Notes from the multidimensional realm

In today's episode of Missives From Insane People Who Still Somehow Get A National Platform, we have: Paul McGuire, self-styled "End Times author," who appeared last week on the Jim Bakker Show.

It bears mention that Bakker himself is nuttier than squirrel shit.  Bakker, you may remember, is the one who predicted a couple of years ago that we atheists were imminent to start publicly beheading Christians.  As of right now, my total is a shameful Zero Christians Beheaded, which either means Bakker is a fucking loon or else I'm way behind on my Decapitation Quota.

Then, last year, Bakker railed against liberals for "blaspheming against Donald Trump."  Direct quote, that, despite the fact that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English says that "blaspheme" means "to speak irreverently about God or sacred things."  Which elevates Trump just slightly beyond his station.  Oh, and if that weren't enough, Bakker's also the one who claimed that the U. S. government was being run by witches.

So it's not like Bakker himself is exactly a pinnacle of normality.  But his guest, Paul McGuire, makes Bakker look like Mr. Sane Rationality 2018 by comparison.

Although it bears mention that Bakker treated everything McGuire said as if it were revealed truth, so maybe they're not that far apart after all.

In any case, here's what McGuire had to say:

President Trump is currently engulfed in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of all mankind...   The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm...  There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called "The Scientific Dictatorship," and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics. 

The highest level of the pyramidic organizational structure in which the highest ranking officers, if you will, of the New World Order and Mystery Babylon are ruling the earth through an organizational structure that looks like the pyramid on the back of the U.S. dollar.  And they control the world because they understand that the true control of the world is done through supernatural mechanisms.

So there you have it.

You know, I have to admit that if I were a Luciferian multidimensional being in charge of Mystery Babylon, I would definitely use my supernatural Pyramid Powers to smite the shit out of Donald Trump.  It may seem petty of me, and there are probably more worthy targets, but I'd love to use occult magic to seal his mouth shut.  Or make it so every time he tweets, no matter what he writes, it comes out "I [heart] the New World Order."  Or attach a thousand-watt LED to his forehead that lights up every time he tells a lie.

Of course, it'd be lit so often that it'd interfere with air traffic.  So that'd be bad.

Looks like Lucifer has been hitting the gym lately.  (Fallen Angel, Alexandre Cabanel, 1847) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But what strikes me about McGuire's claim is that despite all of his dire warnings... nothing is happening.  Trump is still in office, his toadies in Congress are looking like they've greased the rails for Brett "Documents Withheld" Kavanaugh to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and the administration as a whole has undone decades of progress on environmental and social issues without anyone being able to stop them, or even slow them down.  So if there really are Luciferian multidimensional beings, I would be really glad if they'd get off their asses and do something about this.  Because it's increasingly looking like we've invented time travel, and transported the entire nation back to 1830.

In any case, that's the view from the lunatic fringe for today.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm late for a meeting of the Pyramidic Organizational Structure.  I hope one of the other Invisible Realm Operatives brings donuts.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is part hard science, part the very human pursuit of truth.  In The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll writes about the studies and theoretical work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the particle Leon Lederman nicknamed "the God Particle" (which he later had cause to regret, causing him to quip that he should have named it "the goddamned particle").  The discovery required the teamwork of dozens of the best minds on Earth, and was finally vindicated when six years ago, a particle of exactly the characteristics Peter Higgs had described almost fifty years earlier was identified from data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Carroll's book is a wonderful look at how science is done, and how we have developed the ability to peer into the deepest secrets of the universe.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Questioning the holy man

I know I've said this before, but one of the most baffling things for me about the Trump presidency is that evangelical Christians (most of them, at least) not only voted for Trump, but consider him to be the Anointed One of God.

You would think that listening to Trump for five minutes would be enough to disabuse you of that notion.  The man is a crude, vulgar, greedy, grasping, dishonest, misogynistic, narcissistic philanderer.

To put not too fine a point on it.

Okay, I know people make a deal with the devil in politics sometimes.  You vote for someone who agrees with you on some cause you are passionate about, and overlook his/her faults in other realms.  But that doesn't seem to be what this is.  These people not only agree with his agenda -- especially regarding restricting the access to abortions, eliminating LGBT rights, American isolationism, and protecting the rights of churches to discriminate based upon their religious precepts -- they actually seem to think that he's some kind of modern-day holy man, without fault, appointed by God to bring our nation back from the brink of hell.

Consider, for example, the recently-released book by David Brody and Scott Lamb called The Faith of Donald Trump: A Spiritual Biography, which claims that Trump's agenda is "spiritually motivated" and his rapacity and apparently insatiable libido are evidences of a "quest for God."  You'd think no one would be able to read this without guffawing -- and hearteningly, 42% of the reviews are one-star -- but one reviewer said:

Great biography of a man of God.  Well written to understand about D Trump's character and can see clearly who he is in Christ.  I don't question anymore why he speaks & act such a way but trust him as loving person in depth.  No one can be without fear if the person does not stand on God's truth.

Recall that Trump is the same man who was asked if he ever asked God to forgive him for sins, said that he couldn't remember ever doing that.  "When I drink my little wine -- which is about the only wine I drink -- and have my little cracker," Trump said, "I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed."

The people who espouse the view that Trump is Jesus's right-hand man believe this with a fervor that borders on obsessive mania.  Consider the photograph of the back of a car that has been making its way around social media in the last week:

Well, honestly, he "left his great life" primarily to make sure that legislation gets passed that lines his own pockets and those of his cronies.  Trump and his family are using his position as a way of bringing in cash -- witness Ivanka's recent win of exclusive trademarks from China -- followed by her father rewarding them by promising to bail out Chinese telecom firm ZTE.

Because that doesn't violate the Emoluments Clause, or anything.

But no one exemplifies the bizarre characterization of Trump as Savior better than televangelist Jim Bakker, who steadfastly refuses to Go Gently Into That Good Night even though he appears to have completely lost his marbles.  Last week, Bakker had End Times prophet Paul McGuire on his show, and McGuire warns that because Trump is God's representative on Earth, the Forces of Darkness are amassing to fight back:

America right now is in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of all of mankind.  In fact, in America, we are undergoing the greatest spiritual battle in the history of the world…  So this is it.  We don’t get another chance.  This is it.  We’ve arrived at the moment Jesus told us we would, the Old Testament prophets told us we would.  We are at that time, somewhere near the return and the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to the earth.  We are very close! 

Since we’re in the greatest spiritual battle in the history of mankind, one would think that the majority of God’s people, who claim to have Jesus living inside them, would be awake to the reality that we’re in the greatest spiritual warfare of all time. 

President Trump represents the one last chance to cry out to God in repentance and see God intervene... we are the last generation of Americans… before the return of the Lord... 

The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm.  There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called ‘The Scientific Dictatorship,’ and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics.

Well, all I can say is, if hating Trump qualifies you for supernatural multidimensional power, sign me right up.  But I've hated Trump for ages, and I don't have wings or telepathy or the ability to turn invisible or anything.

I feel kind of ripped off, frankly.

(It does bear mention, however, that one of the people who responded to this story wrote, "I think Paul McGuire has been smoking way too much covfefe lately.")

Anyhow, it's all kind of baffling to me.  I mean, this goes way beyond the sunk-cost fallacy and wishful thinking right into the more rarefied atmosphere of complete self-delusion.  I suppose, given how much evidence you had to ignore to support Trump in the first place, I shouldn't be surprised.  It never was about rationality in the first place.

But it still leaves me feeling like I want to board the next spaceship to Alpha Centauri.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Money, allegiance, and faith

Someone I know posted a cartoon on social media a couple of days ago.  It had a pissed-off looking old woman on it, and the caption was, "It's 'One Nation Under God," or bite my ass and leave."

I've always been a little mystified about the fervor with which some people demand that those words be in the Pledge of Allegiance.  The same fervor is invoked when anyone mentions taking "In God We Trust" off our currency.  Besides the fact of marginalizing people in this country who are not religious -- a number that by recent polls now amounts to one in five -- these statements also imply that Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, and members of other religions who do not worship the Judaeo-Christian god have no place here.

More to the point, however, I've never heard a cogent argument for why those phrases should be part of our statement of allegiance to our country, or on our money.  In the first case, you're expecting people either to recite a statement in public that is, for them, a lie, or else refuse (or at least refuse to say that line) and invite censure.  But even more mystifying is the statement of faith on currency.  What happened to "The love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10) and "Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's, and unto God those things that are God's" (Mark 12:17)?  It seems to me a little odd to put a religious statement on something that the bible repeatedly derides as bad.  (Remember "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven?")

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, every so often you hear vitriolic attacks launched against people who, like me, would like that language removed, not because we object to other Americans believing in any god they want to, but because the implication that we all have to believe that way is exclusionary.  You can pray anywhere you like; contrary to popular belief, you are free to pray in public schools, as long as (1) those prayers don't interfere with what's going on in the classroom, (2) you're not requiring anyone else to pray along with you, and (3) such prayer is not school-sponsored.  (I'm guessing there's a lot of praying going on immediately prior to my final exam, for example.)  Why the demand that there be public, government-endorsed language that seems to exist only to make a good quarter of American citizens feel that they aren't welcome in their own country?

As more and more people recognize that such statements are not only disrespectful but unnecessary, the people who want to keep them where they are become more and more desperate.  Take, for example, what religious writer Jessilyn Justice had to say last week about her views and those of radio talk show host Paul McGuire. Apparently, Justice and McGuire think we have to keep "In God We Trust" on the dollar bill, because otherwise we're going to initiate the End Times:

Money and spirituality are heavily intertwined, says eschatology professor and prolific author Paul McGuire.

"The world system is a control system that is both spiritual and economic," McGuire said at the Prophecy in the News conference.  "Money is all about captivity, slavery and control.  That is its essential purpose.  It's [sic] essential purpose is not an economic instrument of exchange.  It's about control and the occult and spirituality." 

McGuire points to one of the founding theories of atheism, Darwin's theory of evolution, and Space Odyssey co-author Arthur C. Clarke to connect atheism, money and the occult: Science is magic. To remove God from the money would allow the occult to take over. 

McGuire says the dollar bill is bursting with blatantly occult symbols, meaning the United States economic system is based on magic and sorcery opposed to logic and principles.

"The world system of economics is based on magic and illusion.  It's based on your willingness to believe in it," McGuire said.  "It's about the manipulation and control of the masses. That's what Jesus is talking about when he's talking about Mammon and the world system."... 

The answer?  To keep God in money, McGuire says, which could mean leaving Him on the bills, as well.

Well, first of all, Arthur C. Clarke didn't say "Science is magic," he said, "Magic is science we haven't understood yet," which is kind of the opposite.  And second, I don't think having "In God We Trust" on our currency has had much effect in keeping money from being about manipulation, power, and control.  If that's why the phrase is there, it's not working.

But third, something I've found puzzling is why a lot of the Christians go on and on warning us about preventing the End Times.  You'd think they'd be knocking themselves out to encourage us atheists to do stuff to bring the End Times on, because don't they believe that the first thing that will happen is that all of the holy people will be assumed bodily into heaven?  Meaning that after that, they won't have to deal with all of the annoying people who don't believe exactly like they do?  You'd think they'd be saying, "Go ahead.  Take "One Nation Under God" out of the pledge.  See what happens next.  Ha ha ha."

But they don't.  Most of the stuff I've read is all about making sure that individuals and governments do everything they can to prevent the End Times, which is a little peculiar if you really believe that you're going to get your eternal reward in heaven and all the bad guys are going to get their just deserts.

Almost sounds as if they aren't completely convinced that stuff is true, either.

So the bottom line is, unless you believe in some sort of occult magical significance of the words, there's no good reason to keep statements of religious faith in the Pledge of Allegiance and printed on our money.  But given that McGuire was right about one thing -- this isn't about logic and principles -- I'm expecting that change isn't going to happen any time soon.