PREVIEW OF NEXT MONTH’S NEWS: PUERTO RICO HIT BY TSUNAMI, PLAGUE, METEOR STRIKE

In case a hurricane in 2018 and mass unemployment in 2019 wasn’t enough, Puerto Rico started off 2020 with an hefty earthquake. And then another one. And then another one. And then literally more than a thousand another ones. Granted, yes, all of the another ones are technically aftershocks, but they’ve all been so large (almost all of them measuring over 5.0 on the moment magnitude scale) and so close together that a lot of the island has simply been shaken apart at this point from sustained earthquakes.

Puerto Rico, it turns out, was due for this sort of thing in a strictly tectonic sense. It lies on the edge of the Caribbean tectonic plate, almost exactly where that plate grinds against the much larger North American tectonic plate, so it is naturally a place where earthquakes are more prone to happen. This particular set of quakes isn’t “the big one,” but it’s been a very long series of respectably large quakes on the moment magnitude scale.

(You might be wondering “what is this moment magnitude thingy you’re talking about, don’t you mean the Richter scale” and it turns out that the Richter scale is considered to be obsolete; it’s accurate enough for smaller earthquakes, but for larger earthquakes it tends to sort of glom everything together, so that Richter measurements of really big quakes, like the 1960 quake in Chile that was one of the biggest quakes of the 20th century, were far too similar to other very large but-not-nearly-as-powerful quakes. So moment magnitude measurement was invented and is now the standard. Granted, for anything under about 6.5 it is more or less interchangeable with the Richter scale anyway, but don’t you like to be scientifically accurate when you talk about stuff?)

Anyway, it’s just more bad news for a place that really didn’t deserve any more bad news, but if you’re curious about next week’s bad news of the geological sort, there’s a volcano in the Philippines close to Manila that’s threatening to have a massive eruption, and if it does erupt that should happen this week. So if it happens you can tell all your friends you knew about the volcano before the cool kids did. Don’t say I never gave you anything!

IRAN UPDATE: IT’S ALL STILL SHITTY

Iran shooting down a Ukrainian Airlines flight bound for Canada via Kyiv is a national tragedy here - dozens of Canadian citizens dead, several cases of husbands/wives losing their entire families in a single shot, a number of PhD students who were visiting family in Iran, people who had just taken their citizenship exams, people who had had their citizenship for years - every story is tragic, because of course it’s all tragic. There’s been some nonsense from the usual suspects about how “this was Iran’s real retaliation” but not much, thankfully, because most people can easily figure out that shooting down a plane that mostly had Iranians and Iranian expats on it and no Americans would be a really stupid goddamn way for Iran to get revenge on America.

In a wild swing, Iran admitting it fucked up and accidentally shot down the plane has created massive anti-government sentiment within a country that literally last week had more or less united after the USA assassinated one of its generals, mostly because - look, can you imagine what might have happened if the army had accidentally shot down a passenger plane in your country? Iranians aren’t any different from you, really.

A LENGTHY DIGRESSION ABOUT RELIGIOUS JUSTIFICATION BECAUSE THAT’S WHY YOU READ THIS EACH WEEK

Jim Bakker - the televangelist who you may remember as the one in the 1980s, yes, the one who bribed his secretary to try to cover up his raping of her and then was convicted for felony fraud because he misappropriated church funds for his own personal use - is still active as a televangelist and recently made minor headlines for stating that “only saved people can love [Donald] Trump” and that loving Trump was a test of one’s rightness with God. It’s easy to mock Bakker about this, because Jim Bakker is self-evidently an asshole, but given that the American Evangelical community is overwhelmingly pro-Trump it’s obviously not restricted to just the most venal assholes in that particular faith.

Other writers have written at length about how modern American white Evangelicalism came about in significant part as a reaction to the civil rights movement in the 1960s (Randall Balmer’s “The Real Origins of the Religious Right” is a good summary of a lot of the academic writing on the topic), but I’m not really interested in retreading that ground. What interests me - as a mostly atheistic/agnostic person who came to such after a lot of long interrogatory study about questions of faith - is that I think Protestantism’s doctrine of justification made Evangelical support for someone like Donald Trump more or less inevitable.

(Before I go any further: “Protestantism” does not mean “all Protestants” in this case. It means the general philosophical underpinnings of the faith. Individual Protestants are like most people of every faith: a lot of them are decent, a few of them are shitty. But I digress.)

Justification - defined generally as how a faith determines how one becomes right with the supreme being of choice - is going to define any religion’s approach to anything, and one of the reasons I rejected Protestantism as an option when I was considering various faiths is because the core of Protestantism is that righteousness is justified by faith alone: that’s the big point Martin Luther was making when he nailed up his ninety-five theses to the door.

Now, granted, he was making this point in order to distinguish his view of faith from Catholicism, where righteousness is determined not only by faith but also by good works, and the reason he was doing that was because the Catholic Church, by his time, had started holding the peasantry hostage by defining “good works” as “tithing to the church and usually more than you could hope to afford,” effectively starving poor people and hoarding their wealth by blackmailing them with the promise of Heaven. It also allowed rich nobles to live sinful, wasteful, awful lives and then purchase forgiveness on their deathbeds via large cash donations to the Church, which were qualified as “good works.” Protestantism’s doctrine of self-justification is a completely understandable reaction to that. (And, although the practice of tithing-for-Heaven ended centuries ago, the Catholic Church is still insanely wealthy and has a net worth in the tens and possibly hundreds of billions of dollars before you even consider the assets it considers “priceless” and refuses to value, like the Sistine Chapel or all of the art in the Vatican Museum.)

The problem, I feel, with this philosophical stance is that although I don’t think Martin Luther intended for his philosphy to become a religious convenience for ends justifying the means, it absolutely has done so. Self-justification, taken to its logical extreme, allows for one to sink oneself in sin and then repent at any time convenient to the sinner, and absolution follows automatically.

Catholicism, for all of its flaws (and hoo boy does it have flaws) does not do this. If you’re a Catholic and you sin - even if you’re sinning for reasons that might be considered reasonable or in the course of your duties to society - that’s tough, you still have to do penitence. The cliche of “three Hail Marys and an Our Father” exists because most sins that get confessed are venal and minor; for mortal sins, though, the priest can and will impose a penance (which will almost always include restitution or reparation for the victims of the sin, and usually submission to the local authorities if the sin was also a crime). And if you don’t do that penance, you haven’t actually been forgiven.

The problem with the Protestant method is that ultimately it places the determination of whether sin has been committed on the sinner, which obviously creates a conflict of interest: after all, most of the time when you commit a sin it’s to your own benefit. This problem is what led to the “prosperity gospel” theory, which is on its face about the most anti-Christian theory that could possibly exist. (Jesus only repeats a teaching once in the entirety of the Gospels: telling the apostles that it is nearly impossible to be rich and enter Heaven. It’s literally the only time he bothers to immediately re-emphasize a point.)

More importantly, however, it has led to Evangelical support of Donald Trump, along with approximately a dozen editorial columns every week that all say the same thing: how are Evangelicals able to support the adulterous multiple divorcee and likely rapist who constantly lies and has a history of cheating and stealing? But the answer here is rather obvious: divorcing the need for “good works” from justification means that Trump literally doesn’t have to do anything to atone for his previous sins. He is deemed saved and Godly because he says he’s sorry, and there is no viable means within the religion to challenge an obvious and notorious liar on this point, because there literally can’t be one or the basis of the religion falls apart. (Plus, given that Trump has delivered for conservative Evangelicals on a number of issues that are important to them, they have no motivation to challenge his statements on his belief anyway.)

Would Trump be so successful were his continued political support reliant on Catholics rather than Protestants? I genuinely don’t know. Certainly there’s recent and ample evidence of Catholicism having its own, ahem, problems with challenging the flaws of the faith (time to go watch Spotlight again). But the idea of Trump undergoing the sacrament of confession is one I find genuinely hilarious in a dark sort of way, and one I think would put lie to his entire religious epiphany in this particular hypothetical.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Dolemite Is My Name (2019, Craig Brewer, Netflix) - 3.5/5

The Best Of Times (1986, Roger Spottiswoode, Hoopla) - 2/5

I’ve been playing a lot of Slay The Spire recently since they added a new character in the beta (the mass release should be coming soon) and it’s still a great game, and it’s on basically every console and PC so if you have any of those things you will probably enjoy it because I have not met anybody who likes vidyagames who doesn’t enjoy Slay The Spire.

See you in seven.