Festival of the Lies

For 2018 we are expecting a festival of lies--a continuing assault on the truth. Republicans have raised the bar. Lying is now not a behavior but a state of being. It's a religion with its own code of ethics. Their "truth" is vested in fantasies to be defended by any means.

Ultimately this is an assault on reality by cynics and whores. The cynics are in it for personal gain. Steve Mnuchin comes to mind. His Yale classmates learned too late what a liar and dick he is. I hope they unfriend him on Facebook, the modern version of moral outrage.

The whores are harder to understand. Most are avowed Christians and believe in the truth but that it is exclusively discernible by them. That is, it's embodied in their beliefs to the exclusion of science, physical reality, and us. It's a matter of the spirit and revelation.

Underlying this is the conviction that God is divorced from His creation in spite of what the Bible says. Injustice and unintelligibility reassure them. Reason and decency challenge God's dominion. They are whores because the beliefs originate in bigotry and fear, not faith.

Their point of entry is injustice. They crave it as a tribal power dynamic involving other races and religions. The lying and inconsistency is in defense of fragile and unintegrated psyches. Their desperation is seen in their continuing support for obvious depravity.

Physical reality is a problem for evangelicals. They loathe it. But they are a part of it and so they kind of loathe themselves. Imagining what a mess this is it would be possible to have compassion for them if they weren't determined to inflict this outlook on all of us.

I agree with them that they are loathable. I probably loathe them more than they loathe themselves because of their disrespect for democracy. They should abide in a culture of their beliefs--a totalitarian, religious state, like the Islamic ones they go on about.