February 24, 2004
Leviticans

On occasion people ask me what, exactly, it is I have against Christianity, inasmuch as I seem to rail against it quite a bit. My general response is: I have nothing against Christianity. I wish more Christians practiced it. The famous bumper sticker says "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven," but I often wonder just how often they check in with Christ about that last one. I look at the picture I included with the last entry, the one with the kid protesting the gay marriages in San Francisco, wearing the shirt that has "homo" written on it with a circle and slash through the word, and I try to find some of Christ's teachings in that. As you might imagine, I'm finding very little.

If that kid were hit by a bus and got to meet Christ shortly thereafter, I do imagine the conversation would be a sorrowful one, as the homo-negating young man would have to try to reconcile his shirt with the admonition to love others as one loves one's self. I would imagine at the end of that conversation, the young man would be looking to see if Christ were holding a lever, and if there were a trap door under the young man's feet.

In the comment thread of the last entry, one of the posters wondered why many fundamentalists spend so much time in Leviticus and so little time in the New Testament, and I think that's a remarkably cogent question. Indeed, it is so cogent that I would like to make the suggestion that there is an entire class of self-identified "Christians" who are not Christian at all, in the sense that they don't follow the actual teachings of Christ in any meaningful way. Rather these people nod toward Christ in a cursory fashion on their way to spend time in the bloodier books of the Bible (which tend to be found in the Old Testament), using the text selectively as a support for their own hates and prejudices, using the Bible as a cudgel rather than a door. That being the case, I suggest we stop calling these people Christians and start calling them something that befits their faith, inclinations and enthusiasms.

I say we call them Leviticans, after Leviticus, the third book of the Old Testament, famous for its rules, and also the home of the passages most likely to be thrown out by Leviticans to justify their intolerance (including, in recent days, against gays and lesbians -- Leviticus Chapter 18, Verse 22: "Thou shalt not not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination&quot .

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From a shopping mall in New Jersey to the farm fields of India, experiments show that poverty saps people's brainpower and may lower IQ by 13 points, scientists said Thursday.

The findings in the US journal Science suggest that being poor can drain a person's mental resources, leaving him or her less capable of focusing on other things, like solving problems and controlling impulses.

"Because you have all these other things on your mind, you have less mind to give to everything else," said co-author Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard University economist.

Rather than blaming poverty on the individual or the environment, the study suggests that the state of being poor exerts the same effect as losing a full night's sleep or having lower intelligence.

Very few Republican operatives knew the Nixon gang as intimately as Roger Stone, the legendary trickster whose back is adorned with an enormous Tricky Dick tattoo. And very few know New Jersey politics as well as Stone, who toiled among the party faithful in many campaigns since 1980, when he first ran the Garden State for Ronald Reagan.

So when he suggests that “Bridgegate” is Watergate – from the imponderable stupidity of the original crime to the profound peril of the ongoing cover-up – attention should be paid. Especially on the day when the U.S. Attorney’s office investigating the Port Authority’s decision to close three lanes of traffic on the world’s busiest bridge issues subpoenas to the Christie campaign and the New Jersey Republican Party.

Speaking with The National Memo on Thursday afternoon, Stone said: “This is about hubris, this is about an arrogance and right out of the dark side of Nixon’s playbook. It’s what ultimately brought Nixon down. There was no reason to break into the Watergate, there was no reason to spy on your enemies. His foreign policy was popular, the economy was good, and he was getting re-elected. Just like there was no reason to close these lanes on the George Washington Bridge – although just like with the break-in of Watergate, we still don’t really know why they did that.” He doesn’t buy the theory that the Christie aides were punishing the mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to endorse the Republican governor — and thinks it more likely that they were trying to harm State Senator Loretta Weinberg, a determined Christie antagonist whose district includes Fort Lee.

To Stone, the governor’s explanations rang false from the beginning – and reminded him of the verbal traps Nixon set for himself. He simply doesn’t believe that Bridget Kelly, the deputy chief of staff fired by Christie for “lying” to him, took the initiative to close the bridge lanes.

Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness