Warning. The world is ending. Don't believe me? Just look up in the sky!
I think it's important to maintain a healthy distance between human beings and their ideas. People are much more than their thoughts. I'm an ardent follower of the Enlightenment Project and its ideological stance expressed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all thirty articles of it, and particularly the first one, which reads:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
But the fact that I make such a declaration publicly doesn't prove that I put what I say into practice. For that you really need to observe my behavior over time. The important thing isn't me or others who make the same claim; it's the idea which is broadly shared by people of good will.
It is important, I think, that we make such declarations, that people defend democracy even when their voting habits suggest they don't practice what they preach. Sometimes, I think, people listen to themselves and talk themselves into things.
The other side of the coin is that all sorts of stupid things come out of people's mouths, and given some time for reflection, they retract those moments of carelessness. They deserve a chance to retract the occasional slip. And also they should be given the liberty to change their minds.
Consider the evangelical preacher John Hagee, for example, the guy who founded Christians United for Israel. He's a literal fundamentalist. If the Bible tells us Noah put animals in his ark two by two, it bothers John Hagee not a whit that there probably wasn't enough room for lions and tigers and giraffes and deer each to get a separate room or how it was that the pairs were 100% fertile and once the ark let everybody off on Mount Ararat, they were all able to keep their species going.
I think John Hagee's lack of familiarity with even the stuff of elementary school science classes makes him look like an idiot. I'd still shake his hand and offer him coffee or tea should he pass my way. But I'd also want to check out whether his ideas are simple b.s. or whether they actually cause harm. Does he hurt Catholics when he calls their church the "whore of Babylon"? I'd let that one go, but then again, I'm not a Roman Catholic. What about Palestinians, or Israelis who believe the answer to the standoff in the Middle East must be solved by getting Israelis and Palestinians to work together?
Of course, maybe koala bears and polar bears and grizzly bears really did all fit together somehow. Hagee's claim that the Noah's Ark tale was not some kind of exercise of early biblical imagination but a literal historical event doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as his claim that God used Hitler to punish the Jews for not following his commandments. And check out his 1990 sermon where he tells you God had another purpose, as well: he wanted the Jews to have the motivation to found the State of Israel. Which they had to do to before they could all convert and become Christians, and fulfill biblical prophecy. I've decided that was Hagee simply having a dumber-than-shit moment. Let it pass. Maybe.
Whether you take this claim as evidence that Hagee is just another half-witted televangelist making a personal fortune from leading the vulnerable and the clueless to part with their shekels, or whether he's totally sincere, he illustrates this bizarre everyday phenomenon that is American religiosity. The problem is when we gave "faith" a seat at the table along with "reason," we opened the floodgates to the tragedy we live with today, where anybody can come up with the most cockamamie proposition imaginable and defend it with the political argument, "I've got a right to my beliefs!" Yes, of course you do, but that don't make it right!
Because Hagee is a religious leader, nobody can touch him, legally. And that's OK with me. I think the best response to nonsense speech is non-nonsense corrective speech, not censorship. As long as a critical mass of people use their heads, check their facts, and commit to civil and reasonable discourse, we'll make it through such diatribes as John Hagee puts forth from his pulpit. But recently evangelicals - and not just evangelicals but some mainstream Christians as well, the kind who believe Mary was a virgin, her son walked on water and Methuselah married a woman named Edna and lived to the age of 969 - have been working hand-in-glove with politicians to make national policy. Best pay attention here, as women, people of color, Jews, gays and transsexuals can tell you.
Hagee became a strong McCain supporter until McCain got wind of his Holocaust stance and dropped him like a hot potato. But, as Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institute reminds us, this is just Hagee getting started. Hagee also explains Hurricane Sandy as God's punishment for Louisiana's bad behavior. A kind of replay of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell's suggestion that 9/11 was God's punishment for abortion, homosexuality, feminism and secular public schools.
What gets me about such claims - besides their sheer hilarious nonsense, I mean - is what it says about their concept of their Christian god - that he is ready, willing and able to starve and torture children for their parents' sins. Never could get my mind around that line of thinking.
But back to Hagee. These days, Hagee has gone full speed ahead in his support for Israel. No such thing as the Palestinian people, he says. No concern for how Israel formulates its foreign policy; all that matters is that they fulfill biblical prophecy.
I just came across his 2013 book on another thing that mystifies me about how God apparently works in mysterious ways - through riddles. He sends us signs that require prophets to interpret. Hagee is happy to answer the call. He's been obsessing for years now over another message from heaven, another "Watch out, folks, I'm a-comin' for ye!"
A little background on the sign. From time to time, the earth lines up perfectly between the sun and the moon, creating a huge shadow on the moon. Eclipses can be partial. Or total, when a full moon becomes totally dark. However, some of the sunlight leaks, and when it passes through the earth's atmosphere, the light gets filtered and scattered. Some wavelengths are shorter than others, and the shorter the wavelength, the more likely they are to appear reddish or orange in color. On rare occasions the moon can take on the color of blood; hence the term "blood moon." Also known as the sanguine moon, the travel moon, or the harvest moon. It's the same phenomenon as occurs during sunrise or sunset, when the light is the kind of red that sends poets into a tizzy.
Where the plot thickens, though, is when these blood moons come in groups of four. Tetrads. If you want to know more, there's a quite useful Norwegian site called timeanddate.com, which has information on the topic. The simplified version is this: every six months or so there is an eclipse season, during which time a lunar eclipse at full moon and a solar eclipse at new moon occur. And, according to timeanddate.com, every so often there are four such eclipses in a row - hence the name tetrad, which may be defined as four blood moons in a row, about six months apart. For a complete list of up-and-coming eclipses, click here.
Hagee is apparently done with seeing Hitler as the messenger of God and into a new shtick, interpreting the blood moon phenomenon and citing the Book of Revelation 6:12:
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.
Hagee wasn't the first clever devil to take advantage of the gullible. Christopher Columbus, whose knowledge of the heavens puts Hagee's to shame, told the Arawak Indians shortly before a blood moon was due that God was angry that they weren't feeding his men properly and would turn the moon red. It worked. The Indians couldn't get provisions to the ships fast enough after that.
Hagee obsesses over this tetrad phenomenon in his 2013 book, Four Blood Moons: Something is about to change. He is unconcerned, apparently, about the fact that you don't see the eclipses of the sun and moon everywhere on the planet, and what you experience depends on where you are located. In order to experience the two to five eclipses that occur every year, you'd have to be constantly on the move. The total eclipse of the sun coming up in April 2023, for example, will not be seen by anyone in North America. But when God commanded the sun to "stand still" in the sky so that Joshua could fight the battle of Jericho and make the walls come tumblin' down, he wasn't talking about the sun as viewed in Peoria, Illinois or Bariloche, Argentina.
There once was a time when most people in America simply brushed off the wacko flame-throwing bible thumpers. Considering the evidence that we have all but lost our government to people manipulating the populace by fear and loathing of the "other," I suggest we might oughta give these clowns more serious consideration. Just because you want to defend to the death their right to spew stuff and nonsense doesn't release you from the responsibility of calling out bullshit when you see it.
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