Thoughts of a Freethinker

I'm reading a book with a long title, Spellbound; How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump  (2025) by Professor Molly Worthen.  Later perhaps I'll reach the part about Trump and write about it then. What I've read so far is her definition of who and what is charisma and where it showed up during the first part of our 250 year history. Certainly it appeared in politics, George Washington for example. But it also appeared many times in religion. She relied of paper records of preachers, what was in newspapers, so there were no doubt countless other preachers who held audiences in the palm of their hands and took advantage of that.     She limits her study to individuals who started and maintained movements. Mostly these are people in religion and politics. As a general overview, she ponders why some individuals are so persuasive they cause others to follow them, often against their own best interest. People with charisma who persuade ...

What does the inside of Trump 's mind look like? Anyone can see it by following what little we know about his tariff "deals."  A consistent position of the Republican Party for many decades has been that the market is the best mechanism for deciding prices of things, who has a job and what people and businesses spend their money on. The worst thing, the Party has said, is for government to make these decisions. With tariffs , however, Republicans has decided market forces should be replaced by government. And, not just government in general. Trump has become what we used to refer to as the " Federal Government ." The New York Times  published a great article attempting to answer the question, "Who still pays tariff, who does not and why?" The answer is the large corporations with lobbyists who can get into the While House , sometimes talking to the President himself, can get tariffs on goods they buy from other countries reduced or eliminated. Small ...

An academic in religion who is also a preacher has posted using a word I had not encountered, apatheism. Even my spell check did not recognize the word. It refers, of course, to people who do not care if there is or is not a god nor care about the narrative the surrounds religion.  Another academic/preacher who write on religious pages has described his experience of taking on, probably as an unpaid volunteer, the pastorship of three churches that were almost closed and trying to keep them open as long as possible. He wrote about the common experience of pastors who notice people stop coming to church but do not show up in other churches. They are not against church life; they just lost interest.  I asked one of my adult granddaughters, who grew up going to Sunday school and then was confirmed, why she no longer goes to church. She said, "I just could not see a place for me." This may fall into the category of apatheism. The link author, who dislikes apatheism, wrote that it ...

A family member passed along a video by a woman who works with people frightened about leaving Christianity or becoming acquainted with other paths like Paganism. She is Brittney Hartley who refers to her approach as nononsense spirituality.  In one of her videos she explains why VP JD Vance and other prominent Catholics talk on and on about the failing birth rate. They point to South Korea which seems to be headed to a population so small the country may have to change or be absorbed.  Hartley points out that secular people treat the low birth rate as the choices of individuals and that human existence on earth most likely happened by a series of somewhat random events. That being the case, humans might, in a million or so years, experience another series of random events that eliminate us from earth. It is not a threat to anyone or any current set of people. Many people in the religious right, however, consider themselves so indispensable it is imperative they do not die. Ch...

Some Buddhist monks are walking from Texas to Washington DC for peace. They had not yet taken all the publicity from Melania's documentary about herself or Trump's roundup of humans, but they have potential to call attention to something more noble than shooting people. The simple act of walking unarmed in unusual places in an old practice with a history of success. We all know about Rev. Martin Luthur King's walks. Gandhi was another who stood unarmed in front of armed police. Filling the streets with shouting and angry people has its place. So does the unarmed noble walker.  The effectiveness and reason for effectiveness is not hard to see after events unfold. We can understand today why King and Gandhi made such a difference. It's another thing to come up with the idea of protesting in this way, convincing others to do it with you and then winning the public relations war that follows. King defeated Sheriff Bull Connor. I think all readers would like to see an end to...

  It's fun to see real progress where some stuck in the past have prevailed. An example is a woman was recently named the Arch Bishop of Canterberry. Unfortunately, there was a loud protest . At her installation ceremony, a right-wing priest shouted out a protest. Instead of the mostly progressive Church of England, this sounds like the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. I remember a well-known Southern Baptist preacher saying, "We in the SBC can bend a little on a few issues. We absolutely cannot allow women preachers." Popes have said there will never be Catholic clergy.  That women cannot be clergy is either a power play or a misreading of the faith's teaching of both. The highest positions in all of society are shared by both men and women. How could it be different in Christianity? The Church of England is, of course, the church of England's government. This makes it even more sensitive to current cultural forces than the Southern Baptist Conv...