Wednesday, December 17, 2025
2012 10 girls collecting firewood are killed by a mine blast in east Afghanistan
2024 Turkey was building up its forces along the Syrian border, raising fears of a possible ground invasion on territories held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
In bed at 10 and awake at 3:30 to move to LZB until 5:20, resting but not sleeping. 34°, wind chill 19°, high 38°, low 32°.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at ?a.m. Kevzara injection at 5 p.m.
I second the motion. From The Atlantic, "Trump's Inferno of Hate is Intensifying," by Peter Wehner, December 16, 2025.
Trump’s malignant narcissism is the most essential thing to understand about him. Heraclitus taught that character is destiny. In Trump’s case, his sociopathy is destiny. His narcissism; his lack of conscience, remorse, or empathy; his pathological lying and grandiosity; his sense of entitlement, impulsivity, and aggression; his cruelty, predatory behavior, and sadism—these are the forces that drive him. If we don’t understand that, we understand almost nothing of importance about him. And beware: When a man with Trump’s personality feels caged in, when he feels besieged and abandoned and begins to lose control of events, he becomes more desperate and more dangerous.
Trump’s personal flaws have seeped into the MAGA movement he leads, which now controls the Republican Party. . .
[Rob] Reiner showed empathy and compassion for a murdered political opponent, Charlie Kirk, and extended grace and praise to Kirk’s widow. Donald Trump, conversely, showed a level of viciousness toward Reiner in death that we rarely see in anyone, and have never before seen in an American president. And yet Trump is president mainly because of the early and undying support he has received from white evangelical Christians and fundamentalists, not all of them but most of them. They stand with him to this very day, to this very hour, to this very second—not on his every utterance but on the moral arc of his presidency.
Many of the people who claim to follow Jesus are instruments of a merciless leader and a merciless movement. They have chosen their political loyalties over their faith, even while using the latter to validate the former. There is something morally twisted and discrediting in this. [Emphasis added.]
One of the most elevating features of Christianity is the concept—and it is not only a Christian concept—of imago Dei. It is the belief that human beings are created in the image of God and valued because we are loved by God. Every person has inherent dignity and worth. Out of that conviction should arise compassion and empathy, including a solidarity with the poor and weak and wounded. It is the way of Jesus—and the way of Jesus, and the person of Jesus, has won our hearts.
Friederich Nietzsche “thought that if a culture was clutching calcified truths, one needed to sound them out relentlessly,” the historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has written. Nietzsche identified himself as a “philosopher with a hammer,” spending his career “tapping that hammer against Western ideals turned hollow idols.” He challenged the notion of eternal truth, of absolute morality, and of God, whom he declared dead.
But “from time to time,” Ratner-Rosenhagen wrote, “Nietzsche put down his hammer as he tried to imagine a world after moral absolutes. Even he wondered what would happen once every article of faith had been shed and every claim to universal truth exposed as a human construct.”
It is a supreme irony that so many American Christians have now picked up the hammer that Nietzsche put down, as if to finish the work he began.
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I read just about everything Peter Wehner writes for the New York Times and The Atlantic. He is a thoughtful guy and a decent human being. I have come to think of 'decency' as the attribute I most hope for in any human being, perhaps mostly because so much that I see coming out of my nation's government - White House, Congress, and Supreme Court - is so indecent. Wehner is not the kind of guy I would normally be attracted to, since he was a principal speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and for former Secretary of Education William Bennett. He supported "W's" disastrous invasion of Iraq. He is a strong supporter of Israel in its war on Gaza and of US support for Israel. He is a serious, practicing Christian, a member of the Presbyterian Church, and a moralist, though he disputes that Jesus's teachings apply to governments as they do to individuals. I suppose I am so drawn to his writings because he is so strong in his condemnation and opposition to Donald Trump, and to Evangelical Christian support of Trump, as the article I quoted from demonstrates.
How is it possible for anyone claiming to be a Christian to support Donald Trump? In this Atlantic article, Wehner writes regarding evangelical Christians who support Trump that, "They have chosen their political loyalties over their faith, even while using the latter to validate the former", but this invites the question of what exactly is "their faith"? Christianity is not one faith, but many, perhaps as many as there are people who purport to profess it. I still think of myself as a Christian, tattooed in my cradle,' though I don't believe in most of the Bible, or the Nicene Creed, or a personal God, and I tend to believe in Spinoza's God, not the popes'. I have very little in common with the Evangelical Christians, especially those who support Trump or Trumpism.
In 1935, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a terrific book titled "An Interpretation of Christian Ethics." I've read it once and re-read parts of it many times. The chapters that I am most drawn to are titled "The Ethic of Jesus," "The Christian Conception of Sin, and "The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal." He is a brilliant thinker and writer, and I've long wondered what his faith was. Surely it's one very different from Pat Robertson's, Jerry Falwell's, and the group of evangelicals who occasionally show up in the Oval Office to lay hands on Donald Trump and pray for his protection and divine guidance. It's also very different from mine. I assume he believes in a transcendent, personal God who acts in history and in some sort of Trinity, but who knows? Was his faith like that of the curé in Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, or like that of the "whiskey priest" in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory? Or like Joan's in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc? Or like any of the Catholic cardinals, princes of the Church, in the recent movie Conclave? Isn't it more true than not that every faith is unique to the believer, that one man's conviction is the next man's hopeful doubt? And that many persons' faith alters from age to age, year to year, or moment to moment? As I type this, I recall the conversation I had in 1966 or 1967 with a Marine reservist who was a Protestant minister of some sort. He told me that most seminarians are atheists, or at least don't believe in the same God that their congregants believe in. I was 26 at the time, going through a very challenging year after Vietnam, and not a churchgoer, but I was shocked. Now I recall the priests of my youth, the chaplains in Vietnam, my priest friends at St. Francis and at the House of Peace, especially Matthew Gotschalk and Al Veik, and I think of the anguished pastor in Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light, the one in Paul Schrader's First Reformed, the missionaries in Martin Scorsese's Silence, Robert Duval's The Apostle, and the Catholic haplain who visited me when I was hospitalized this year. What did their faiths have in common, and what distinguished each one from the others?
For me, even as an apostate, the heart of Gospel Christianity is the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 31to 46, not the part about the Last Judgment, which I seem to be living through in my old age, but the part about the meaning of life being to help one another, especially those most in need. Donald Trump and many of his followers would call the starving, the sick, the imprisoned, etc., 'losers', 'suckers,' perhaps 'scumbags' or 'dirtballs' or 'lowlifes.' In what way are they "Christians"? I include the Catholic convert, J. D. Vance. the Catholic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr,. and the Catholic Marco Rubio, and the Protestant Kristi Noem. Jesus weeps.
I chose the image of Jesus falling for the first time from the Stations of the Cross as an appropriate graphic to accompany my rough thoughts on the multiplicity of "faiths" and on the un-Christian faiths of so-called Evangelical Christians. Disputes and disagreements among Jesus's followers arose almost immediately after his death, witness the varying and contradictory accounts of his life, death, and resurrection in the 4 gospels and in the noncanonical books of early Christianity, e.g., the Gnostic gospels. Judaism and Islam, I suspect, all religions suffer from inevitable disputes and disagreements, fights. Niebuhr recognized this and wrote about it expansively in Moral Man and Immoral Society, asserting that factionalism is unavoidable in religions, including Christianity.
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