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?

THE SEXUAL PREDATOR STORM

      The hurricane of accusations against famous men, including some much-admired figures from entertainment and politics, gives the impression that most men are hiding histories of molestation, harassment, pedophilia, or even rape. The effect this windstorm is to paint the majority of  men as brutal and bestial. I have lived for 78 years and I have never known a friend or acquaintance whom I would suspect of any such behavior.

Let us start with my father. Perhaps he was better than most men, but he was the first man I ever knew and he was as humane and decent a man as this world produces. I have tried throughout my life to pattern myself after my father, but he was too kind, loving, honest, and faithful a man to copy. I have three brothers, and each of them, in his own way, has modeled his life after my father. It is beyond human credibility to imagine that any of them would ever be a sexual predator.

Over the decades of my life as an attorney I have made many friends drawn from the law firms and professional ranks of New York, Connecticut, and Ohio. Sure I have heard locker-room talk, but never the kind admitted to by Donald Trump on Access Hollywood. No friend or acquaintance I have ever known has bragged of non-consensual sex with a woman, especially someone underage. I have never heard a friend or acquaintance speak of sexual interest in someone underage. The only such confessions I have ever heard have been by criminal defendants.

I feel a great deal of respect and admiration for those brave women who have come forward to expose the male predators who apply their power to debase and humiliate innocent female victims. Those predatory entertainers should all be fired and the politicians should resign or be impeached. Many of such men should go to jail.

It is a matter of concern, however, that some men are caught-up in the whirlwind for the most minor offenses. I am thinking particularly of former president George H.W. Bush. The minor pats, in front of his wife, by an old man in a wheelchair, should not be the cause of an outcry. His distinctive leadership of this country should earn him a little slack.

 I go back to the life of my late beloved father. He once phoned me at the office, and while talking to the receptionist he called her “Dear.” She rebuked him for using that term and told this good and gentle old man that he was a “male chauvinist pig.” My father was not used to being spoken to in this manner and was quite shaken by it. He apologized to the receptionist. The next time I saw him he was in tears speaking of the rebuke. He was not a man of the modern world, and did not understand that there were new rules of discourse. Even now that I am an old man, my heart is heavy thinking about that incident.

I feel it is important that we remember that not all men are pigs. Most men, as they struggle through this harsh world, try to behave decently. We must be careful not to let good honest men like George H.W. Bush and my father be swept-up in this tempest of accusation.

TRUMP AND CLASS

I can usually tell a Trump supporter just by looking at him. This is especially true of men. Support for and opposition to Donald Trump is based largely on social class, and social class today is based almost entirely on education. I watched a discussion on television the other day in which several Trump supporters and several Trump opponents participated. I was able to spot the trump supporters right away. They were physically heavier than the opponents, had shorter hair, and redder faces. When introduced, they all had occupations as blue collar workers. The Trump opponents were thinner, better dressed, and better educated.

The election of Donald Trump revealed that the divisions in America are primarily based on social class and education. This is nothing new. I watched the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War on television and the split between social classes was apparent at the time of that war. While students at many universities were demonstrating against the Vietnam War, blue collar workers were demonstrating in support of the war. I remember well that when students at Pace University in New York demonstrated against the war, construction workers on a nearby project became enraged and violently attacked the students.

There has always been an antagonism between the educated classes and the (so-called) working classes. This was manifested in historical revolutions such as the French Revolution. The deep hatred the common people (“sans-culottes”) held against the nobility was not so much based on wealth, but rather, on social status, manners, spoken language, clothing (the sans-culottes did not wear the culottes worn by noblemen), and education. The nobles disdained the sans-culottes, and they manifested that disdain in every encounter. Similarly, the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution hated the noble class primarily because of status and education and not because of wealth.

How can I say that? Isn’t wealth the real cause of resentment between the classes? Well, look at the beliefs and feelings of Trump supporters. Why do so many blue collar people identify with Donald Trump? He is a very wealthy man, possibly a billionaire. If it was wealth that they hated they would certainly not support the Donald. No, it is something else. Despite the fact that he has had a good education, Trump comes across as an uneducated man. He speaks in rough sentences with a very small vocabulary and a New York accent. He is probably not very self-educated. One gets the feeling that he does not read books and is unfamiliar with history, philosophy, literature, political theory, and other academic pursuits.

Many college graduates continue to learn after graduating. Many become autodidacts (self-educated), reading books, attending classical music concerts, and going to art museums. Trump gives evidence that he never does any of these things. One remembers the high style of John and Jackie Kennedy, with philosophers, intellectuals, and classical musicians in attendance at the White House. It is very doubtful that you will see any of that under Trump.

Like Trump, there are many college graduates who do not appear to be very educated. I have known a number of them. They went to college to get degrees in business, and avoided the more liberal arts subjects. One can hardly blame them. The business world is not crying out for art historians. Many of those ill-educated graduates became Trump supporters. You go into the houses of these people and there are no book cases and no books.

On the other hand there are many people who never went to college, or never attended for very long, who are extremely well-educated. One occasionally sees them on the TV show, Jeopardy. Do you remember Frank Spangenberg? They may never have had the money to go to college, or they may not have attended for other reasons, but they have always had a deep love of learning. They may have taken advantage of free libraries to become well educated, and may have spent their sparse earnings going to concerts or operas. They are more likely to be Trump opponents.

In the last election Hillary Clinton appeared to be the consummate intellectual. She showed scorn for Donald Trump. She picked a man for Vice President with blue-collar credentials to counter-balance the ticket. The blue collar voters hated her. Those voters vastly outnumbered the educated voters supporting Hillary Clinton. If it were not for the Black, Hispanic, and other minority voters, she wouldn’t have won the popular vote.

It is hard to calculate how deep the anger of working-class Americans is for the educated class. One hopes it goes no deeper than voting for someone like Donald Trump. There are Neo-Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, and other extreme right-wingers out there, and it is not impossible to imagine one of them trying for the White House. Just remember 1930s Germany.

EVIL

          I strongly disliked Donald Trump long before he ran for President. I always thought he was an arrogant blowhard, even back in the days when he gained fame for repairing the Wollman Skating Rink in New York. When Trump aired his “birther” beliefs, that Obama was not born in America, George F. Wills, to my delight, called him a “Bloviating Ignoramus.” When Trump declared for the presidency, I assumed he had zero chance. I believed that the American people thought of Trump as a publicity-seeking clown, and when asked what I thought of him as a candidate, I said that he was a joke.

            Like most intelligent persons, I was totally stunned when Trump won the election. I didn’t realize that there were so many uneducated, disaffected, stupid people in America. I didn’t know what to think of Trump. In my mind he was still a joke, and it was going to be a strange four years with this clown as Commander in Chief. I couldn’t imagine what kind of cabinet he would appoint or how he intended to carry-out his promise to “Make America great again.” I doubted he would greatly improve the economy, create jobs, defeat ISIS, halt illegal immigration, build his stupid wall, or repair the infrastructure of the country.

            With the exception of Steve Bannon, I was not particularly alarmed at the people he appointed to his cabinet. I should have seen Bannon as a red flag. From what I read, Bannon was a racist and alt-right-winger. But I did not look deeply into it. Some of Trump’s appointments bothered me, but I assumed that that was what you would expect of a conservative. I was not alarmed until the Charlottesville riots.

            The riots in themselves were not what alarmed me the most. I knew that those hate groups were out there and that they occasionally demonstrated, carrying automatic weapons, wearing swastika tattoos, and waving Confederate flags. I knew that their demonstrations would bring-out counter-demonstrations. What alarmed me were Trump’s statements about the riots. To him, there was wrong “on many sides.” He said that there were “fine people” on both sides. This balancing of denunciation was not just the stupidity of an incompetent chief executive. This was a statement of support for those low-life people who admire Adolph Hitler and the evil he perpetrated.

            I know that it is common for people of a political persuasion to accuse their opponents of evil, and I do not do it easily. You do not call your opponents evil for tax increases or cuts, military or domestic spending, welfare reform, or most social issues. Rather than accuse Trump and his henchmen of evil, I would prefer to accuse them of ignorance, malefaction, and mendacity. But here there is something much more serious. Here there is evil.

            I have spent my life studying the Nazis. I have found myself stunned and occasionally in tears reading about the Holocaust. I have found myself baffled by the horror of a so-called civilized nation setting out to imprison, starve, torture, murder, gas, and burn an entire race of innocent people. And yet, to my disgust, I have seen the mindset of those Nazi murderers copied and admired by some modern American people.

            I have examined the kind of people who were Nazis in World War II Germany. The major enforcers of Nazi horror, the Gestapo and the SS, were thugs and losers without education or societal respect. The anti-Semitic conservative masses went along with the Nazis. Hitler and his thugs started-out small, but gradually grew into a dangerous power.

When you look at the American hate groups you see the same kind of unrefined, crude, angry, bitter, ugly, stupid, uneducated thugs that supported Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. I guess there are many such people all over the world. Educated, intelligent people have to work to prevent these thugs from gaining power. It will be much harder when you have someone like Trump in power. As I look at the Neo-Nazis, KKK, and White Supremacists today I see an evil that could grow into real political power if supported by people in high office.