Creed
Today is Friday the 27th, not Friday the 13th, which was two weeks ago, so today I don't have to worry and take care not to step on sidewalk cracks, or about spilling salt. In fact, not adding salt at all these days, rather, along with Furo40 to reduce my feet two sizes, lightly using NoSalt to restore some potassium. Torpedoed by BP 78/40 ten minutes after simple breakfast of black coffee and goat cheese on five tiny pieces of toasted German rye bread. If this isn't it, what would be a stable breakfast for an octogenarian who's a decade into his replacement heart valve and four years from nonogenarianism? Maybe a Bloody Mary and can of anchovies. A banana?
Creeds have been in mind and on blogpost, so this creed caught my eye on poem-a-day. The poet obviously knows the Nicene Creed and its construction, and so likely did her mother whom she memorializes here.
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The Guardian Today: US. Analysis / Atrocity offers a glimpse of the chaos to come in Afghanistan. (bottom, scroll way down)
As Christians, we don't understand this, and we thank our God that our religion is one of Love, not one of Hatred, indiscriminate, murderous Hatred. And yet, hatred has become the central divide in our own country. A few years ago, I attended (did not officiate) a funeral at which the speaker's main praise of the dead man was the sentence "and he hated Obama". Recently a dear friend told me with some apparent shock, that a decades-long friend of his had said to him that Democrats are "enemies of the state, and should be dealt with accordingly", a horrifying synopsis of our own national equivalency to ISIS. Anyway, the above line from The Guardian is right on, and there is Hell to come. From my point of view: better nearly ninety than nearly nine.
The following article, cut-and-pasted from this morning's online FiveThirtyEight, is a fascinating rundown on religion that is the opposite of mine. We are all Different, and I am grateful for being born and bred an Episcopalian; someone who has owned telescopes, studied astronomy, peered into the Heavens, and contemplated the vastness of Creation that includes unnumbered universes in a present multiverse, innumerable galaxies in our own universe, and even countless suns, stars, solar systems in our own tiny Milky Way - - such that I don't believe in a small God who is watching me and waiting to wreak punishment on me for my sins known and unknown. Empires come and go, and ours is on track; planets face incoming meteorites, and maybe we are overdue; but no way in Hell do I believe it's the seething end-Time vengeance of my God, the Father of my Lord Jesus Christ.
TW+
from FiveThirtyEight this morning:
AUG. 26, 2021, AT 6:00 AM
Why Some White Evangelical Republicans Are So Opposed To The COVID-19 Vaccine
Filed under COVID-19 Vaccine
In the race to get Americans vaccinated, two groups are commanding a lot of attention: Republicans and white evangelicals. Both are less likely to have been vaccinated already and more likely to refuse vaccination altogether.
But it’s the overlap between white Republicans and white evangelicals that is especially telling, as white evangelical Republicans are among the most likely groups in the U.S. to refuse vaccination. According to a June survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, where I’m the research director, and the Interfaith Youth Core, white evangelical Republicans were considerably less likely to say they were vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated as soon as possible (53 percent) than Republicans who were not white evangelicals (62 percent). Moreover, white evangelical Republicans were the most likely of any large subgroup we surveyed to say they were refusing to get vaccinated (26 percent).
That the combination of being a Republican and a white evangelical would form a particularly toxic anti-vax stew, more significant than party or religion alone, seems obvious to me, but then again, I grew up in rural Texas — I see this combination of beliefs in motion every day on Facebook, where I’m connected to many high school and college classmates.
According to PRRI’s 2020 religion census, the county where I lived longest as a kid (Leon) is 72 percent white Christian, including 44 percent white evangelical, and election data shows 87 percent of the county voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. Just over one-third of the county’s eligible population is fully vaccinated, even though COVID-19 case rates are higher than they have ever been. At least three people who went to high school with me have died, while tracking statistics say at least 1 in 9 Leon County residents have been ill — almost as many as in New York City (1 in 8), one of the hardest-hit areas in the country, and well over the rate in Washington, D.C. (1 in 13), where I live now.
This is significant because Leon County is extremely rural, with less than 20,000 total residents, including less than 2,000 in Buffalo, the town I lived near. For reference, my high school has only about 260 students at any given time. If you need ICU treatment, you have to travel — there are currently no hospitals with ICUs in the county.
But what is also significant about Leon County is the role religion has played in residents’ low vaccination rates even when faced with death from the coronavirus. When my classmates were hospitalized with COVID-19, there were repeated calls for prayers and proclamations that God would provide healing. When they died, those prayer requests became comments that “God called [them] home.”
The belief that God controls everything that happens in the world is a core tenet of evangelicalism — 84 percent of white evangelicals agreed with this statement in PRRI polling from 2011, while far fewer nonwhite, non-evangelical Christians shared this belief. The same poll also showed that white evangelicals were more likely than any other Christian group to believe that God would punish nations for the sins of some of its citizens and that natural disasters were a sign from God. What’s more, other research from the Journal of Psychology and Theology has found that some evangelical Christians rationalize illnesses like cancer as God’s will.
This is why I remember friends and acquaintances in Leon County when I think about how religious beliefs influence one’s attitude toward COVID-19 and vaccination. PRRI’s March survey found that 28 percent of white evangelical Republicans agreed that “God always rewards those who have faith with good health and will protect them from being infected with COVID-19,” compared with 23 percent of Republicans who were not white evangelicals. And that belief correlates more closely with vaccination views among white evangelical Republicans — 44 percent of those who said God would protect them from the virus also said they would refuse to get vaccinated. That number drops to 32 percent among Republicans who are not white evangelicals.
Complicating matters further, the pandemic also fits neatly into “end times” thinking — the belief that the end of the world and God’s ultimate judgment is coming soon. In fact, nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Republicans (64 percent) from our March survey agreed that the chaos in the country today meant the “end times” were near. Faced, then, with the belief that death and the end of the world are a fulfillment of God’s will, it becomes difficult to convince these believers that vaccines are necessary. Sixty-nine percent of white evangelical Republicans who said they refused to get vaccinated agreed that the end times were near.
Moreover, given how many white evangelicals identify as Republican or lean Republican — about 4 in 5 per our June survey — disentangling evangelicals’ religious and political beliefs is nearly impossible. Consider how many white evangelical leaders like former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. downplayed the severity of the pandemic in line with Trump. Falwell was hardly the only evangelical leader to do this either. If anything, the pattern of white evangelical resistance to vaccination has reached the point where some white evangelical leaders who might otherwise urge vaccination hesitate to do so because of the political climate.
In the same survey, about 2 in 5 white evangelical Republicans (43 percent), and Republicans more broadly (41 percent), said one reason they hadn’t gotten vaccinated was that the COVID-19 pandemic had been overblown.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that most white evangelical Republicans, and Republicans in general, disagreed with our question about the Golden Rule, that “because getting vaccinated against COVID-19 helps protect everyone, it is a way to live out the religious principle of loving my neighbors” (57 percent and 58 percent, respectively). This may be because for some white evangelicals and Republicans, politics and religion are inseparable — and God’s will, or their interpretation of it, controls everything.
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pics pinched online, 1935 Pontiacs, first year of the Silver Streak series
Why? confessing: devilment is surely part of it. I hope that deriding, making fun of is NOT, but I'm certain of nothing. T+
Kabul airport atrocity offers a glimpse of the chaos to come in Afghanistan
Joe Biden left with no good options after deadliest day for US troops in Afghanistan in more than a decade
David Smith in Washington
Fri 27 Aug 2021 00.01 EDT
Last modified on Fri 27 Aug 2021 14.12 EDT
The tempting comparison between the withdrawals of US forces from Kabul in 2021 and Saigon in 1975 has offered diminishing returns over the past 12 days.
Whereas about 7,000 people were evacuated from Vietnam (5,500 Vietnamese civilians and about 1,500 Americans), more than 95,000 people have left Afghanistan in a historic airlift since 14 August, the day before the capital fell to the Taliban.
But nor did the departure from Saigon face suicide bombers. Thursday’s attack by Islamic State in Kabul, which killed at least 60 Afghan civilians and 13 American troops, disrupted the evacuation effort and turned a crisis into a catastrophe.
The darkest day of Joe Biden’s young presidency left him with no good options. He must now decide whether to shorten, maintain or extend his deadline of 31 August for the full withdrawal of US forces.
To cut and run now would leave, by most estimates, hundreds of US citizens and many thousands of Afghan allies stranded in hostile territory. But to stay longer would be to invite further deadly attacks by Islamic State’s local affiliate and, beyond Tuesday, the Taliban itself on huge crowds at the airport.
“Every day we’re on the ground is another day we know that Isis-K [Islamic State Khorasan] is seeking to target the airport and attack both US and allied forces and innocent civilians,” Biden warned on Tuesday.
Having already disappointed international allies who craved a post-Donald Trump restoration of American leadership, the president also finds himself in a changed political landscape at home. Conventional wisdom has held that relatively few Americans care about Afghanistan or other foreign policy matters compared with the coronavirus pandemic and “kitchen table” issues.
But now, after the deadliest day for US troops in Afghanistan in more than a decade, American body bags will be flying home, a wake-up call to the insular and apathetic. The nation is in more need than ever of Biden’s empathetic side, not the one recounted in Our Man, a biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke by George Packer.
In a private conversation in 2010 with Holbrooke, the book says, Biden argued that America does not have an obligation to Afghans who trusted: “Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it,” – a reference to President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.
This tragedy, however, will feed America’s bitter polarisation and heighten the political temperature. Some Republicans have already demanded that the president quit. Josh Hawley, a senator for Missouri, said: “This is the product of Joe Biden’s catastrophic failure of leadership. It is now painfully clear he has neither the will nor the capacity to lead. He must resign.”
In the longer term, Thursday’s atrocity offers a glimpse of the chaos to come in Afghanistan, and just how dismally efforts at nation building and importing western-style democracy have failed. If the group known as Islamic State Khorasan wanted to grab the world’s attention and underscore the limits of US power, it surely succeeded.
Islamic State Khorasan is a sworn enemy of the Taliban and even more ideologically extreme. Its ranks include members of the Taliban who resented their leaders’ peace talks with the US. Its intervention on Thursday suggests the potential for further terrorism even after the Americans have gone.
This comes on top of the Taliban’s own threats to human rights, particularly those of women and girls, the weakness of government institutions and an economy hurtling towards the edge of a cliff. “This is a full-fledged humanitarian crisis,” said Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee.
Along with Saigon parallels, it has also been widely observed with frustration in recent days that 20 years’ worth of American blood and treasure in Afghanistan failed to make a difference. On Thursday, as the Pandora’s box sprang open, it seemed possible that it did make a difference – for the worse.
Mehdi Hasan, a host on the MSNBC cable news network, tweeted: “We invaded Afghanistan to fight a terrorist group, Al Qaeda, that attacked us. As we leave, we’re attacked by another terrorist group, ISIS, worse than Al Qaeda, & which didn’t exist when we invaded. I’ve said it before: all the war on terror gave us was more war & more terror.”