Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/26/donald-trump-shows-off-his-skills-as-a-pious-bible-salesman-in-this-amusing-montage.html
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I’m flabbergasted that people take this lying piece of shot seriously!
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One day, when enough time has passed, a movie will be made about this fucking clown and his misadventures in politics and it’ll be absolutely hilarious.
I know you can’t see it just now, but it’ll happen. Somethin’ somethin tragedy plus time…
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It’s my second-favorite book.
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What’s interesting about his interviews about the Bible is that he makes it abundantly clear that not only has he never read any of it (or heard anyone read it), which is… interesting as a self-identified “Christian,” but more than that, he also can’t conceive of why anyone would read it, or what they would get out of it. He’s not capable of even imagining it. The whole thing is so completely alien to him. It’s not just that his supposed faith is an obvious sham, but he also has zero empathy.
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I’d say that’ll be like 200 years in the future, because as long as I live, I’m never going to be able to laugh at what’s happened since he came onto the political scene…
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I’m not really capable of imagining why someone would read most of the bible. It’s drivel.
Repetitive, useless drivel.
I’m not saying Popol Vuh or the Book of Mormon are much better (to pick two beside it on my religion shelf) but I can’t understand anyone going there for wisdom.
There’s a lot more coherent wisdom in Gilgamesh. Sure that wisdom isn’t particularly useful in the modern world but if you were an ancient Sumerian king so obsessed with the Wild Man as to forget his kingly duties this might be the epic tale for you.
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Still waiting on the Mein Kampf comedy hour. Maybe it needs another 100 years.
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He’s deploying the tricks he’s learned for bullshitting about something he knows nothing about: repeating platitudes about how great it is, avoiding coming down on one side or the other of an argument (Old Testament or New Testament) and, when all else fails, dodging the question.
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I may be an atheist, but I can understand, on some level, what Christians get out of the Bible (even if it isn’t remotely what I would get out it). Trump, the ostensible Christian, can’t. He not only can’t imagine being in that position, i.e. being a Christian, he can’t even bother to simulate it. The questions catch him off guard because even if he has thought about it (and there’s no evidence he has), the answers elude him. What would a Christian get out of their religious text? He has no idea, and can’t be bothered to figure it out.
Yep, and that’s not just bullshitting about the contents of the Bible, but more fundamentally about being a Christian. He’s not sure what he, as an ostensible Christian, is supposed to feel about the Bible or get out of it, so he bullshits that, too. I mean, okay, it couldn’t be any clearer that he’s just pretending to be a Christian to get the fundie vote - but he can’t even bullshit convincingly because, as a narcissistic sociopath, it’s so alien. He can’t be bothered to fake it with research, either - it’s really quite insulting to the evangelicals that love him.
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I’ve read the Epic of Gilgamesh and I enjoyed it, but…coherent wisdom? Are we sure?
I stick to the Iliad. “Man, teenagers do not like it if you kill their lovers” will never stop being true.
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You raise a point with the Iliad. For me the Greek stories are still worthwhile because of the stories around stories that we have. The actual overarching thrust od the whole epic doesn’t really have a whole lot for contemporary people but the areas where people before and after poked at the holes and teased thoughts out do.
The original Iliad doesn’t do much for me, a non-bronze age person who doesn’t live in a warlord society. It’s a window into an ancient world and is only relevant through later thinking and writing.
Sumerians were bonkers so I don’t really have any way into that.
The Protestant obsession with original texts and meanings of the Bible really misses the point about how we construct meaning out of myth for me. There are big chunks of the Bible in which the stories are genealogies or maps. I each case they are tedious ancient texts whose real purpose is to impose a political validity on a particular entity. A large part of these are that which existed around King Josiah when they “discovered” a whole lot of the Bible when they were renovating the temple as you do, and edited a whole lot more so that, say, Abraham’s travels reflect the political entities in the region at the time of writing rather than when Abraham was supposed to be around.
Failure to understand this is a result of desperate attempts to pretend the text of the Bible is relevant now in its entirety. It’s how US Bible thumpers can come out with genuine nonsense about Israel’s right to ethnically cleanse Palestine. At some point the Bible laid claim to certain lands. That point being when they had slaughtered the original inhabitants of that particular place. Therefore as the Bible is constant that means they can do the same now. But texts are not constant, whether religious or political, and the stance that they are is deliberate ignorance. I can find interest in parts of the bible but that hermeneutic activity is interesting if and when it is historically, critically informed. I mostly read New Teatament and even there parts which people seek to make universal weren’t most likely intended that way but were very localised political responses (like the lion and the lamb beinf puns in Aramaic referring to Herod).
The bible was once a book of living legend and myths. Once it became ossified (tanakh I would argue probably around the time of Jesus with other periods of stability before it, New Testament around the time of the Vulgate) it becomes less and less suitable for spiritual questing.
Religion isn’t science. Books were really important for science (particularly the illustrations rather than the text, the texts were transmitted in letters and read aloud in scientific societies but widespread reproduction of images was a breakthrough), they kill living religion and spirituality.
Ancient religions were practices, not texts.
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John Goodman did it better.
I seem to recall somebody putting together a pilot for a comedy show about Adolf Hitler, young Vienna hipster. I’m not sure if they’d include his rival living a few blocks away at the time, Joseph Stalin (the part where they lived in the same neighborhood of Vienna at the same time did actually happen).
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Slightly different premise, but…
Heil Honey I'm Home! - Wikipedia!
[Why won’t this onebox?]
Heil Honey I’m Home! is a British sitcom, written by Geoff Atkinson and produced in 1990, which was cancelled after one episode. It centres on Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, who live next door to a Jewish couple, Arny and Rosa Goldenstein. The show spoofs elements of mid-20th century American sitcoms and is driven by Hitler’s inability to get along with his neighbours. It caused controversy when broadcast and has been called “perhaps the world’s most tasteless situation comedy”.
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Perhaps because of I%27m in the URL?
I was hoping for “antifascism”, but okay.
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Tax the ones that are overtly politically active, whose leadership abundantly crosses the legal (requirements re nonprofit status) line. First approximation / evaluation could likely be done through auditing the organizations’ tax returns, unless org in question intentionally is obscuring information. I know, I know, it’s complicated.
My guess is that #NotAll churches, temples, synagogues, mosques etc. are operating financially in bad faith, no pun intended. Some of these institutions, at least in Austin, are at the forefront addressing hunger, the unhoused, and more.
ETA: punctuation
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