Contents
Background
Discussion Review
Discussion Analysis
Conclusion
Background
This blog is oriented toward such matters as God, religion, spirituality, belief, and skepticism. Attempts to discuss such matters often collide with the fact that people become attached to their beliefs, and cannot or will not consider anything else.
Notoriously, people often believe they are being openminded. They think they are open to countervailing evidence. No doubt some of them are.
A number of posts in this blog have criticized the blindness and deceitfulness of religious thinking, by believers and nonbelievers alike. Those posts have illustrated that such behavior is available for everyone – that stereotyped ignorant evangelicals are not the only ones who behave like this, contrary to what one might infer from overexposure to mainstream media.
The present post reframes the problem of belief-based self-deception by looking at a discussion of a political (i.e., not religious) event. As I well know, not everyone is interested in dissecting old conversations. I am certainly not forcing anyone to read what I’ve written on the subject. This material is here for those who share my belief that, while it is not the most exciting stuff to read, it can be useful for purposes of learning what goes wrong in conversations.
There are also those who can’t bring themselves to move along, and yet who are not interested in studying problems in interpersonal dialogue. I don’t know that every person who would ridicule this sort of inquiry is necessarily a cynical manipulator who does not enjoy having light shined upon his/her abusive behavior. But it may not be unfair at least to ask what would motivate someone to find fault with an attempt to learn from misunderstandings and disagreements.
In the discussion that this post analyzes, I was one of the two participants. That was advantageous, for present purposes, because my participation motivated me to work through it, and also because that proximity to events enables me to say what I was feeling and intending. I would not have comparable access to the inner content of a discussion between two other people.
When I discuss a conversation in which I was a party, of course, what I report may be distorted by flaws in what I see and how I see it. That is indeed a drawback, but not necessarily a major one. If I were to relate a conversation between me and a person who was tripping on LSD, the reader would probably decide, pretty quickly, that biases due to my personal involvement were far outweighed by the much more dubious if not insane statements made by the other party.
That LSD example may seem far-fetched. The problem with true believers is that, unfortunately, while their views may be more superficially plausible, the underlying implications or priorities may be rather irrational. As an example, The Daily Beast (McWhorter, 2017) argues that today’s so-called antiracism functions as a sort of religion:
“Why is the Bible so self-contradictory?” Well, God works in mysterious ways—what’s key is that you believe. …
It stops there: beyond this first [superficial level of questioning], one is to classify the issues as uniquely “complicated.” They are “deep,” one says, looking off into the air for a sec in a reflective mode ….
Antiracism requires much of the same standpoint. For example, one is not to ask “Why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at much more danger of being killed by one another?”
Vox (Illing, 2021) elaborates:
For McWhorter, antiracism functions more like a religion than an ideology or a political project. And its adherents are obsessed with “performing” virtue, not for the sake of societal change but because of the sense of purpose it offers them.
For generations, conflict-avoidant people have recognized that religion and politics are best not discussed in most settings. On the occasions when I have disregarded that advice, such as the one discussed here, I have done so in the belief that people can learn that sometimes they are wrong, and that the person who disagrees with them is not necessarily evil.
Discussion Review
This section reviews a discussion I had on Facebook. The other party to this discussion – let’s call her Ann – had just become my Facebook friend, during a prior discussion of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021. That discussion was triggered, in June 2022, by congressional hearings into the January 6 attack. Those hearings were conducted by a U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee, referred to below as simply the Committee.
I asked participants in that prior discussion for links to informed sources that would tell me how many of the rioters (or attackers, or whatever term is most appropriate) illegally entered the Capitol on January 6, and where they went after entering. Nobody in that discussion seemed to have specific information on that. So I wrote a blog post presenting what I learned on that subject. Ann responded to that post, as follows, and I replied (I assume “45” is shorthand for President Trump, the 45th president):
Ann would return repeatedly to the notion that I should sit and watch hours of video presenting the case against Donald Trump. I had been reading about his administration for years. I didn’t need the events of January 6 to form my impressions of his qualifications as a leader. Briefly, I felt that he was a remarkably skilled politician; that if he was not more corrupt than most, certainly he was more brazen in his corruption; that his effects upon domestic politics were mixed, with some beneficial and some harmful consequences; and that he was pretty much a disaster in international politics, though again some of his antics had unanticipated beneficial effects.
That said, I was kidding when I wrote that part (above) about irritating Trumpists. I was also aware that the “mission accomplished” part could be construed as a jab at Republicans. Thanks to people like Ann, I am now closer to voting Republican than ever before, but generally that’s still a heavy lift for me. The parties continue to evolve, however, and so do I. Anything is possible.
I don’t know whether Ann was unintentionally conveying a sense of her own approach to evidence-gathering, as she watched her hours of video pertaining to January 6. I wasn’t at all inclined to just start watching random video about January 6 – and if I did, I could watch a ton of it and still not necessarily wind up where Ann thought I should be.
I felt that, if the Democrats had a legal case against Trump, they were obviously super-motivated to make it; they didn’t need me to obsess on that. I was content to wait and see how it turned out. I also wasn’t terribly interested in wasting a lot of time arguing about any of that. I didn’t see how such argument would help anyone. But I did make an exception for the relatively limited question of people entering the Capitol.
For me and, I think, for many Americans, interest in the events of January 6 was tempered by fatigue. Vox (Beauchamp, June 8, 2022) expected that the upcoming hearings would struggle to change many minds. My own attitudes were worn out by years of hype by media and by the Democratic Party – about the pussyhats protest, about the Mueller report, about two impeachments that did not seem to accomplish anything. I who was once an ardent reader of the New York Times had also become much more aware of partisan distortions and blatant falsehoods, there and elsewhere. As discussed in another post, I felt the Democrats and the mainstream media had done pretty much everything possible to undermine their own credibility. Despite (or perhaps because of) the many Trump-related scandals that they spent years obsessing on, by this point they seemed incapable of developing and executing an effective plan regarding Trump.
For me, regarding these January 6 hearings, it seemed best to wait for the hype to diminish, and then see what had changed. This attitude was obviously very different from the juvenile impatience of the Twitter crowd, for whom everything had to be decided instantly, and with a higher likelihood of potentially harmful error. I was content to wait for a final statement, appearing either during a prosecution of Trump or, more likely, in the Committee’s final report in September 2022.
Despite what my post said, I don’t think Ann understood that my questions at this point were simple and limited: who entered the Capitol, where did they go, and what did they do once inside? If she had understood that, surely she would not have kept urging me to watch video about people who didn’t enter the Capitol.
Now that we have laid that groundwork, we move closer to problems of mutual understanding in discussions of politics and, perhaps, of religion. Here we have Ann’s next reply, and my next response:
Ann began with the claim that she tried not to form opinions “unless I have facts or have done a study of the situatuon.” She felt that I lacked this ability, and that I should try “to use a bit more intellectual curiosity” in my writing.
That was odd. Ann had just read my 9,500-word writeup. I haven’t done an actual count, but a quick search in source code suggests that my post contains more than 90 links to other sources. Against this, Ann did not seem to have done any study at all. She only kept referring to things she had seen on TV or other videos. There was no sign that she exercised “intellectual curiosity” regarding anything in the Committee’s activities or in the videos she recommended. She seemed to construe them as original sources of information, which they were not. They were partisan compilations intended to support a preconceived conclusion.
So, at this point, I thought I detected glimmers of a couple of issues that seemed to have more to do with personal psychology than with the January 6 riot. First, Ann seemed to be trying to position herself as superior – but, perversely, she was doing it on the basis of factors that argued against her. She, not I, seemed to be the one lacking in intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and comparison of sources.
Ann was a lawyer. I had mentioned that I got my law degree from Columbia in 1982. Possibly she went to a lower-ranked law school and, as such, felt a need to assert that she did not consider herself intellectually inferior.
Yet that would raise another question: what compelled her to make this an adversarial fight in the first place? I felt that I, myself, had taken a friendly, almost chatty tone in my initial reply. I certainly didn’t think I was inviting these small insults in return. Possibly she lacked the basic social ability to detect my attempted friendliness. For that, there was only so much I could do. Ann was a big girl. For purposes of setting the tone of our discussion, she had as much opportunity and responsibility as I.
This was not the first time I had encountered gratuitous sniping from someone who attended a less prestigious law school. Experience suggested that people from such schools could spend years getting over the fact that an Ivy League admissions committee had rendered a negative judgment of their capacity for legal practice. I appreciated the committee’s positive judgment in my case, but it had been 40 years since I had learned that prestige does not guarantee competence. There were things that I could do well in the legal world. But I hadn’t practiced law since 1985. Surely I was not the first ex-attorney that Ann had encountered.
Whatever the precise issue there, it did appear that something was going on, in Ann’s head, that compelled her to convert what could have been a positive interaction into a negative one.
I asked Ann whether it was OK to append her remarks, anonymized, to the January 6 blog post. She said she would rather that I not do so. That, too, seemed odd. If she felt she was making sense, why would she not want others to see her rebuttal of my supposedly flawed article? As I said, I would be happy to post her remarks anonymously.
In any case, I was not offering her editorial control over my blog. I asked because asking was the polite, friendly thing to do. She did not reciprocate that politeness or friendliness. That was her choice. I did not owe her a code of silence under all circumstances. Ultimately, if someone wants to make themselves an object of curiosity by snubbing a person who tries to be friendly to them, the most appropriate response may be to highlight, critique, and discourage that gratuitous meanness. It should not generally be allowed to persist without any pushback. Given anonymity, the pushback here is very mild. But it is still better than nothing.
One other point, in passing. Note that I told Ann (above) that “there have always been the Never Trumpers.” I did not say that the Committee’s Republican members or witnesses were Never Trumpers. I had no idea as to the state of affairs on that question, nor much interest in it.
Continuing with Ann’s next reply:
As usually happens in discussions of this sort, our comments were getting longer. That was especially true on my side. I seem to have slipped into the role of the person who tries to repair misunderstandings, in response to a person who seems to be trying to expand them. The behavior of the latter can be manipulative; it can be one in a series of instances where, perhaps without specific intent, the person repeatedly teases others with a faked or superficial interest in further discussion – only to pull back when the other party takes the bait and makes clear his/her eagerness to achieve a genuine rapport.
Obviously, I was not interested in avoiding Ann’s views on my central question, having to do with the number of people who entered the Capitol building. My research did not find a clear answer on that. Possibly she did find a claim that there were 2,000 to 2,500 on the Capitol grounds, but that would not tell me how many entered the building, nor would it explain why the Department of Justice seemed to anticipate more like 1,000 (not 2,500) arrests altogether.
As I told Ann, going into that and her other remarks would have made my reply even longer than it was already. I wasn’t aware of any particular rush. There didn’t seem to be an urgent need to respond immediately to everything she said.
On that, Ann apparently disagreed. She did reply to that last post immediately. She may have likewise replied immediately to the others. I wouldn’t know: I only visited Facebook twice a week, and tried to stay no longer than necessary. I noticed her immediate response this time because I was still on on Facebook when she replied.
Over the years, I have gradually become more aware that, sometimes, I do try to save dialogues even when it becomes obvious that the other party is trying to derail them. In this case, Ann finally decided to “disengage” because “this convo is going nowhere and has turned into a snoozefest.”
Plainly, Ann was not behaving as someone who wants to build rapport. It goes without saying that it can take some time and effort to understand where another person is coming from, on any potentially controversial subject. It would not be surprising if one party to such a discussion quit because of frustration. But it was strange to quit due to boredom.
Ann’s response didn’t seem consistent with her indication, in our prior interaction, that she was willing to talk with me about several other topics. You don’t “disengage with” someone whom you want to talk to.
The explanation seems to be that Ann didn’t like the way I reacted, when she suggested that we needed to “back up” to analyze our conversational dynamics.
Ann would not be the first woman to recognize that some people – men, especially, I’m told – tend not to be very good at (or very interested in) parsing specific statements in conversations. Perhaps Ann had found that she could throw the other party off-balance by suggesting that they needed to “back up” to discuss the tone of a debate.
I may have surprised Ann with my willingness to do exactly that. When I backed up and took stock of the situation, my response was that I felt attacked. I pointed out that it was unwise to attack me gratuitously, when she could have adopted a more collegial tone. I was surprised that someone of her seniority would make that rookie mistake.
Details of Ann’s situation, not disclosed here, suggest that she may have been able to do some unchallenged coasting in her career. She may just not have very much experience with people who don’t have to back off and say, “Yes, Ma’am.” As in this instance, she may avoid people who call out her abusive behavior.
The interpretation, in that case, is that maybe “snoozefest” was not exactly what Ann was experiencing. The more accurate statement may be that this wasn’t turning out to be that much fun for her.
What was she looking for instead? It certainly appears that what she wanted was an opportunity to rant. Nothing in her remarks expressed uncertainty or invited discussion. She presented herself as someone who knew it all.
That is the behavior of a lawyer. It is not the behavior of a scholar or truthseeker. Anyone who makes a serious attempt to know it all will quickly discover how much there is to know. Lawyers don’t usually get that far: they are only interested in the parts of the truth that they can use to make someone look bad.
Ann’s style became clear enough in her remarks about that American Conservative article (Van Buren, June 20, 2022). She seems to have believed that she was expressing the insights of a superior intellect when she dismissed it as “misguided.” Instead, she was showing that she did not even understand it. And that was an achievement, because it was not hard to understand. As the article made clear at the outset, you cannot have a coup attempt if what you are attempting could not result in a coup. It is a matter of simple logic. You may have an attempted assassination of Mike Pence. You may have other interesting or dramatic events. But if the result could not be a coup, then you do not have a coup attempt.
In the same lawyerly spirit, Ann misrepresented what I said about the Never Trumpers. She apparently didn’t bother to review the actual words, even after I pointed out her error. That, too, was the behavior of a lawyer: forget the truth; just keep repeating anything that might make the other side look bad.
The notorious advice to lawyers is, “When the facts are against you, argue the law. When the law is against you, argue the facts. When the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table and yell like hell.” Ann persistently tried to muddy the water. She avoided the specific questions addressed in my blog post – the questions of how many people went into the Capitol building, where they went, and what they did. From the beginning, she wanted to talk about the composition of the Committee and other tangential matters. I’m sure she found those matters interesting – they gave her opportunities to attack the other side – but, as I said, I didn’t plan to spend a year exploring the full story of January 6.
The closest Ann came to actually addressing the central issues in my blog post was when she claimed that the “DOJ estimates that between 2000 and 2500 people invaded the Capitol on Jan 6th.” In response to her suggestion, I searched for exactly that claim. That search led directly to one article (Daily Beast, January 6, 2022) that used such numbers. But that article’s remarks fit within what I had already written. We knew that many people had passed the original police line, at some point after the police abandoned that line. But how many of them actually entered the building? That was my question. Ann pretended that everyone knew the answer to that. But she did not provide the answer, nor did she direct me to anyone who might have it.
Generally speaking, lawyers are not intellectuals. Law is not about exploring and developing knowledge. Law is about winning. Thus, few lawyers are scholars. They are not truthseekers, except in the deceptive, partisan sense of seeking those parts of the truth that will help them to win. Some of them congratulate themselves on the supposedly moral core, within them, that hesitates to deceive people. But they will go ahead and try to deceive people anyway. That is the nature of the job.
Ann complained that I did not ask for her views, choosing instead to infer them from her statements. But as any social scientist knows, what people report about themselves (e.g., their views or priorities) often fails to match up with their actual behavior. I have met more than one Trump-deranged Democrat who believes herself to be the very model of an honest, neutral seeker of truth. I mean, if someone is already frothing at the mouth about Trump, it is not rocket science to infer her views on related matters.
In any case, if Ann felt that my inferences were incorrect, she was free to explain why. She chose not to do that. The truth of the matter is probably that she did not want to have to discuss inconsistencies between her self-image and her behavior. Her choice left me with the impression that she was acting like a lawyer. She didn’t want to learn, to seek the truth. She clearly did not want to participate in a dialogue. What she wanted was to attack, and to be told that she was right. I originally found her swimming in a school of likeminded fish, there on Facebook, and a quick glance confirms that she has returned to that.
Discussion Analysis
The preceding section dissects a Facebook discussion of politics, in an attempt to learn why that discussion failed. The premise is that this effort may yield insights into problems in discussions of religion. I am particularly interested in the sorts of discussions that I have had with evangelical Christians, or in my former experience as an evangelical Christian; but evangelicals aren’t the only ones who have such discussions.
On the question of why my discussion with Ann failed, ego seems to be part of the answer. People pat themselves on the back for being clearsighted atheists, or for knowing God’s truth. They aren’t interested in seeking the real truth, in all its awkward and indeterminate permutations. They are the opposite of that: they want a simple and settled form of “truth” that affirms their personal (e.g., intellectual, moral) superiority. They are not remotely interested in uncomfortable questions about, for instance, what the Bible really is, or what we can and should make of it.
Power seems to be another part of the problem. To protect Ann’s identity, I cannot elaborate on the impression that she is in a position where, aside from a relatively limited number of higher-ups within her organization, her interactions with others generally allow her to have the last word. Her behavior in this instance suggests that, when she does encounter someone who won’t be bullied, she claims to be bored, and quickly disengages.
Believers are like that too. Down through the centuries, they have been happy to talk about good things, like love and honor … and to enforce them with the sword. The preacher with his sermon models the attitude you will carry with you through the coming week. Like Ann in the political sphere, the preacher affirms the proud method of telling people what needs to happen, rather than the humble method of asking what we need to learn, or how we can help. In this instance, I asked a question – how many people entered the Capitol? – and I got an attack. In many other instances, so-called Christians have grown hostile when someone asks the questions that thoughtful people have been asking for centuries. The believers simply don’t want to hear from truthseekers; they will use what power they have to discourage and silence them.
Those remarks about power suggest a problem of aggression. People who initiate or welcome political or religious discussions often do so in the belief that they have a right and/or an obligation to impose their views on others. Essentially, what you believe is wrong and what I believe is right, and God has sent me to help you see that. Ann’s remarks reek of a pompous certainty that she was entitled to push people around. Belief means certainty; and once you have certainty, there is no longer a reason to hesitate. So you use everything you’ve got – not only the kings, the laws, and the bankers, but also the malicious gossip and, where possible, the criminal deed – to compel others to think, do, and say what you demand. Ann is just one among a vast number of people who, given a little power, seem willing, indeed eager, to abuse it – not just for the cause but, again, for the ego.
Underlying all this, there appears to be a failure of epistemology. Like a person who hands you a Bible while telling you that Jesus is the answer, Ann directed me to spend hours staring at the tube. She seemed to think that only a moron would fail to find Jesus, if the person would simply start reading at page 1, in Genesis. That is, she studiously avoided the obvious fact that a person could watch a great deal of video and might still want to know what was not being shown, what had been edited out by the palpably one-sided producers of that video. Ann showed no awareness of what the other side might say. It seemed that her many years of education had completely failed to train her to think critically. Like a believer who wants you to read the Bible without asking where it came from or what others say about it, she expected me to simplemindedly accept her chosen sources at face value.
Apparently I was supposed to read Ann’s rants and just say, Oh, yes, everything you say is so right. That’s not discussion. DIscussion doesn’t start until the ranting ends – until the person drops the fantasy that s/he has all the answers, and is entitled to inflict them on others. It is one thing to consider yourself intelligent. It is another thing to suppose that your intelligence automatically confers knowledge. Not only do you not have essential information about most of this world’s innumerable issues, in politics or religion or elsewhere; you won’t even begin to acquire that knowledge if you think you already know everything you need to know.
It is not hard to imagine how a cooperative, mutually encouraging discussion might have gone. Ann would say, “Interesting post. Regarding X, have you looked at the ProPublica videos?” I would reply, as I did, “Which video were you thinking of?” Ann would say, “Try the one at this link …” I would respond, “That’s interesting, but it doesn’t seem to say how many people entered the Capitol, or what they did once they were inside.” Having thus worked our way through the process of getting Ann to focus on the actual question, we would finally be ready to determine whether she had information that I had overlooked.
Why doesn’t that happen in religious discussions? Why, for instance, do traditional Christians invent falsehoods to try to explain away obvious contradictions in the Bible? The reason seems to be that people have a precommitment to a certain point, and they are quite willing to try to deceive others about it, so as to avoid any self-questioning or real learning about it. It is this stupidity and dishonesty – more than any other single thing, I think – that so thoroughly deters people from trusting religions. There are all sorts of religions, of course, and a wide variety of styles within them. But in too many cases, the story seems the same. It is all about lying to everyone else and, ultimately, to oneself.
Yet why does that happen? Why do people who are certain of their own honesty make such efforts to be dishonest? Maybe the common thread is that, in politics and religion alike, the penalties for being really honest are too great. The single greatest penalty may be that, if you are honest, you will wind up with the bad people. In religious terms, that may mean that the God of your imagination would burn you in Hell forever, as a punishment for being truthful. In politics, it may mean that being honest would make you an outcast from your friends, and might even force you to try to talk to the people whom you have spent years ridiculing – the rednecks, the Marxist intellectuals, whatever. It is virtually unthinkable. People just don’t go there.
Conclusion
I spent a bunch of time looking into the locations and activities of people who entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I probably would not have done that if Ann had not signaled an interest in talking about related matters. I wasn’t investing all that effort in her personally. Her interest just seemed like a prompt, like maybe it was time for me to get up to speed on that subject.
I am sorry, now, that I invested that time. The subject did not interest me all that much. What I needed to know about it, I could surely have picked up by reviewing summary materials, a month or two later. Writing this follow-up piece has represented an additional time investment. For me, this was actually the more useful of the two blog posts.
Granted, I did not have to write either of these posts. I wrote this one as a semi-structured way of trying to understand what went wrong. Most people wouldn’t spend the time. But they often lose time to such interactions in other ways – in distraction, in lost sleep, in preoccupation with the other person’s unexpected unfairness or hostility, and so forth. Blogging about such matters takes more time and, in exchange, it usually gives me (and, hopefully, others) some insight into the situation. As illustrated in my several posts about abusive behavior in online tech forums, I find that thinking about and articulating such experiences can contribute to an improved understanding of such abuse, and of how to oppose, reduce, or avoid it.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful for the opportunity to learn something new. The problem is that my plate is already full of things I don’t understand. For practical purposes, I am sorry that I ever met Ann, I wish that I had not been fooled into thinking that she had a sincere interest in the subject, and I come away feeling that I must do a better job of making sure that people really want to talk, and know how to talk, before I let them distract me from other priorities.
In the story of the blind men and the elephant, everyone thinks he knows what an elephant is shaped like, because he has grabbed onto a leg (“an elephant is like a tree”) or a tail (“an elephant is like a snake”) or whatnot. My legal background may mislead me into thinking that lawyers are the problem, when in fact lawyers are only a symptom of something else.
I don’t mean to suggest that America’s (or the world’s) problems would be solved if we could just kill all the lawyers – or, if you prefer, all the preachers, atheists, or whatever. But I do believe that legal thinking has poisoned America – that not only the churches, but the business relationships, interactions with our children’s teachers, even our marriages – have been badly polluted by the grossly corrupt legal mentality, in which there is ultimately some asinine excuse for virtually any form of abuse short of criminal prosecution.
Law is the enemy of trust. In law, everything is constantly up for grabs. Anytime anyone wants to accuse you of anything that is not completely ridiculous on its face, the legal system is ready to help them chew up your time and money. It doesn’t matter at all that the person may be someone whom you’ve known and trusted for 10, 20, 30 years. Indeed, the more deeply you’ve trusted them, the more the law will use their trust as a weapon at your throat.
Lawyers live in a world of constant distrust. They do not necessarily understand that trust isn’t like accuracy. It’s OK to be accurate most of the time. Nobody’s perfect. Being 80% accurate is great, if nobody else is above 50%. But being 80% trustworthy means being completely slimy, regardless of where everyone else is. If your marital fidelity is only as good as your score at target shooting, you’d better start looking for a divorce lawyer.
Perhaps I am belatedly learning what seemed to be standard wisdom among most people of my parents’ generation: it is best never to talk about religion and politics. You can’t trust anyone to be honest or fair in such matters. I have resisted that because it seems like a slippery slope. As just indicated, I have encountered comparable meanness and stupidity in tech. I would probably encounter it elsewhere too.
Maybe I am the problem. I have a habit of trying to get to the truth of things. It tends to mean that, wherever I poke my nose, I am soon saying things that people don’t want me to say. Maybe I am an enemy of trust, in the sense that I oppose those comfortable fictions that help people to form bonds with one another, in mutual rejection of – often, hostility toward – those who don’t share their views. Maybe trust works best when you share a perceived adversary, against whom you must make common cause. In marriage, maybe it’s “you and me, against the world”; maybe marital trustworthiness weakens when the world no longer seems like such a bad place.
I spent several days researching and writing that piece about January 6. I have now spent some hours assembling this piece about that one. I don’t come away with a simple solution. I guess I think I have been on the right track, in mostly avoiding discussions on Facebook. Social media seem to be designed for flaky and insincere people. I have mostly limited myself to books and articles, where writers use their real names and often make a serious attempt to know something about their topic. That’s no substitute for real relationships. But neither was this.
God, Spirituality, the Supernatural, and All That 