Neo-Nazis, the KKK, White Nationalists, and other right-wing extremists. He constitutes a potential threat to our democracy and values.

TRUMP AND INTELLECTUALS

TRUMP AND INTELLECTUALS

What is an intellectual? One dictionary defines the word “intellectual” as follows: “Intellectual is often used to describe intensive reasoning and deep thinking, particularly in relation to subjects that tend to spark deep discussion, such as literature or philosophy.” Intellectuals are usually educated people who, as the above definition says, engage in deep thinking. Universities, institutions, think tanks, and the professions are filled with intellectuals. Occasionally you find intellectuals with no formal higher education. They are self-taught thinkers (autodidacts) who engage in serious reading and deep thinking. There are many intellectuals in the media and the arts. Sometimes, one finds intellectuals in politics, government, and the military. But the current atmosphere in Washington, under Donald Trump, is anti-intellectual. 
Trump has tried to refute the argument that he is ignorant and uneducated by pointing out that he attended a top university and a top graduate school (Wharton School). What he doesn't mention is what a lousy student he was. In his book Fear, Bob Woodward quotes Steve Bannon as saying: "Trump doesn't like intellectuals." Trump was a guy who "never went to class. Never took a note. Never went a lecture. The night before a final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that's good enough." Trump was the son of a multimillionaire and therefore it was expected that he would attend college. But like millions of college graduates, he learned nothing and remained a seriously uneducated person.

In a recent article in The New Yorker magazine, the author, Patrick Keefe, describes the tenure and firing of former General H.R. McMaster as National Security Advisor to President Trump. The thrust of the article is about the difficulties of an honorable man with deep integrity serving a president who has no integrity. The article makes clear that one of the reasons Trump disliked McMaster, and fired him, was because McMaster is an intellectual with a PhD.

In the beginning of the article about General McMaster, the author describes Trump’s dealings with written matter. He says that when Trump assumed office, N.S.C. staffers initially generated memos for him that resembled those produced for his predecessors: multi-page explications of policy and strategy. But an edict came down, “thin it out.” The staff dutifully trimmed the memos until they were a single page. But then word came back: “This is still too much.”  A senior Trump aide explained to the staffers that the President “is a visual person,” and asked them to express points “pictorially.” By the time (the staffers) left, they had these cards that pictorially explained the information a president has to have. A former staffer also said that Trump receives a thick briefing book every night, but that nobody harbors the illusion that he reads it. Current and former officials said that filling out a card is the best way to raise an issue with him in writing. They said that everything that needs to be conveyed to the president must be boiled down to two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of “See Jane run.” 

This is all very sad, but it is also somewhat frightening. Trump, the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, is a virtual illiterate. That is cause for concern in a complex world where he must deal with highly complicated issues and with heads of government who are far superior to him in intelligence.

As a good indication of how things have changed in Washington, compare the Trump Administration to that of President John F. Kennedy. On April 29, 1962, Kennedy hosted a dinner at the White House for American Nobel Prize winners and other intellectuals. At that dinner he said that this was the greatest gathering of eminent minds held at the White House since Thomas Jefferson sat there alone. Try to imagine Trump holding such a gathering or saying something with the wit and intelligence possessed by President Kennedy.

Kennedy was himself an intellectual. He welcomed intellectuals to the White House. During his presidency he surrounded himself with intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen. Today, alas, Donald Trump, who dislikes and avoids intellectuals, has surrounded himself with incompetent hacks like Scott Pruitt. He has managed to get rid of intellectuals such as H.R. McMaster.

I remember the hope, optimism, and enthusiasm with which many of us greeted the presidency of Kennedy. I also remember the despair when he was assassinated. His policies, speeches, and ideals transformed me from a Republican into a Democrat. I’m sure that millions of others did the same. I also believe that the appeal of Donald Trump to the lowest common denominator of uneducated, anti-intellectual people in America will have the opposite effect. Sadly, such people vastly outnumber the intellectuals.

Millions of men voted against Hillary Clinton because they felt that she was condescending, snobbish, and female. She did not appeal to their bigotry against African Americans and Hispanic immigrants. They preferred a man who acted like one of them. If Hillary were president, you can be sure that her administration would be more like that of John Kennedy. Hillary not only reads books, she writes them. Trump supporters realized that Hillary Clinton was one of the dreaded things they hate—an intellectual.

EASTER

           It is Christian doctrine that Jesus died as a sacrifice for man. The idea is that “Original    Sin” was committed by Adam and Eve, and that the stain of that sin was upon every human being born thereafter. Thus, even though subsequent humans did not commit the original sin, they were guilty of it as well as other sins. Christ came to save man from original sin and all other sin, and to provide a means for man to achieve everlasting life in heaven. In order to save man, Christ had to perform a sacrifice. Jesus was God, so he performed a sacrifice to himself. The sacrifice was a human sacrifice of the most bestial and agonizing kind, a painfully slow death by suffocation on a cross.
           One has to wonder why this omnipotent, all-loving, almighty God couldn’t have simply forgiven all men of sin without this orgy of torment? Why did he have to be the scapegoat for all human beings and go through this horrendous nightmare of torture in order to provide salvation? The answer is that the writers of the Bible lived in a benighted and barbaric time when this was thought to be the right way for the gods to behave.
             The resurrection of Jesus from the dead has been called the basis for all Christianity. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:13-14: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” The celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the most important date on the Catholics’ liturgical calendar. It is also the concoction of Paul and other writers who came long after Jesus died.
            Scholars use various methods of textual criticism, including language and style, to determine if text is authentic or was added to the original gospel at a later time. There are many things on which they agree. Scholars agree that Jesus did not predict his own resurrection from the dead or his second coming. The quotations in the Bible in which he makes such a prediction (e.g. Mark 8:31) are considered to be later additions.
             Moreover, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are so contradictory and improbable that the whole story has to be dismissed as fiction. Matthew says that the day following Jesus crucifixion Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says that the two Marys and Salome went (Mark 16:1). Luke writes that Mary Magdalene went with Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and other women (Luke 24:10). Matthew says that the stone was removed by an angel at the time the women arrived at Jesus’ tomb (Matt. 28:2), but Mark and Luke say it had already been removed (Mark 16:2-4, Luke 24:1-2). Matthew says that when the women arrived, the angel was outside the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says the angel was inside the tomb (Mark 16:5) and Luke says there were two men inside the tomb (Luke 24:4).
             In Matthew the two women rush from the tomb to tell the disciples (Matt 28:8-9), but Mark says that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). Luke says that they reported the story to the disciples (Luke 24:9-11). John tells a very different story from the others (John 20:1-18). Later post-resurrection stories are also in conflict (compare Matt 28:16-20 with Luke 24:13-53, and John 20:19).
            The first Gospel written was the Gospel of Mark. Scholars can tell that the whole story of the resurrection of Jesus in Mark was added to the Gospel by somebody else long after the original version was written. Originally, the Gospel of Mark ended at Chapter 16:8. That is the part where the women find the empty tomb and are told by a “young man” that Jesus has risen. The part of the Gospel after that, in which Jesus appears to various people, was added by later writers who wanted to supply authenticity to the myth of Jesus’ resurrection. As Professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina says: “These verses [Mark 16:9-20] are absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand….and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found elsewhere in Mark.”
             If you consider the fact that the Gospels of Mathew and Luke were based on the gospel of Mark, then it becomes clear that the Gospels’ story of Jesus’ resurrection is pure myth that was made-up long after the Gospels were written. The earliest Christian scriptures were the Epistles of Paul, yet Paul does not give any details about Jesus’ resurrection other than referring to it (See Rom. 6:5, 1 Cor. 15:13).
                 The idea of resurrection by a god did not begin with Jesus. Lots of gods arose from the dead in ancient times. Among them are Mithra, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, Tammuz, Ishtar, Adonis, Persephone, Semele, Heracles (or Herakles), and Melqart. Some claim Buddah was resurrected from the dead.
               Roman Catholics around the world celebrate Easter by partaking of the Holy Eucharist. It is a wafer of unleavened bread and liturgical wine. The wafer is placed in the recipient’s hand or mouth, and the wine is usually sipped out of a common chalice ( a somewhat unsanitary practice). According to Church dogma, the bread and wine are not just symbolic commemoration of the body and blood of Jesus. They are the actual body and blood of Jesus. It is believed that by consuming the body and blood of Jesus you take into your body part of his divine grace.

            It seems that for thousands of years nobody has ever stepped back and examined this holy practice. A little thinking about it should, however, make us wonder where it came from and why we do it. Why eat a human body and drink human blood. Isn’t that a little cannibalistic? How did the Catholic Church ever decide to ordain this as the most profound way of worshipping Jesus. Obviously, it is taken from an ancient time when men performed human sacrifice. It is well known that following a human sacrifice, ancient men frequently ate the body and drank the blood of the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial victim was often an enemy defeated in battle. It was believed that by doing so the eater took into himself the courage and strength of the victim. Even in more modern times headhunters would eat the bodies of their victims in the belief that the valor and fighting ability of the victim would come into the victor. Thus, as the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism decreased, religions continued the practice by substituting bread, wine, and other food for the bodies of sacrificial victims.

The rite of the Last Supper, which the early Christian Church adopted as its Holy Eucharist, clearly was borrowed from the ritual meal practiced by more ancient religions. In The Roman Cult of Mithras, Manfred Clauss says: “The offering of bread and wine is known in virtually all ancient cultures, and the meal as a means of binding the faithful together and uniting them to the deity was a feature common to many religions. It represented one of the oldest means of manifesting unification with the spiritual, and the appropriation of spiritual qualities.” Claus describes how the worshippers of the god Mithra engaged in a ritual meal similar to the Christian Eucharist.

In the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Last Supper is a Passover meal. In the Gospel of John, it takes place the day before Passover.     It is possible that Jesus asked his followers to eat bread and drink wine in his memory. It is highly unlikely that he horrified his disciples by recommending anything so cannibalistic as having bread and wine represent his body and blood. Such ideas were abhorrent to the Jews. Even the blood of an animal was forbidden at a Jewish meal by biblical law (Leviticus 7:26). Geza Vermes, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, in The Religion of Jesus the Jew, says, “...the imagery of eating a man’s body, and especially drinking his blood...even after allowance is made for metaphorical language, strikes a totally foreign note in a Palestinian Jewish cultural setting...With their profoundly rooted blood taboo, Jesus’ listeners would have been overcome with nausea at hearing such words.” The idea that the eating of bread and wine was a consumption of the body and blood of Jesus is a later Greek development, taken from the Mystery Religions such as the cult of Mithra. The biblical version of the Last Supper was obviously added long after the original gospels were written.

 In the Mystery Religions, the cult “agapes” were “love feasts” in which the communicants achieved “mystical identification with the divinity.” The cults of Mithra and Attis had sacramental use of bread and wine as a means of communing with the gods. The early Eucharistic feasts of the Christians came to be called “agapes” by the Greeks. It was the Greeks who substituted bread and wine for the body and blood of sacrificial victims. If one goes back far enough, one can see the history of human sacrifice in Greece and how it affected the liturgy of the modern Church. 

NO GOD

NO GOD

            The Death of Billy Graham reminds me that belief in God has decreased over the years so that now there is reason to believe that eventually there will be no such thing as belief in God. Graham preached to very large audiences around the world, but I doubt that his listeners would be anywhere near as large today. There is nobody out there today who commands such huge listening audiences, even on television.

A current report in the Huffington Post says: “An ongoing spate of recent studies - looking at various countries around the world - all show the same thing: religion is in decline. From Scandinavia to South America, and from Vancouver to Seoul, the world is experiencing an unprecedented wave of secularization. Indeed, as a recent National Geographic report confirms, the world’s newest religion is: No Religion.”

Studies show that in a number of European countries there are more atheists than religious people. The Huffington report says: “For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday.”

This decline in religious belief has been going on for some time. In the Middle Ages everybody believed in God, but with the Enlightenment, the increase in education, and the progression of modern knowledge, the belief in God has gradually waned. This is not going to change. The arc of non-belief is going to continue, and belief in God is going to diminish to the point where there will no longer be any such belief.

Just look at the ancient Greeks. In ancient Greece, the gods were taken very seriously. It was mandatory to believe in the Greek Gods. Socrates was condemned to death for, among other things, Asebeia, which was: "Not believing in the gods of the state.” Today, nobody believes in the Greek gods, not even the Greeks. The Greek gods make wonderful subjects for literature, but everybody knows that they were myths. The same can be said of the ancient Egyptian gods such as Osiris and Isis, the Roman gods such as Jupiter and Juno, and the Nordic gods such as Odin and Thor. Someday everybody will know that the gods people worship today were simply myths. I doubt that they will be replaced by other new gods. The trend is not toward new religions but toward atheism.

There is really no difference between belief in today’s gods and the ancient beliefs. Today’s gods, like the ancient gods, are still invisible. Religious people believe that the God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, is perfect, good, loving, and helpful to men. They believe that God is omniscient and omnipotent. For some reason we never get any empirical evidence of God, the Virgin Mary, or the saints doing anything to or for men. But we are expected to have faith in them on the grounds that life on earth cannot be all there is. Religious people believe that there must be some form of afterlife called Heaven or Paradise or something. We are also told that there must be something to deal with evil, some rules and some punishment. Evil people cannot just get away with the evil that they do. They can’t go to heaven, so there must be some place like Hell or Purgatory for them to go after they die.

I suspect that the defection from belief in God has accelerated in modern times because of our reliance on science and technology. We expect there to be scientific answers to most important questions, and we expect there to be empirical proof of theories and hypotheses. When you come to religion with its absence of scientific proof and the requirement that you take everything on faith, you find a growing number of people who are skeptical of its validity. The more educated people are, and the more intelligent they are, the more likely that they will disbelieve religious doctrines.

To really intelligent atheists, the idea of belief in God is absurd. They can’t understand how people could believe in ancient religions with their strange rites and dogmas. How could the Catholic Church insist that a wafer of bread is not just symbolic of the Son of God, but is the actual body of Jesus Christ? How could Muslims believe that if you died in jihad you would go to Paradise and have marriage with seventy two virgins with "full grown", "swelling", or "pears-shaped" breasts? Religions stress the idea that one of the highest virtues is the ability to accept those tenets of religion on faith.

          The people who believe most strongly in God and religion are less educated and intelligent than atheists. A British academic did a study of the connection between IQ and religious belief in countries around the world. When he broke down the statistics, he found a strong link between intelligence and lack of faith. People with higher IQs tended to be more disbelieving. People with lower IQs tended to be far more religious. Countries with a lower national IQ tended to have the most believers.
         Your most intensely educated people, such as scientists, have, over the years, drifted more and more to atheism and agnosticism. In 1996, 1000 leading American scientists were randomly chosen from American men of science and asked about their belief in God. Such belief was least popular among the scientists in the most demanding field of science, physics (about 22%). A survey of scientists in the illustrious National Academy of Sciences found that 72% were Atheists and another 20% were agnostic or had doubts.

Try your own survey of the subject. If you question people you know, it is likely that the people who are most deeply religious are the least educated and least intelligent. You will also notice that the most highly educated and most intelligent people you know are likely to be the most skeptical about religion. Many studies done over the years have shown that the lower people’s IQs, the higher their religiosity. Conversely, the higher people’s IQs, the lower their religiosity. This should tell you that belief in God is actually a form of ignorance.

FROM A DISTANCE

                 The song says “God is watching Us, God is watching Us, God is watching Us from a distance.” One has to wonder how far a distance that is. Last week a former student walked into a Florida High school and shot 17 students and teachers dead. He wounded many others. Every few weeks we hear of other mass shootings. It is upsetting and depressing. We turn to the news on television and hear that people are dying in the fight against ISIS and other splinter groups that believe it is God’s will that they murder unbelievers.                      Whether God is watching us or not, he is certainly not doing his job. Neither, for that matter, are Jesus, Mary, the Saints, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mohammed, George Clooney or Tom Brady. The world is racked with suffering. We need a new God who will alleviate the suffering and evil in the world. Where do we get one? Do we advertize in the newspaper? Is there anybody out there capable of doing God’s job? All of the religions worship God as a perfect being. He/She is omnipotent, omniscient, loving, caring, good, kind, and okay. Should we worship and love this God? Could that be said of this God who lets a wacko kid go in and shoot-up a high school killing seventeen kids? In the past I have written about whether we should thank and love God. Here is what I wrote:

Consider the following: The great majority of people in the world live in abject poverty. Most of those people suffer from hunger, disease, famine, tsunamis, cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, plagues, infestations, and war. When one looks at the continents of Africa, Asia, and South America, one wonders how there could be a loving God looking over those people. Hundreds of millions of the people on those continents are subjected to widespread diseases such as cholera, malaria, sleeping sickness, AIDS, Dengue Fever, and Yellow Fever. They have insufficient clothing, shelter, and medical care. They are ruled-over by tyrants and dictators.

Millions of women throughout the world are treated as chattels without civil rights. They are beaten, raped, stoned, and subject to genital castration designed to eradicate their sexual pleasure. It is hard to imagine that such people are happy.

Hundreds of thousands of women, young girls, and boys are abducted each year by sex-crazed men who imprison and often torture them, using them as sexual toys for repeated rape, and ultimately murder them. Many thousands of them are sold into sexual slavery, often to be bought by so-called upstanding members of the community.

What about the lucky people in America and the more affluent countries of Europe? One would think that they have many reasons to thank God. But we need to ask, are the lives of Americans so blessed and happy? Let’s start with health. Practically everybody in America has somebody in their family suffering from some serious illness. Millions of Americans have children with serious congenital diseases and infirmities such as autism, blindness, deafness, physical deformity, Down Syndrome, mental retardation, mental illnesses, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, epilepsy, cystic fibrosis, heart disease, cancer, and hundreds of other less common syndromes and disorders. The parents of such children often live lives of great sorrow.

Millions of adult Americans also suffer from terrible diseases. Heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, liver disease, Emphysema, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), AIDS, Crohn’s Disease, chronic pain, and hundreds of other conditions beset the happiness of their lives. Millions of Americans suffer from mental problems, depression, anxiety, fatigue, loneliness, phobias, panic attacks, disabling shyness, and stress throughout their lives. Millions of Americans suffer from the effects of terrible automobile accidents and other injuries. They go through life as cripples with disabled or missing limbs, daamaged internal organs, and other essential parts of their bodies.

As people get older, they greet a host of problems afflicting older Americans such as strokes, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, hearing and seeing defects, prostate problems, osteoporosis, erectile dysfunction, sleep disorders, Alzheimer’s and dementia, and hundreds of other medical and psychological problems that impair their happiness. As people age their bodies breaks-down, their skin wrinkles, their hair disappears, their energy fails, and they lose their sexual ability and attraction.

Millions of Americans are addicted to alcohol and illegal drugs. Many of them are living in terrible misery, unable to shake the imprisonment of their addictions. There are millions of homeless people living on the streets, in tents, under bridges, and in shelters. Millions of other Americans are addicted to behavior patterns such as gambling, fetishism, sexual addiction, frigidity, obsessive-compulsive behavior, dependency, and other forms of addiction.

There are millions of people with sexual deviations including the need to molest children or rape women. Millions of people engage in abusive behavior, physically beating or verbally berating their spouses, companions, and children. Millions of spouses, companions, and children are victims of such abuse. Such people cannot possibly be happy.

Millions of Americans live in poverty surrounded by a land of plenty. They eke-out a living in slums, tenements, housing projects, trailer parks, and rural shacks. They often go hungry in this land of plenty. Many go without decent clothing, shelter, ordinary medical care. Many live in places without heat, cooling, electricity, telephone service, computers, sanitation, or even running water.

Millions of Americans are the victims of discrimination. People of all minorities suffer from bigotry. Millions of homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, and other trans-gender people are the objects of prejudice and condemnation by millions of other people.

Every day one reads in the paper about people who commit crimes. There are thousands of kinds of crimes committed every day by millions of people. It is difficult to guess what percent of the populace is dishonest, violent, dangerous, fraudulent, and deceitful, but judging from the constant news of crimes, schemes, scams, and corruptions, the number must run well into the tens of millions. There are millions of people engaged in serious and not-so-serious crime, including robbery, larceny, drug offenses, burglary, mugging, assault and battery, murder, and thousands of other kinds of crime. One constantly hears about violent massacres by crazed gunmen in schools, theaters, and public places. In addition to the victims of such killings, the families, friends, and communities of the victims are also victims. Millions of Americans are incarcerated in prisons and jails. There are millions of wives, children, parents, and other close relatives of prison inmates. These people must suffer having their loved ones in jail. There are millions of victims of crimes whose lives have been ruined by the crimes of others.

Throughout the world there are fanatic terrorists driven by religious hatred who make it their business to kill others who do not share their beliefs. I cannot imagine how many people are killed each year by these zealots but it must be in the thousands. It seems that every day one reads about a bomb going off in the Middle East or some other place, killing innocent people. The fanatics of ISIS feel compelled by their hate to murder and behead their enemies. If we consider the minds of the terrorists, they must be angry, tormented, unhappy people who have a lust for blood.

Millions of Americans are in unhappy marriages or relationships. Millions of Americans are suffering from the breakdown of their marriages or the breakup of relationships in which they were very much in love. Half of all marriages end in divorce. A majority of those who do not get divorced go on living in unhappy marriages. Millions of people are engaged in illicit sexual entanglements that cause them emotional pain and guilt. Millions of people are almost suicidal because of the infidelity of a spouse or loved one. Millions of people suffer from feelings of inferiority or lack of self-worth. Millions of people suffer from the feeling that they are too fat, too thin, or unattractive.

Millions of Americans hate their jobs or suffer under cruel, tyrannical, or sadistic bosses. There are millions of people with sour, nasty, cruel, vicious, malicious, and evil personalities who make it their business in life to damage, spoil, and injure the lives of other people. Millions of people live lives consumed with envy, jealousy, and hatred of others whom they perceive to be more fortunate than they.

Millions of families have children with serious behavior problems. Many of these children may grow up in middle-class homes with respectable parents, yet such children are constantly in trouble with school, neighbors, the police, and others. Thousands of such children run away every year only to wind-up on the streets caught-up in drug addiction, prostitution, and crime.

For every Bernard Madoff carrying-out a giant stock swindle, there are thousands of businessmen, brokers, hedge fund managers, and others engaged in insider trading and other blatant violations of the rules of business law and ethics. Millions of Americans cheat others in smaller ways for smaller amounts of money. If one were able to calculate the amount of money embezzled from businesses, organizations, and charities each year it would probably be up in the billions if not trillions. I have known several embezzlers in my lifetime. I’m sure everybody has.

Although one would expect great probity from the wealthiest and most successful people, it is simply not there. Doctors routinely over-bill for services. I have had personal experience with dishonest doctors. One doctor who came in and handed my wife a card while our son was being treated for a broken bone at the hospital, later billed for services even though he did not examine or treat my son at all. Doctors frequently bill for services never rendered. When I was in the Hospital for back surgery, several doctors from the surgeon’s office came by and took a couple of minutes to talk to me and listen to my heart. Later they billed Medicare for hundreds of dollars for the visit. Medicare and Medicaid pay tens of billions for fraudulent claims by physicians who are wealthy by any standard.

Eventually, we die. Death is not a simple leaf dropping off a tree. Death is usually painful. Often, it is horrible. It is usually accompanied by the grief of loved ones.

While many people suffering from the terrible things listed here may not think life is bad, that is because of the human ability to cope with the things that make us unhappy. It is a wonderful thing that people going through the most extreme torments will often try to look on the bright side of life. But if we stop and look at all of the problems faced by humans and listed here, we can hardly say that life is beautiful. We can hardly find reason to thank that mythical being called God.

Surely, if there was a God, and he was a good and loving God like the one worshipped by most religions, life would not be filled with such misery. There would not be millions of starving, diseased, oppressed people in Africa and other parts of the world. There would not be so much tragedy, horror, injury, illness, poverty, hunger, anger, war, and death. We would not have to wait for some mythical afterlife to experience a better life. Life on earth would really be beautiful for everyone.

REPUBLICANS, TRUMP, AND AFRICAN AMERICANS

           The most important issue between Republicans and Democrats is and has long been the rights and treatment of African Americans.Ever since Black inhabitants of Africa were brought over here in slavery most of the white citizens have considered them an inferior race of people and have discriminated against them in every possible way. This has given rise to convulsive eruptions in the fabric of America and has polarized the attitudes of its people, particularly on a regional basis. Today, although there may be other issues that separate Liberals and Conservatives, it is the chief underlying cause of conflict between Republicans and Democrats.

            If you look at the root of many of the issues dividing Republicans and Democrats, it is the manner in which the government treats its Black citizens. Take for example healthcare. Republicans hate the Affordable Care Act (ACA) because it smacks of socialism and will increase the taxes of the richest people. But there is also the fact that the biggest beneficiaries of the ACA are African Americans. They are the poorest Americans and as such they benefit from a law that makes it easier for them to get health insurance.
         In a recent article, Kkurt Bardella, a journalist of Korean background, argued that the recent government shutdown was based on Trump's racism.

Many White conservatives think of Black people as lazy, shiftless, stupid parasites who take advantage of the system, who are supported by the government, and who do no work. They think that it is the Whites who work for a living and pay the taxes that support the Blacks. One Senator recently asked why the government should spend money on poor people when they would only use it for “alcohol, booze, and women.” I cannot express how much this attitude disgusts me.

            Conservatives will tell you that in the old days it was the Southern Democrats who were guilty of the most blatant discrimination against African Americans. At one time apartheid in America was carried-out primarily in the South where the preeminent party was the Democrats. They remember that it was Republicans like Everett Dirksen who championed the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s. They seem to forget about Richard Nixon and the “Southern Strategy.” The Southern Strategy began when Nixon and his supporters, following the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. The Board of Education, claimed that school bussing was a violation of State’s Rights and was unconstitutional. This made large numbers of Southern Democrats into Republicans while many liberal Republicans became Democrats.

            Conservatives believed that inserting African Americans into White schools would lower the level of education in the schools and impair the learning of White students. It was as if Whites, particularly in the South, thought the brown skin of African American kids would rub-off on White kids and cause them injury. Even one hundred years after the Civil War, Blacks were still thought of as pariahs.

            As a White person it is hard for me to imagine the mental anguish this bias and bigotry must have caused Black Americans. It is amazing to me that they did not engage in mass revolution against this kind of treatment. Instead, led by men like Martin Luther King, Blacks began a series of peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience. Today, when subtle forms of bigotry continue to plague African Americans, their demonstrations against such bias are mostly nonviolent. Whites have been outraged by the act of Black football players kneeling, instead of standing, during the playing of the National Anthem. At a time when it might be argued that Blacks have a right to violently oppose the treatment they get from the police, the government, and most Whites, a few of them resort to this pitifully mild form of  protest.

Today the Republican Party seems to be returning to the old days of bias against the African American community. Donald Trump has been elected, in part, by subtly suggesting that he will not support the rights of Blacks and will cut governmental programs that benefit the poor. When White Nationalists and KKK extremists demonstrated in Charlottesville Virginia, Trump said that there were some “fine people” among them. He recently referred to largely Black countries such as Haiti and the African countries as “Shithole countries.” Trump’s supporters are clearly happy about his attitude toward African Americans. Extremist groups like the KKK have come-out strongly in support of Trump.

The North won the Civil War, but a large section of the American People today, particularly in the South, refuse to accept that outcome. They wish that African Americans were still slaves. White people disrespect Blacks every day in small ways and large. Wouldn’t it be a better America if all White people treated African Americans with respect, kindness, and love?  Wouldn’t Martin Luther King want this kind of America?