The Trump faithful...

 Brace yourself. I'm going to trash religion again.

We're currently in a very irrational time, and some people are likely to believe anything. Probably too many words have been wasted trying to explain the lasting popularity of Donald Trump, but I can't help myself.

I have written before that one thing Trump voters like is that he, by example, says to them that their worst impulses are actually virtues. That's a consoling message, because everybody has a base impulse or two. But that's not all.

One great mystery that people have tried to explain is how Trump fans continue to believe him even after his promises don't come true.

The smarter people, in 2015 or so, heard Trump promise to replace Obamacare with "something terrific." The smarter people noticed that he didn't say what the plan was, and it was plain that nobody on his team was working on it. Jared was in charge of everything in those early days, but seemed not to be working on anything in particular, other than enriching himself.

That was just one example. In his second campaign, Trump again made promises that nobody who has followed politics at all would believe. He'd lower the price of eggs and all other groceries on Day One, while simultaneously ending the Russia/Ukraine War.

What makes a person believe in the promises of a man who has broken most of his promises in the past?

Of course, there are some things going on that are designed to mislead the credulous: Fox News and other media organizations that cater to people who don't trust any other media; and Trump's continuous stream of lies are told with such conviction that they sound great as long as you don't look beneath the surface.

I would say that the Trump voter has certain habits of mind that match those encouraged by religion. Trump voters maintain their faith in him, even when he doesn't come through. He gets excused the same way God does when he doesn't answer prayers. Ever since religion has existed, there have been people who have elected themselves to explain why an all-powerful, loving God can't make things better than they are. These people are the clergy and the theologians. They specialize in explaining why God doesn't come through, and they have historically come up with some wonderfully convoluted explanations.

In the case of prayer, when any of their explanations for the failure of prayer don't explain anything, God gets his final out: "It wasn't God's will."

Anyway, excusing God for what happens or doesn't happen is a practice many thousands of years old. People are encouraged by religious leaders to think that way. Perhaps that's one explanation of why such seemingly good people, the deeply religious people of the right, continue to excuse Trump's never-ending outrageous behavior.

The behavior is what must be suffered for belief in the miracles he promises.

Transgressive books, Part 4: Books that will rile up the Christian Right

 Iowa's Republican Senator, Joni Ernst, followed up some cruel remarks about health care for the poor with an invitation to accept Jesus Christ, Giver of Eternal Life.

I have long maintained that the Christian Republic that the current Republicans in power are trying to achieve would be as miserable a country as any Islamic Republic. Thank you, Senator Ernst, for the preview.

The purpose of this particular essay is not to convert the reader to atheism (I've attempted that before). But for the reader so inclined, I have a list of books that will enrage the religious right, and may well bother some on the religious left.

I have always thought that, once one concludes that there is no God, there's not a lot more to say. Our bodies and minds switch off forever, and there's no soul to travel upwards or downwards. That said, I find that I have read quite a number of books on atheism. Here's a sampling.

Breaking the Spell, by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett wonders why humans are religious if, as he believes, religion confers no biological advantage to a person. It's a highly readable book, containing plenty of science and philosophy.

Why I Am Not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. "I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue." See also Russell's book Religion and Science.

The Missionary Position, by Christopher Hitchens. The subtitle of this book is Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens has many problems with Mother Teresa, one being that her stance against birth control is at least partly responsible for the suffering of the people she claims to be helping. There's lots more.

The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens. This is a nice, big fat collection of essays on atheism. Daniel Dennett, whom we've met before, writes a thank you to the doctors, nurses, and medical personnel he thinks are more worthy of thanks than God when there's a good medical outcome. Another essay is simply a list of the names of gods who are no longer worshipped, or even remembered by most people.

Faith vs. Fact, by Jerry A. Coyne. An evolutionary biologist, Coyne points out that science and religion are incompatible. Many people put their faith in both, but I agree with him that that is only possible to those who do not examine their own beliefs seriously. Another great book by Coyne is Why Evolution Is True. I fully recommend both books as classics.

The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, by Alex Rosenberg. This one assumes that the reader is already an atheist, but is struggling with the big questions. He attempts to answer the big questions scientifically.

Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists: by Dan Barker. The title speaks for itself. It's a journey many of us atheists have gone through.

The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible, By Ruth Hurmence Green. This is a good companion to Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, but delves more deeply into the text of the Bible and how it describes the world.

Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, by Michel Onfray. Onfray takes on the big three monotheist religions. For Michel Onfray, the three big monotheistic religions amount to a collective misguided attempt to hide the fact of our own mortality from ourselves by creating a fictional paradise, and thereby trading away the pleasures of the one life we really have.

From Housewife to Heretic, by Sonia Johnson. This one isn't an atheistic tract, but the story of a Mormon woman who was excommunicated for campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. This is a good book to read when our present democracy is threatened by a severely patriarchal version of Christianity.

OK, I've probably bored the reader enough, but there's lots more where these books come from. (If you go to your local Barnes & Noble, you'll find shelf after shelf on Christianity, other religions, and even Christian fiction, subdivided down as far as Amish fiction. But there's only a shelf or two of books on philosophy, and maybe a dozen or so books on atheism. You've got to go out of your way to find them. After all, they're not the kind of "good news" most people are looking for.)