Next thing they will be claiming that Trump is not mentally competent enough to be interviewed yet still allowed to be POTUS...
There is a bit in comedy, usually television or cinema, though it's not impossible to do in theatre, that has to do with the absurdist playing straight man and everyone else reacting accordingly. Think of that once famous saying about God that no religious person anywhere has ever uttered, that God knows what is in a person's heart. There's an ongoing theme, here. To wit, I know a man, a Christian, who will contrive circumstances to achieve deception without lying. To wit, there was one time he wanted me to call him back, and the reason was that he wanted to wake someone, and he didn't want to be lying when he walked in and woke her up because I had "called". So I said to him, "You do realize I was calling you back, right?" I mean, sure, there's a lot that goes into the moment, but the guy tried conspiring with me to deceive because he is a Christian and Christians are not supposed to lie. And all I can think is that for all the pretense he's putting on, God must be pretty stupid. The idea that God knows what is in his heart and can see the deception does not occur to him.
There is a political example I use, as well. A Dubya-era appointee to some UN-related advocacy board, Pam Stenzel, whose day job was manufacturing abstinence advocacy scare videos trying to convince teenagers to not have sex. In 2003, I believe it was, she got up in front of a church in Florida and
proudly declared that it doesn't matter whether her abstinence program works because the point is to cozy up to God.
That is to say, the abstinence advocate explained to a friendly room that it "doesn't matter" if her program works, "'Cause guess what? My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex!" Her explanation is simple: "At the end of the day, I'm not answering to you. I'm answering to God. So the problem, in her view, is not that her child might become pregnant, or contract a disease; she literally says unplanned pregnancy, life-threatening disease, or hysterectomy are "not the enemy" because the real enemy is to be seen, by God, failing to satisfy God: "My child believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence, and my child spending eternity separated from God, is the enemy!"
(see #1586886↗ for detail)
Behaviorally, this is exactly what it looks like, and we might note to major influences: Being derived from Christianity, such behavior can inspire sympathetic support according to identity politic. The other influence is a bit more subtle, and the thing is that there is only so much other people should have to guard against anyone. Consider, though, that this basic disconnection, Stenzel's plot to deceive God compared to what the faithful say about God, is inherently dysfunctional; it is contradictory unto itself. Now consider how often discourse ever actually considers such circumstances.
Here is another version: It was 2000, if not earlier, when a Christian preacher wrote and posted an article arguing a Biblical purview regarding marital traditionalism including the basic, defiant hypocrisy many churches showed in consecrating unions 'twixt divorced persons. The article was eventually pulled, in 2012, and presently can only be found in archive; there isn't much of the original domain left.
At any rate, it took the rest of us until Kim Davis to get around to the question.
The discourse doesn't consider such circumtances when the discourse is not capable of doing so. It's one thing to expect the marketplace to adjust, and recognize the swindle, but people just don't, in part because faithful and critical alike just don't seem to care. No, really, the people whose faith it is need it to be that way; the people who complain about religion can't be bothered to pay close enough attention to what they're complaining about. There is a reason people think they can get away with behaving like this. Indeed, some measure of that is among the reasons Trump is president in the first place.
Which sort of brings us back to the point.
The example is not the idea of
deceiving God, because that is not how the Christian in these cases looks at it. Yet the contradiction is visible:
God is omniscient and thus knows what is in a person's heart, therefore I will deceive Him in order to win His favor. Obviously, they don't say the second part; its context is invisible for ego defense; after they have conditioned themselves to the behavior, the contradiction becomes invisible to them.
This is like Donald Trump literally confessing to obstruction; or Don, Jr., releasing incriminating evidence. They are literally unable to see the problem.
The Trump administration keeps telling us how guilty they are, just like conservatives have done ... eh, probably nearly forever; neurotic dysfunction very frequently shows through, in history, as a fundamental component of the conservative political argument. (Yes, sure, "both sides", for those that need such concessions, but they're not the same behavioral phenomena.)
I don't know who all recalls the conservative argument, during the Obama years, about "sincerely held beliefs", but this was essentially the underlying point. The moral relativism feared by proverbial grumpy old men in my youth, when it showed, did not come from secular humanism as the complaint would have it, but traditionalism and religous faith the grumpy old men thought they were protecting.
Neither American Christians in general nor their atheistic critics could wrap their damn heads around what preacher said about when Christ was gay and what Jesus said about adultery. So we got around to it fifteen years later. Yet, still, it's not like the churches consecrating adulterous marriage are rushing to correct themselves, and it's not quite correct to characterize their outlook as, "What does that have to do with anything?" because that would imply the point even occurs to them.
I use the phrase ego defense because I am postfreudian; the buzzphrase a few years ago was
cognitive dissonance. The effect is the same, in these occasions:
•
Proposition: Next thing they will be claiming that Trump is not mentally competent enough to be interviewed yet still allowed to be POTUS.
― Response: Sure, why not give it a try?
It's not the fact of being brazen. Rather, if it is so brazen as to require blind apathy, then they will not perceive their own self-contradiction. Furthermore, a
general note about "sincerely held beliefs" goes here, and remains so general because the particulars get long and intricate owing to the humanity of human beings. The point being that it is
well within the realm of possibility that the official, operating defense of Donald Trump will eventually attempt to split a competency hair.
