The brilliant Avigail Abarbanel has pointed out that Judaism teaches a couple of beliefs that, taken together, are quite toxic. These are chosenness and perpetual victimhood. To the extent that we Christians share these beliefs, we, too, are poisoned by them and we have to let them go. No one is chosen unless everyone is. And every human being has the capacity to be a victimizer as well as a victim.

Perhaps we’ve managed to avoid that particular trap: perhaps we realize that no one group is special or superior, and that we’re all brothers and sisters struggling through this world together. That’s what my faith taught me—we are all kin, and it’s our duty to love each other. So far, so good.

But all faiths, however divinely inspired we may believe them to be, are ultimately human constructs, and we humans are flawed. My faith may have given me many positive things, but it did teach something very negative, too. Here it is: collective guilt.

I don’t know what I think about original sin. Personally, I think it just means that we humans are flawed, as I said above. Evil does exist, though. If I ever doubted it, the actions of Netanyahu and Trump and their unholy crews have proven it conclusively. But little children are not guilty of the sins of their parents. They aren’t guilty of anything!

Each one of us, when we reach the age of reason, is responsible for his or her own actions. We cannot possibly be blamed for things we didn’t do.

But that is exactly what the genocidaires do. “There are no innocents in Gaza”— what an utterly pernicious lie that is! How evil! All children, everywhere, are innocent. No child should ever be murdered because of their faith or family or the country they live in.

This, by the way, is why war is itself always evil. Especially modern, western-style warfare which relies on butchering civilians. We blame, and then murder, our fellow human beings for their nationality and nothing more.

Somehow, we must stop doing this.

“The Devil is a liar, and the father of lies.” Jesus

“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” Groucho Marx

I think it’s been said that we are already living in a post-literate society. We are also living in a post-truth society, or so it strikes me.

This may seem a stark transition, but I am going to describe some things I personally witnessed several years ago. It was December 14, 2012, and I was driving north to visit our family banker when three police cars screamed by me, going at close to 90 miles an hour. I wondered where on earth they were going, and what the hurry was.

When I reached the bank, our banker was on the phone. She was visibly shocked and upset. Her friend, Dawn Hochsprung, had just been shot. So had several other teachers and twenty small children. Ms. Hochsprung died running toward the shooter, trying to save the children in her care.

On my walks, I often pass a monument to Dawn Hochsprung. It’s a bench where people can sit and look over a small pond. There is a plaque on it that says: In memory of Dawn Hochsprung, Principal—Hero—Neighbor—Friend. Sandy Hook Elementary, 12/14/12.

Further, I know two teachers from Sandy Hook who experienced the lockdown. One of them is our near neighbor.

That’s why Alex Jones absolutely infuriates me. He tormented the grieving families at Sandy Hook for years by claiming the shooting never happened. And far too many of my fellow citizens believed him, even though he was proven a liar in the courts. Some still do.

I bring this up because of what happened to me here on SubStack quite recently. I told this story in response to someone who, out of the blue and quite needlessly, called the Sandy Hook shooting a lie. The person’s response was to call me a liar—and a Zionist, though God alone knows why. Israelis shoot up and bomb schools all the time. Anyway, if someone denies your own personal experience as a lie, there is no reasonable response except to walk away and put it behind you. But—

It seems I had encountered a member of the Alex Jones cult. How do such cults arise and what causes people to join them? I honestly don’t think I can answer this question fully—perhaps not at all. I’m a librarian and writer, not a psychologist. But it’s pretty clear that U.S. culture has changed quite a bit in my lifetime. It has become coarser; we accept behaviors that would never have been accepted when I was a small child in the ‘60s. We are also very divided. Here are some examples of what I mean.

I will always be amazed that millions of my fellow citizens voted for Donald Trump after he mocked a disabled reporter in public. He is also a proven liar—as, to be fair, is Joe Biden. How did we elect these men president? Doesn’t character matter any more?

Then those school shootings, and the very existence of the Alex Jones cult. How do millions of us accept such cruel conspiracy theories?

Here are my answers. They certainly aren’t complete, but I hope they may explain some things, and perhaps offer us a way forward.

One of the things that is damaging us greatly is corporate control, and end-stage capitalism. All that matters to the oligarchs is gaining more wealth. The billions they already have are not enough. So there are no public goods; everything must become profitable. What does this mean for the fourth estate and freedom of information?

Some years ago, Matt Taibbi wrote a book explaining exactly what it meant. But I’m going to lead in with a quote from another book—a YA urban fantasy about a young man trying to find his place. Here is a question one of Rhan’s journalism teachers asks.

“What will be my top story today?” The class threw back answer after answer…but Tory kept shaking his head.

“ A man was beaten to death and thrown into the Bow River, half a block from a gay nightclub. That is my top story.” ….

Rhan was checking his notes. “But it’s still not going to affect a lot of people. So why…”

“Because it’s horror,” Tory Samuels said simply. “And it’s in our back yard. That’s always your lead.” (Ranvan: Magic Nation by Diana Wieler, excerpted from pages 64-66, U.S. paperback edition.)

In Hate, Inc. Taibbi points out something similar. Conflict sells. And these days, mainstream news sources are not seen as the fourth estate. In the U.S., they are not seen as a public good. They are expected to make money for their owners. The more conflict, the more money. This also happens in social media, where people post outrageous insults and divisive statements for clicks.

And this brings me to my second point: social media. When I was a child, we had four TV stations. When I was a teenager, we had dozens. Now there are hundreds of sources of news and information, if not thousands. Some independent sources online or on social media are excellent—Consortium News, for example. Some are not. Many are individuals presenting their lives or points of view directly—and that’s valuable, but it can be hard to filter. In any case, we are all getting our news a bit differently. None of us are experiencing the same reporting any more.

What’s more—and this is very disturbing—some of the most trusted mainstream sources, such as the New York Times, have repeatedly been caught out in lies. The most egregious example is the lead-in to the second Iraq war, but in the past two years, the Times has pushed “Screams without Words” as though that piece of fiction were verified fact. It has been thoroughly debunked, but I know at least one person who still believes it—most likely because it was in the New York Times and they have still not corrected or retracted it.

An older gentleman who ran the current affairs book club in my library explained how this could happen, even to a respected source like the New York Times. In the United States, news sources are not actually required to tell the truth. Of course, most journalists do try to do so. A journalist I know explained that you are supposed to have at least two sources for each fact you state. But there is, nonetheless, no legal requirement to tell the truth—it’s just something ethical journalists strive to do.

In the past, they were also required by the FCC to present both sides of complex situations. But this is no longer the case, and that’s what the leader of our nonfiction book group pointed out when we were discussing Hate, Inc. In 1987, the FCC’s fairness doctrine was overturned. That doctrine had required news sources to cover controversial issues, and to present both sides. But that’s not a requirement any more.

I do think these things—the lack of legal guardrails and the need to make money—have gone a long way toward debasing and dividing us. You could also point to the COVID pandemic, and the political uses that were made of it, as a cause. But however we got here, we have to take a hard look at what our divisions mean for our society.

I’m going to quote another children’s book. In Madeleine L’Engle’s The Young Unicorns, Dr. Austin, a GP from rural Connecticut, comments that when trust is broken, the only response that is not destructive is to trust again. That—certainly bears thinking about. Must we really choose to trust again when our trust has been betrayed? Why? Why is trust necessary?

I’d say, because we cannot have functioning relationships without it. And without healthy interpersonal relationships, we cannot have a functioning society.

But I’d also say that, in order to trust each other, we have to recognize that truth exists. It does! There are such things as facts. No, no human being can know the whole truth. We are flawed and limited, and we must recognize our limits. But we can recognize, acknowledge, and proclaim truth to the very best of our ability. If we don’t, we will continue down a very dark and dangerous path.

Right now, those of us who live in the U.S.—I’d say in the West generally—lack trust in our institutions and in each other. Those who desire power are actively exploiting our divisions. They always have. And, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, this is the road to fascism and tyranny. And we’re very close to this, if we’re not there already. So how do we fight back?

I’d love to hear readers’ ideas on this! It won’t be easy to get back to even the shaky, imperfect democracy we had here when I was a child. We were divided then, too. But—

I think the first thing we need to do—the very first—is to acknowledge each other’s humanity. Yes, some of the “people” we respond to online are actually machines. When faced with a swarm of bots, as when faced with unreasoning hostility, all we can do is disengage. But, when we have a chance, we should choose kindness and courtesy. We should treat people the way we would like to be treated.

This brings me to my second point. As far as we’re able—none of us is perfect; I’m certainly not! —we should be truthful and trustworthy.

We should seek truth, listen to each other while remembering we’re all flawed human beings, and speak our own truths as clearly as we can. This is the only way we can build healthy relationships, both in-person and online. And healthy relationships are the basis for a healthy, sane society.

We, in the U.S., truly do live in the Empire of Lies right now. But that doesn’t mean we have to succumb to the Zeitgeist. That doesn’t mean we can’t try to make things better.

What are your thoughts?

There are three really toxic beliefs in the Abrahamic tradition, IMHO. I don’t know if they exist in Islam, but the first two are certainly present in Judaism, and the third is as well. It has carried over to Christianity. Here they are:

1. It seems, looking from the outside, that some people believe in chosenness—that is, that there can be a people who are chosen by God. If we acknowledge that everyone is “chosen” and beloved, that’s okay. It’s also okay if those who consider themselves chosen see this as a gift to be shared with all. But this belief can become toxic if it leads to the idea that the people who aren’t chosen are inferior.

2. There also exists a belief that the righteous, chosen people are persecuted by those who aren’t chosen. This persecution is inevitable, because those who aren’t chosen are jealous and only know how to react with violence.

3. Finally, and this is what I’m getting at today, there is a belief in collective guilt. Consider the horrendous story of Amalek. Some of this tribe attacked the Hebrews, and therefore, every member was guilty and had to be wiped out. That included babies, old people, and even animals. How can a baby or an animal be guilty of anything?

   But that’s not the only place we see this idea. We are all guilty, somehow, because of the sin of Adam and Eve.

And yes, all humans have flaws. We’re all imperfect, and capable of doing great harm. To me, that’s what the concept of original sin expresses. We are none of us perfect!

But collective guilt is a lie. All too often, it’s a lie used to justify war, and even genocide.

So we must be very careful when we think about these concepts. Again, as I’ve said before, the myths of the Bible cannot be taken literally. What spiritual truths are these stories and ideas showing us?

I guess that’s what I’ll be struggling with this Lent. BTW, a blessed Lent to all who celebrate.

Drinking the Sea at Gaza

“Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters.”

In the rain of bombs,

The people drank the sea,

Its salt bitter

On their lips.

The children wailed,

Dry-eyed,

No tears left

In their parched bodies.

And still the bombs fell.

“God brooded over the waters,”

And, in another time,

A slender man marched to the sea

To harvest salt.

In this time,

A boy cried out,

“We had no water,

so God sent us rain!”

The sea is our mother,

The womb of all life.

Her tides

Pulse in our blood;

Her waves

Roar in our ears.

She speaks to us.

Listen.

Her voice is

The susurration

Of water on sand.

Over and over, she says one word:

“Shantih.”

Peace.

Peace.

Peace.

Notes: The title is copied from—or shared with—the title of a book by the great Israeli journalist, Amira Hass. The Bible quotes are from the Books of Amos and Genesis. The quote from a Palestinian child was from a film clip in November or December of 2023. I don’t know his name, and hope he is still alive. The final words are my own hope, but also inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”.

Mary Johnson, 2025

My fish dances with happiness

As I bring her breakfast.

I cannot help but think

of another pet—

Gaza city, 2021

Two children, Ahmed and Nana

And their fish,

Their beloved pet,

That they pulled, alive and well,

From the rubble

Of their bombed home.

“We’re going to save the birds next!’

Little Nana said.

How fragile children are,

And—how strong.

I wonder often,

If these three are still alive,

Nana, Ahmed, their fish—

Yes, the birds, too.

I cannot know. I will never know.

But hope is hard to kill.

(Note: I only just thought of this, but L.S. Mathews wrote a remarkable book about a refugee child. The title is Fish.)

When people fell through the air

like burning leaves;

when smoke smudged

the bright air

and metal crumpled like paper;

On that day,

we should have learned

a truth that still eludes us:

That each life—

every one—

is of a worth

beyond all naming.

Mary Johnson, 2025

I believe every adult American and Briton should watch it. As they do, they should consider that the oppression they are eyewitness to has been going on for decades, long before October 7, 2023. The main story of the film starts in 2019, when the Israeli government starts to destroy villages in the community of Mafaser Yatta.

Some spoilers will follow as I set down my impressions.

As I said in my Google review, I was trying hard not to mutter aloud in the theater. There was so much horrific violence against these innocent people! We witness a young man shot in the stomach and an older man throttled; we also see the Israelis destroy a chicken coop, not giving the people time to save all their animals. And we see them pour concrete into a well. Next to the attacks on people, this is what upset me the most. To deprive human beings and the animals that depend on them of water! This is so utterly cruel and debased. I can’t even express how it made me feel.

As I also said, I often wanted to hug the people in the film and make things better for them. I was deeply moved by the courage and grief of Harun’s mother—Harun is the young man who is shot and paralyzed, and who then has to live in a cave without proper medical care. And the friendship of the two filmmakers was deeply touching, and offered some hope. I came to admire both these young men, as well as their colleagues.

So yes, you ought to see this film. It is bleak, but it’s absolutely essential viewing. I hope and pray it will reach a wide audience and change some hearts and minds.

For one thing, when he looked at the myths of the Bible, like Israel’s killing Amalek, he didn’t go into detail about what recent Bible scholars have discovered. In brief, the Bible as we know it today was written over many years, and Genesis was not written first. Further, as an essay in America Magazine pointed out many years ago, the Bible is mythic truth, not literal or scientific truth.

What I’m saying here is that, according to Bible scholars, there was no flight from Egypt. This founding myth of the Jewish faith cannot be taken literally. Therefore, there was no genocide of the Amalekites nor of the Canaanites. These things just didn’t happen. Instead, the Hebrews were one of several groups of people (at the time) indigenous to Canaan. As Wes Howard-Brook points out in his brilliant, dense book, Come Out, My People: God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond, this means that many of the Bible stories were deliberately metaphorical. He makes a fascinating comparison between King Solomon and Pharaoh, pointing out that the same language is used to describe both men. It seems the scribes of the Bible may, in describing the cruelty and obduracy of Pharaoh, have actually been criticizing their own king!

But many, many people, both Christians and Jews, take the Bible literally. One of the scariest manifestations of this literalism is the Third Temple movement. The plan is to tear down the Al Aqsa mosque and build a third temple in its place—a temple where animals will be sacrificed. This is such a crazy idea, on so many levels, that I can hardly believe it has supporters. But it does. The far right among the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian, want to see the third temple built.

Any attempt to do this, and to tear down the third-holiest mosque in Islam, would lead to horrific bloodshed—evem more horrifc than what we’re seeing today.But, bizzarely, Christian Zionists are okay with this. They hope to hasten the end of the world and Christ’s second coming by building the third temple.

I am a Christian. To be specific, I am a Catholic. It’s absolutely clear to me that this third temple movement is mistaken. Here’s why.

First, if you are a follower of the Jesus movement, you know he has already risen. He promised us, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among you.” He did not tell us to commit crimes and cruelties in order to hasten his coming—he told us he is already here!

Second, the third temple also exists already. It’s us. We are the body of Christ on earth. As St. Teresa of Avila said,

Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

And Christ said this at his trial. He was the temple, and therefore so are his followers. It’s our job as Christians to be the temple—to be the living body of Christ in the world. It’s not our job to ignite horrible wars in order to force the second coming.

May we, in our lives, be blessings in this poor, fractured, cruel, beautiful world. God bless Gaza. God bless Palestine. May there be peace, and may we help bring it.

I am writing this for the Easter season, because, for me right now, many of the readings are hitting very hard. The prayer that God should take away our hearts of stone and give us natural, human hearts--wow! Even the drowining of Pharaoh's army in the sea seems different this year. Because who is Pharaoh? And what is that reading really saying?

But I began with an essay on World War 2, which I'm posting below.

WW2 and the myth of redemptive violence

As humans, we’re storytellers, and we use stories to guide our actions and form our communities. If we want good and life-giving communities, we must tell good stories.

This is why we must, somehow, get over our obsession with World War 2.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean we should forget World War 2, which—along with its holocausts—is rightly considered the major event of the twentieth century. We do need to remember history. But we also need to question what aspects of history we focus on, and what lessons we are taught.

I’m American. Some of my older relatives and friends were WW2-era veterans, and I honor their courage, loyalty, and sacrifices. It’s also absolutely essential to remember crimes like the Holocaust, the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so much more. These things must be remembered. They must also be examined so that we can learn from them.



And it did seem, in the period before I was born and even into my childhood, that we were trying to draw the right lessons from the horrors of this war. The war led to the Nuerenberg trials and also to many laws meant to ensure such things never happened again—the Geneva conventions, for example, and the declaration of human rights and more. The principal lesson of WW2 seemed to be how utterly cruel and inhumane we human beings could be to each other, given the right provocations.

But, along with these lessons, we learned several others. First, we learned that the world could be divided into “good guys” and “bad guys”. We Americans and our allies were the good guys. The Nazis, the Italian Fascists, and the Japanese were the bad guys, and had to be fought strenuously and totally defeated.

Which—well, it seems true, doesn’t it? There’s just no doubt that the Nazis did evil, and the Japanese, too, did unspeakable things to the countries they occupied. Both Nazis and Imperial Japanese were following a false story they had learned: that they were the superior human beings and that others—such as Chinese, Jews, and Roma—were inferior creatures worthy of slavery at best and death at worst. These lies led to horrific, unspeakable evil. And that evil did have to be fought.

But here’s the problem. If we are the good guys and the Germans, Japanese, and Italians are the bad guys, doesn’t that make them inferior to us? There’s the trap, you see.

In fact—and this is the major lesson the Holocaust, in particular, should teach us—we are all human beings on this planet together. No group is superior or inferior to another; we are all brothers and sisters. As a Catholic Christian, this is one of my core religious beliefs, but it’s backed by science. The whole concept of race is bad science and false; all human beings have the same origins, if you go back a million years or so, and that’s a blink of an eye in the face of geologic time—or of eternity.

But we humans do like to get together in gangs of various sizes. We do like to see our gang, whatever it is, as good and superior and other gangs as bad and inferior. Looking at the Nazis of the 1940s, or supremacists of any type today, shows us exactly where that type of thinking gets us. And those supremacists do include Zionists, Christian and otherwise. I empathize with Jewish Zionists who are ruled by fear and anger after what their people suffered in the twentieth century. I think they’re wrong, like all who would divide human beings into superior and inferior groups. But I can see why they act as they do. To achieve real peace and real justice, however, we have to live in truth. And that means that we must move away from nationalism and groupthink of all kinds.

There’s more, though. There is the idea that violence—even the utterly horrific violence of war—can be good. It can be redemptive. It can save us, and save the world, if the “good guys” use sufficient violence against the “bad guys” and defeat them thoroughly enough. After all, that’s what we—the good guys—did in Word War II. We defeated Japan and Germany utterly, and forced them to surrender without conditions. Then, so our version of history goes, we rebuilt their countries into prosperous and peaceful democracies. But they had to be shattered before they could be rebuilt.

There are a couple of things to note here. First, Germany had suffered a humiliating defeat already in World War I. Our rebuilding of the country after World War 2 was, in part, based on what we learned from the failed peace after the first World War. Second, even if everything I’ve said above is true—even if Germany and Japan did have to be utterly defeated in order to be rebuilt—that doesn’t justify war in general.

For war is always a crime, the worst crime human beings can commit. It is always a failure. My Church developed a theory of a just war in the Middle Ages, but many are now arguing that no war can ever be just. No war can ever be justified—not if you are truly a follower of the Jesus movement. My dad was one of the World War 2 era veterans I mentioned earlier. During one of the Gulf wars, he said, with great sincerity and sadness, “There’s no justification for war in the New Testament. None.” He was right.

And that’s why, though we must always remember the facts of Word War 2, we must somehow let go of the myth. The myth teaches us that war is just, and that we have a right to do whatever is necessary to our enemies in order to win, because we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. And only violence can defeat evil. This is the myth that has guided my country’s actions for the last seventy years. No matter what we do, we are still the good guys. So we—or our allies—can bomb civilians relentlessly. We can impose sieges. We can destroy entire cities, including priceless historical sites and even schools, pharmaceutical plants, religious buildings and hospitals. We can kill millions through our bombings and sieges—and we remain the good guys. We are judged not by what we do, which is often monstrous, but by who we are.
And that is toxic. That is a lie. It’s a lie we must let go of if we are to live as mature, free, and peaceful humans in a free and peaceful world. We must also somehow repent of the harm we’ve done in so many places, from the Congo to Haiti, from Honduras to Palestine.

May we live in truth and let go of lies.

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