"Until We Put God First"

FOREWARD

As a pragmatist, college graduate, and run-of-the-mill rational adult, I shun Facebook like antivaxxers court preventable diseases. Facebook, excuse me, "Meta," is where societal jetsam feigns possessing informed, unbiased, and nuanced opinions on everything from gender dysmorphia to election tampering. Facebook is the internet's premiere online open mic for bowling alley bartenders to wax intellectual on esoteric geopolitical developments decades in the making, spelling and grammar be damned. Facebook is an echo chamber wherein dropouts and washouts become the next American Idol by targeting equally tone-deaf amateur audiences, and where mom's basement-based conspiracy theorists swear by outlandish scenarios they lack the CV, passport stamps, service rank, graduate degree, or security clearance to have acquired, much less fact-checked. It wasn't easy, but, last presidential election cycle, I retired from the "laying waste to false, ignorant, and hyper partisan social media content" game. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

A single photograph was all it took. The uncredited capture, taken in some dismal rural setting, featured a billboard in the foreground proclaiming, "AMERICA WILL NEVER BE GREAT AGAIN UNTIL WE PUT GOD FIRST." The only thing I hate more than vapid, virtue-signaling displays are vapid, virtue-signaling displays stumping for adulthood's analogue to Linus' blanket. Naturally, I solicited elucidation. What I received in return from one Ken Delisi, with a halfhearted assist from one Roger Dabdab, was a clumsy effort to project confidence through haughty assurances that "these were not the droids [I] was looking for."

Ken Delisi I'm terrified to live in a country where adult-age children forgo science, reason, and objectivity to vote on modern, multifaceted issues they are, more often than not, intellectually incapable of grasping. I'm terrified to live in a world where these purportedly sane grownups offer Bronze and Iron Age platitudes as plausible solutions to complex real-world problems (Or, in your and Roger's case, vapid allusions to the aforementioned platitudes). In the real world, one helping hand does more than one thousand hands idled by prayer. That said, what exactly does it mean to "put God first?" How EXACTLY does one go about that task? Just for a second, quit parroting cryptic, sophistic bumper sticker slogans and provide some specifics; hell, provide ONE. The New Testament has been read by an estimated 830 million people in the 1,500-plus years it's been around, why is Roger so loath to share his deeper understanding of it? I'd love to hear his take on "Revelation," AKA the Apostle Paul's live-tweeted bad trip. Should I completely ignore the Old Testament, wherein God sanctions the wholesale slaughter of the Midianites, sparing only female children for breeding? Should I ignore the tale of Sodom & Gomorrah, wherein Lot offers his virgin daughters to be violated by the reprobate mob in exchange for allowing his male guests to keep their cornhole V-cards? Should I read King James translation of the NT, or one of its many predecessors, rife with Easter eggs, deleted scenes, and alternate endings? Should I read all the gospels, or only Mark's? After all, Mark's novel inspired Matthew, Luke, and John's retconned fan fictions. Should I read the expunged Gnostic gospels of Truth, Thomas, Judas, Peter, and Mary, as you and Roger no doubt have? While we're on the subject, since you and Roger are such accomplished Biblical scholars, perhaps you'll set the record straight on some of the tens of thousands of discrepancies that result from cobbling together fables, folklore, apocrypha, and propaganda from disparate lands over several centuries, then subjecting them to revision after revision, redaction after redaction, addendum after addendum, and translation after translation, to say nothing of hand-copying them for untold generations before the printing press obsoleted scribes. Perhaps you can explain why "putting God first" went so horribly wrong in Northern Ireland, or Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia. If not, you're welcome to choose two different examples from the bottomless grab bag of possibilities. Go on, I'll wait.