Yeah that has occurred to me. Some of them were re-arrested for fresh offenses within days or weeks of their pardon. A couple were even shot dead in confrontations with police (the one I’m most familiar with was shot dead by a cop in Hobart, Indiana when he got mouthy at a traffic stop, doubtless because he thought he was immune now). I have no doubt that some of these could be pardoned more than once. The lawlessness is the point. These are informal mercenaries for the regime to harass and intimidate the populace.
They’re basically setting up their own informal Dirlewanger Brigade. Though at what they consider to be sufficient arm’s length to provide a veneer of plausible deniability if they end up facing a future Nuremberg style tribunal. Hopefully the jurists presiding over such a court will see through the pretences just as the “superior orders” defence was exposed as a sham in 1945.
Authoritarian regimes have always found certain categories of criminal to be useful. Lowlives who are prepared to do dirty work for the thugs at the top, but who are on the leash of kompromat, so to speak.
Though of course the use of kompromat isn’t new - Putin’s activities merely provided us with a convenient shorthand for the requisite skulduggery. Here’s an unusual piece of candour on the matter from a British (needless to say, Tory) politician:
Finding dirt on someone, then using that to make someone do your bidding, is as old as politics itself, but I suspect we’re about to see this weaponised to a truly ugly extent. The Orange Scrotum is a criminal himself, and has already demonstrated what is practically a fetish for rabble rousing.
Indeed, the ethical stench surrounding the Trumpanzees leads me to conclude, that the next few years could see the USA descend below even the turpitude of Ante Pavelic’s “Independent Croatia”. It might not be comparisons with Auschwitz that are invited, but Jasenovac in years to come.
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“Trumpanzees” fkn brilliant, I am borrowing that one… 
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does this “divine authority” even exist? can you prove it?
because there are people who claim to be following morals based on “divine authority”
Are you really sure that’s “divine authority” or a social and institutionalized construct established by HUMANS in the past and never stopped growing ever since?
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Why do you start off with the assumption that a moral standard that comes from our own understanding of right and wrong to be less valid just because we figured it out on our own?
Please consider that if God (or gods/goddesses) exist, then God gave us intellect . . . so using our intellect to figure out standards of morality is Godly anyway.
There are many instances of moral revelation that seem to have nothing to do with God. As an example, consider Nunuku Whenua. Around 1500 A.D., a group of Maori left New Zealand and set up a society (called the Moriori) on Chatham Island and Pitt Island, which are about 500 nautical miles from New Zealand.
The Maori were avid cannibals and head hunters, and Nunuku Whenua (in addition to being an explorer, naked eye astronomer, bas-relief artist, fleet admiral, and chief of the Hamata tribe) was also a cannibal.
So . . . this vicious cannibal and head hunter placed himself between two warring tribes, held his arms up, and said “Enough! From this moment forward, there will be no war, no murder, and no cannibalism. This is the law. Anyone who violates this law will have their bowels rot.”
He worked very hard, and turned his society from warlike cannibals and head hunters into pacifists who revered all of human life simply for its own sake. They took all of their weapons of war (as distinguished from weapons used to kill animals for food) and placed them on display in their meeting places, and children went through an adulthood ceremony where they were brought in, shown the weapons, and educated on why they were bad and why the Moriori renounced them.
All of this happened long before Europeans reached this part of the world, so where was God and/or Christ when Whenua raised everyone’s consciousness?
If morality only comes from God, then why do we see evidence of morality in the material left behind by ancient peoples from the Stone Age? In Shanidar Cave in Iraq, a Neanderthal was found with old injuries that were incapacitaing, yet his tribe took care of him even though he couldn’t hunt and/or provide. This was long before anything that ever occurred in the Bible.
And so on.
When we consider these points, how can we argue that morality can only come from God, or that morality that we impose on ourselves is–somehow–”less moral” then the morality that comes from a book which advocates slavery and the death penalty for sexual transgressions?
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It was very important to my fundamentalist handlers that we believed that “true” morality only originated with god and that we were its protectors, the “salt of the earth” without which everything would degenerate into, ironically, exactly what we have now that the fundamentalists have started getting their way!
This exclusivity on the source and nourishment of morality was one of our basic conceits, if not in fact our most important one.
Generally, theists who come here talking about how God is essential to morality, and how morality is meaningless without him as its backing authority, really are just suffering under a taboo that forbids thinking morality could possibly have any other basis, much less a far better one.
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I agree. Twenty characters.
I’m so tired of Christians using this argument.
Churches and their religion have really closed their eyes to everything and everyone around them. While brainwashing them into believing that their eyes are open and everyone who doesn’t conform is as blind as a bat.
Religion does one thing and it does it well. Control.
Control….of folks’ wallets.
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Yes. A lot of churches reflect the nice renovations that the free money brings.
When I was a teenager, the church I was forced to attend acted like the money would buy you into heaven if you gave it all to them.
I noticed a lot of old people were writing big checks into the offering plate when it was passed in my family’s direction.
The thought of churches and Christianity itself is irritating, let alone seeing it. They see it as worshipping a god. I just see it as lies and pastors ripping off people.
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I see a lot of the churches as a Ponzi pyramid scheme that is similar to the multi-level marketing scams that were very popular in the 90s and early 2000s . . . with Amway being a specific example (although there were many more).
I find it interesting that churches and MLM companies often seem to use similar techniques to strip people of their money.
Please see below:
Coming from that background I tend to think likewise but the truth is that most churches are neither Reich-wing nor mega-sized, but rather, smallish liberal congregations surviving off of basically old endowments (or at least a long paid-off building). Yes they were originally financed from member contributions but usually with heavy lifting from the wealthier ones, with that sort of philanthropy leveraged through denominational structures (especially if the denomination actually owns the building).
One such congregation in my town runs the local food kitchen and it’s exemplary in its operation (and run as a separate non-profit from the church itself). One can find actual no-strings public benefits mediated by these groups without looking too hard. Catholic Charities (which is about 95% financially independent from the Church) is another good example; in our area they do more for poor people than even the liberal-leaning city & county governments.
The parallel with Amway though is meaningful to me just the same as I did some work for them under contract in the 1990s and let us just say my nether regions still hurt from the experience. I don’t have hard numbers but it felt to me like a lot of the participants in their MLM org were harvested from evangelical congregations, and their annual conventions in Grand Rapids, where I lived at the time (about 20 miles from their headquarters in Ada, MI) were structured much like evangelical meetings with the same kind of emotional pot-stirring and a strong whiff of prosperity gospel-like ideology.
The funny part, were I able to laugh it off, is that the rules they had me automating for how individual salesfolk advanced through the system were so obtuse that I couldn’t get clarity from middle management on how some of those rules worked. I actually had to force them to make clear decisions so that the software could follow unambiguous rules. Probably did them some favors in that regard. I suspect the rules were vague on purpose so that they could lean one way or the other in certain situations. Not unlike how fundagelical thinking went: god will bless you unless you’re cutting corners on Bible study, prayer, or some other highly subjective measure of piety; therefore, system failures are all your own fault somehow.
Similarly you will make lots of $$ as an Amway rep if you don’t question the system too much and impress the Right People along the way.
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A lot of religious people, upon hearing the idea that there is no God, panic and say “what will we do, morally speaking, if that is true?” Well, I ask them a simple question: Have you been a morally sound and stable person all your life, been a responsible person, taken care of your responsibilities in your life and lived as a stable citizen within your community? Then just keep being that kind of person…IN A GODLESS UNIVERSE! That’s all there is to it! It’s time for humanity to grow up!
There are so many earwigs boring into the brains of these folks.
The idea that you are already a good person and should accept credit for that is anathema because that would be prideful and not giving “all glory to god”. Also, it would be suggesting that it’s not true that “every good and perfect gift is from above”.
The idea that you don’t need god to be moral … pretty much the same story.
The idea that whatever moral fortitude you’ve ever shown has not come from outside you … blasphemous!
So the panic you describe is real.
I agree it’s high time humanity grew up, and in these dark times it’s hard to believe they’re not all devolving, to be honest. But one thing I’m sure of … it won’t happen until it’s ready to. I think more and more people are ready to be empathetic, loving, and kind for their own sake … but not enough to relegate religion to the nutter fringe where it belongs. That’s going to be more of a long haul thing. Not in my lifetime, or yours, or most likely our great-great grandchildren’s. But we have to keep working toward it, even when it’s like watching paint dry.
Yes, but I believe we have to keep up the fight, not allow religion and politics to mix, keep the wall between church and state strong and keep our message out there. We cannot afford to be weak or we lose.
The writers of the Bible believed in a Supreme Being which punished immorality. They set down a set of moral laws which they believed would always and everywhere be met with punishment from God. But these were fallible men who established various laws which were merely generally accepted by the majority of people at the time as being immoral. The only Being capable of judging an act as gravely immoral and worthy of severe punishment is God and God is capable of forgiveness. Of course other men can judge morality according to earthly measures. And they can exact earthly punishments. The threat of punishment is the guiding needle of the moral compass. The best a man can do is follow general guidelines. The best a man can do is admit that he is tempted by immorality and recognize temptations when they occur. Resisting temptation is the clearest indication that the intended act is an immoral one worthy of judgment in the eyes of the Supreme Being. Man should strive to eliminate temptation.
I cannot demonstrate to you that my God exists. But He can demonstrate it to me. So Why would you think someone like OP is capable of demonstrating the existence of a Supreme Being. The demonstration of a Supreme Being requires Supreme Power and a Supreme Act.
Likely from the idea that humans are inherently drawn to immorality and are subject to temptation. It takes a Supreme Being to be Supremely moral. Thus the standard for the highest and most powerful morality belongs to a Supreme Being. It is not the case however that a mere human would be expected to comprehend the nature of supreme moral standards, much less be able to live a life as a mortal on earth practicing such a standard.
I am tempted by ice cream, that doesn’t make it immoral, but I am not tempted to rape or murder anyone, and yet I would consider those immoral, so this seems a dubious correlation to me.
Though I accept all moral judgments are ultimately subjective, the idea of morality can have no meaning for me without harm as some form of metric, whether something is tempting to me is irrelevant to whether I consider it moral or not.
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I personally think it is just an attempt to enforce subjective beliefs onto others. I have only ever seen evidence of human vengeance for breaking religious moral codes, never any evidence of any deity’s vengeance.
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