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.
@Daniel Melvin:
Omnipotence is not a property to be attributed to the deity. I don’t know how that got mixed up in there, but it is mistaken. It is not part of logos. (Why do you think of the deity as “him”? Donald Trump has delusions of omnipotence. The symptoms of his ongoing and rapidly developing mental pathology resemble those of schizophrenia. How is it the people who voted for him could not see this in him?)
Well, God is supposed to be our father, so male. Omnipotence is supposed to account for his creative powers and general greatness. DT has illusions of everything.
If the cultural facts had been different (contingency), we could just as well have had, “God the mother, God the daughter, God the Holy Ghost”. Maybe then people (i.e., men) might not have gotten the idea that omnipotence is a proper property for a deity. Maybe then we could have avoided centuries of overbearing men browbeating, controlling and abusing their wives and children, asserting their right to dominate and producing damaged souls like Donald Trump. We could have avoided alienating femininity from the idea of Logos and the curse of men always calling women “illogical”. The incarnation of the word might have been more effective if delivered by a woman; then it might not have led to schizoid abominations like vicious war criminal Pete Hegseth invoking God to justify and glorify the callous murder of, inevitably, more little schoolgirls.
BTW, I don’t know if Trump is Satan, but the evangelical Christians who worship Trump (and they literally do) are, I would say, best described as Satanists.
Polytheism is best with both male and female gods. I myself am a zoolatrist.
I thought if the mythmakers had gone with the feminine metaphor, we could have had old man Zeus as the father of the daughter of God. (And we would have avoided the “Leda and the swan” type of scenario.)
That would be one way to go.
“the Iranians are not insane or unbalanced”. True, but they are theocrats, which is worse. There is no reasoning with people whose every moral principle is determined by some theological belief. “It takes a great ideal to produce a great evil”. Same for Trump’s base in white Christian evangelical nationalism. Try arguing with a creationist.
What we are seeing is a form of religious war, and you know how those end.
I agree. I think those theocrats would be quite able to see that their use of a nuclear weapon would be responded to in kind.
The text-image that has been dominating Netanyahu’s mind for the last 40 years or so is, “The Iranians are hell-bent on developing a nuclear weapon and using it on Israel at the earliest opportunity.” He can’t get beyond that image, and prefers to go on in ignorance of the changing times.
Could be.
“If there is a true universal mind, must it be sane?” ~Charles Fort
It’s an interesting question whether God is necessarily sane. If he created the world we live in, he looks not to be in his right mind.
What do philosophers say about the ontology of ideal principles (e.g., ethical principles)? What are they? (As with causal laws, I want to distinguish between ideal principles and the statement of ideal principles. I don’t think it’s necessary to expect that ideal principles or causal laws have a propositional form. That’s the way human language seems to have to talk about them. If they exist, they must exist independently of man’s attempt to formulate them. But the whole notion of a law or a principle is dependent on human language. (So they don’t exist prior to being formulated? But a formulation is just an attempt at understanding.) Something like that could exist, I suppose, without being known to exist. Perhaps instead of being formulated and expressed, they could be described as intentional objects.) Does it make sense to ask such a question?
(This may seem unrelated to the previous discussion, but I wondered it in response to the quotation in Steven’s comment.)
As it happens, I have a long treatise on laws on this blog, called Principia Metaphysica.
Trump is a weirdo but he never calls Iranian people sick and disturbed. He applied these descriptions strictly to the Iranian ruling class, the radical mullahs in power. If anyone cares to even superficially follow the Iranian history and politics since 1979 revolution, the usage of these terms should be no surprise. Iran systematically intimidated and fought its neighbours, funded and trained armed Islamist militants in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere. The fact that NYT and similar ideology driven media outlets systematically distort every word and image coming from the White House is no excuse to believing their counter factual nonsense. Iranian mullahs prosecute and kill gays, women who do not wear head scarfs, students who oppose their theocratic dogmas and anyone who dissents from their party line.
For the record: I am stating the above not as a Trump supporter but as one who tries to keep a balanced point of view.
I didn’t say he called every Iranian “sick”, only the ideologues, though he was sloppy in his usage, here as elsewhere; but this extends beyond the ruling class. Anyway, the point was that the people in charge are not literally insane; they know that using a nuclear weapon would generate a response in kind, or close to it. They are bad not mad. The history lesson you give is common knowledge and not necessary here. You surely exaggerate when you say the NY Times distorts “every word and image coming from the White House”.
You would be surprised how many well meaning people, especially of the younger generation in North America, have no clue at all about history. Too many think that sympathy towards the oppressed (without paying attention who and why defines “oppression”) is all it takes to form an evidence based and fair opinion about any given conflict. As to NYT — the only exaggeration on my behalf was the quantifier “every”. Agree. “Usually” is a better suiting word. FWIW I read NYT regularly.
As to “mad” vs “bad”: I think the currently ruling class in Iran is both. I do understand your point though as some of their tactics appear rational (but so are selected reasonable behaviours of some mentally ill). “Mad” applies to rulers who do not care about their own citizens. Iranian rulers spent their people’s money on arming the militias in other countries, paying off their huge military complex to support the regime and building piles of rockets that are useless defensively. Messing up for years with their peaceful neighbours doesn’t qualify as sanity either.
I’m not surprised at all; I lament it daily. But readers of this blog are not so unsophisticated. I don’t agree with “usually” either; “often” maybe, “sometimes'” for sure (I’ve been a victim of it myself).
The relevant madness with respect to nuclear weapons concerns their propensity to use them given the likely consequences. That’s what Trump was suggesting. But simple sane self-interest suffices for this. I doubt they would be any more ready to use them than North Korea. And what kind of nuclear weapon with what range? Were we insane when we used them in Japan?
US nuclear bombings in Japan were terrible acts. Whether these acts were sane or insane is subject to heated unending debates. Some claim that the bombings were the only way to stop the world war and save many more lives in comparison to loss of life expected from blockading Japan. Others claim that it was a preventable war crime.
Iranian mullahs are very clear about their aims – converting the world to Islam and eliminating those who do not want to convert. Taking them infidels out, by all means available, starting with the big and the little Satan. Their leaders deny basic humanity to their enemies and repeatedly proved their lack of red lines using their heaviest available weapons on civilian populations. North Korea appears less dangerous in particular due to lack of expansionist foreign policy objectives. They are not looking to control the worlds religions and morals.
But none of these people are psychiatric cases like schizophrenia and mani-depression. The problem is that Americans tend to substitute psychiatric language for moral language–insanity for evil.