7/29/2025

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

D+ 263/191/1270

1921 Adolf Hitler becameleader of the National Socialist German Workers Party

1993 Israeli Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk 5-0, stating there was insufficient evidence he is Concentration Camp guard Ivan the Terrible

2016 Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for President

In bed by 9:30, up at 5:45.  70°, high of 85°, cloudy/sunny

Meds, etc.  I took them this morning, but made no note of it.    

Facebook comment to JJA's post this morning: 

It's hard to disagree that the overwhelming support of white evangelical Christians for a man with Donald Trump's horrendous character and history contributes to some people rejecting Christianity, though there are surely other contributing factors, not the least of which is clergy corruption. As Sinclair Lewis allegedly said, "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." It's mostly the religiosity of Trump's avid followers that makes them so dangerous. With God on their side, they feel free, indeed required, to engage in any kind of depredation to accomplish His (God's and Trump's) purposes and goals. As Bob Dylan wrote in "With God On Our Side," " The land that I live in has God on its side" and "Ya never ask questions, when God's on your side."

I drove to the Central Post Office to mail Geri's card to Ellis in camp.

I ordered Blink NutriTears from Amazon for almost $30 after trying unsuccessfully to buy it at Walmart in Saukville, CVS in Fox Point, and Walgreens in Mequon..

Last year's journal entries on this date surprised me, both by their length and by their thoughtfulness.  I must have spent a fair amount of time writing them.  I note that I woke up at 4 in the morning and was up at 4:30, so I probably did a lot of thinking and writing before Geri got up, perhaps before I had breakfast.  I aslo must have had some energy and mental focus, more than I have had today.  I note also how much of my attention a year ago (and two years ago, for that matter) was devoted to Israel, its government, and its crimes against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, to religion and especially the Catholic Church, and the decline of America and democracy, my emotional heath vel non, pessimism, cynicism, dispair, etc. Some excerpts (a way to avoid original thinking and/or writing today):

7/29/2023:  Pandora's Basement Boxes and Why Religion Matters.  In the several boxes I opened in the basement a few weeks ago were some books that I valued and had packed away when we moved to Bayside, among them Huston Smith's Why Religion Matters.  I started it years ago and got distracted; I have no idea how far into it I got.  In any event, I picked it up again yesterday and have started to get into it again.  It's in large measure because I am so thoroughly confused in my old age not so much about religion but about the whole idea of "God."  I know as I look back on my life that what I was taught in Catholic schools for so many years - 8 years elementary school, 4 years high school, right into 10 academic credit hours of Theology and 15 hours of mostly Thomistic Philosophy - means nothing to me as I get nearer and nearer to death.  All that 'all' stuff - all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful, all-good, all-this, and all-that - still leaves me with the problem that has haunted Mankind for millennia: why so much suffering in our lives, so much evil and wickedness in the world, the 'theodicy' question.  It's as I said to Geri's cousin Sue and her husband years ago, if there is a God, a good case can be made that He is a mean prick, or, if He isn't, He has a brother who is (a bit of Manichaeanism.)  To the query 'Do you believe in God' I'm always inclined to ask "Which one?"  If "He" is beyond definition and beyond description, how can we deal with that in any meaningful way?  On the other hand, I was once blessed with a bit of wisdom from an old friend of mine, Vicki Conte, who when I was pissing and moaning about such matters, said to me "It's not a head thing, Chuck, it's a heart thing."  She was a lot smarter than I was and am.  But I do think that there is Something ineffable about Life, about the World, about Being at all.  Why is there anything?  I don't think I spout BS when I say, as I so often have, that the world is full of Saints and Miracles (and Heroes) though we usually don't see what is all around us.  I don't think it's just sentimental claptrap.  I think the Whatever is not in the same realm as other stuff that is unimaginable and incomprehensible to me, like quantum physics, the nature and behavior of subatomic particles, etc.  The Whatever is in the realm of Awe, of poetic apprehension, of some sort of mysticism, and thus unquantifiable, unmeasurable, unfalsifiable.  I think these thoughts are what Huston Smith's book is about and I hope I have the discipline to see it through.  Maybe I'll learn something and help my "Chaos of thought and passion, all confused." [Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man.]

7/29/2024 Feeding the hungry.  "There are so many people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." — Mahatma Gandhi.    Yesterday was the tenth Sunday after Pentecost and the gospel reading was the tale of the feeding of the five thousand.  Jesus was said to have fed 5,000 of his followers with 5 loaves of barley bread and two fishes.  Indeed, the few loaves and fishes he distributed produced 12 baskets of leftovers!  Brother Booker Ashe, the founder of and my predecessor managing the House of Peace had a theory about this gospel story.  He said that what really happened was that the people in Jesus' audience saw him giving away the little available food, they took out and shared the food they had squirreled away in their clothing and bags so that everybody got something to eat with much left over.  His theory was that seeing Jesus' generosity led the followers to stop being selfish and to become sharers.  I am thinking of this gospel story and of Booker's reading of it as I think of what has been happening in Gaza for the last 9 months, i.e., Israel using starvation of Palestinian civilians as an instrument of war.  Of all the genocide and war crime charges against the State of Israel, the one that is most damning is that of depriving the civilian population of food and clean water, producing famine or near-famine conditions.  Yoav Gallant, the Defense Minister, announced shortly after October 7th, "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" and so it has been.  In his recent speech to Congress, Benjamin Netanyahu lied in saying

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has shamefully accused Israel of deliberately starving the people of Gaza. This is utter complete nonsense. It’s a complete fabrication. Israel has enabled more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. That’s half a million tons of food, and that’s more than 3,000 calories for every man, woman and child in Gaza. If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it, it’s because Hamas steals it.

It's the old story: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  Dp we believe the countless news photos and videos showing desperately hungry Palestinians chasing food trucks or holding plates of some sort toward servers at food distribution sites, the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, and all the humanitarian organizations striving to provide some relief to the civilian population in Gaza, and countless reporters  or do we believe Benjamin Netanyahu who also said

The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. What in God’s green earth is he talking about? The IDF has dropped millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way.

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  Yet so many American legislators in the room stood and applauded his lies.  What does this say about "who we are"?

Perhaps the lie that most offended me was Netanyahu's attempt to identify the State of Israel and its fascist current government with the Jewish people, to equate opposition to Israeli political and military policies and practices with antisemitism.

Antisemitism is the world’s oldest hatred. For centuries, the massacre of Jews was always preceded by wild accusations. We were accused of everything from poisoning wells to spreading plagues to using the blood of slaughtered children to bake Passover matzos. These preposterous antisemitic lies led to persecution, mass murder and ultimately to history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust.

 Now, just as malicious lies were levelled for centuries at the Jewish people, malicious lies are now being levelled at the Jewish state. No, no. Don’t applaud. Listen. The outrageous slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish State and to demonize Jews everywhere. And no wonder, no wonder we’ve witnessed an appalling rise of antisemitism in America and around the world.  My friends,

Whenever and wherever we see the scourge of antisemitism, we must unequivocally condemn it and resolutely fight it, without exception.

 The greatest cause of antisemitism in the world, especially for diaspora Jews, has become the State of Israel and its fascist, criminal government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

 7/29/2024 World's second-largest religion?  Christians remain the world's largest religion at 31% of the world's population, with Muslims coming in second at 24% and Hindus at 15%.  Within Christianity, Catholics claim pride of place with about 1.28 million followers, followed by Protestantism with 920,000 unless you count the Anglicans/Episcopalians, in which case they are the largest with about 1.5 million believers.  In any case, I used to hear it said that the Catholics were the largest and that the second largest were the ex-Catholics, or 'fallen away Catholics, i.e., people like me.  Why are there so many ex-Catholics?  Why are there so many ex-Catholics with hostile feelings about their former religion?  Some thoughts:

1. I think of Sinead O'Connor and her experiences, indeed all of Ireland's experience, with the Irish Catholic Church.

2. I think of the popes and cardinals and bishops and their sorry history.

3. I think of Humanae vitae and A Syllabus of Errors and Vehementer Nos: 

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

4.  I think of thousands of pedophiliac priests all over the world harming mostly boys but also girls, many for life.  How long has this been going on?  How long has it been tolerated and hidden by the Church?  How many victims have there been?  We will never know.

5. But I also think of our Supreme Court with 5 and perhaps 6 of the radically right-wing justices being Catholic.  I think of Donald Trump's Catholic aides and enablers like Rudy Giuliani, Bill Barr, Pat Cippolone, Dan Scavino,  Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich, Elise Stafanik, Leonard Leo, Kellyanne Conway, Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundations/Project 2025), Fox's Laura Ingraham, Matt and Mercedes Scjlapp (CPAC), and now J. D. Vance who converted in 2019.  Trump is surrounded by right-wing Catholics and Evangelical Protestants so one wonders what is the difference between the two groups.  All are, like the Church itself, conservative, reactionary, and anti-democratic.  One wonders why Vance decided to become a Catholic in 2019, the 3rd year of the Trump presidency.    Was he socially embarrassed by his prior affiliation with Pentecostalism or politically embarrassed by his prior claims of atheism?  In. Right-wing America, Catholic is cool.

6.  On the other hand, there is "cafeteria Catholicism" everywhere, condemned when practiced by liberal Catholics (an oxymoron?).  Vance supports the death penalty in some cases, wants to boost fossil fuels, wants to deport millions of migrants, and has voted against many government programs aimed at aiding the poor. All of those positions are in opposition to his church.  Also, data on the number of conversions is spotty. Polling organizations including Pew Research have long shown that many more people are leaving the Catholic faith than joining it — by more than 6 to 1.