On Trump, Nukes, and Satan
On Trump, Nukes, and Satan
The reason Trump gives for his war and threat of annihilation is that the Iranians are “sick” and “disturbed” people, i.e., insane. This is why they must never have a nuclear weapon, though other countries may, some of which are antagonistic towards us. The thought is that the Iranians are too psychologically unbalanced to be a trusted with a nuclear bomb, so we must do anything in our power to prevent them obtaining one, even to the point of annihilation. The trouble with this rationale is simply that it is false—the Iranians are not insane or unbalanced or “sick” (though they may be very bad). So, Trump is waging war against them based on bad psychology, endangering the entire world thereby. He is a lousy psychologist on top of everything else.
I used to think that Trump disproves the existence of God. I don’t think I need to explain why I say this (so many times God could have stopped him from gaining power, but did nothing). Recently I have started to think that he proves the existence of the Devil, because of his demonic power; Satan would love him. He personifies evil. But this may not go far enough: he is Satan—the hair, the voice, the insidious racism, the cruelty, the absence of a moral center. But I now think this hypothesis must be rejected, because the Devil is never funny and Trump is. His saving grace is that he is hilarious. I don’t mean this metaphorically; he makes me laugh out loud all the time. Perhaps we need a new theology—no God, no Devil, just a funny Force. Or else it’s all just us with our pettiness, nastiness, and absurdity.
That’s an interesting proof of God’s non-existence. I remember my exercise, in Catholic high school, (my family was alarmingly Catholic), of posing something to my sophomore-year ethical theology instructor. He went to lengths of adducing “proof” that Hitler was not evidence of God’s non-existence based on evil. I just knew that this instructor would make appeal to free will; as in, “God endows us with free will, so that we may ‘know’ him, by free will choice, but if worldly evil exists, it’s not the Almighty’s fault, we humans chose it”. Fine, I replied, God gives us free will to choose evil, but why would God allow a Hitler to become head-of-state of a military superpower? The Supreme Being could have, easily, allowed the bastard child Hitler, to roam the Austrian countryside as a kind of Jeffrey Dahmer, with his free will intact, destroying a dozen lives, but with safeguards in place; that this same Hitler could never become a head-of-state, who would shatter millions of lives. The Hitler still gets his God-given free will, but yet, the greater humanity is protected from his devastation. I got thrown out of that class.
Unanswerable argument–no wonder they threw you out.