@mzbehavin The implication was that because Trump, who is adjudged sinful by some, signed some Bibles Christianity is therefore invalid.

Radically illogical.

If the president of the US is on hand it would be a smart business move to get his signature on any book.

@mzbehavin All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Judge not that ye be not judged.

I personally think there’s no such thing as sin, and I’m not impressed by mindless labeling. Trump is more or less secular, saying that he fixes his own mistakes and does not involve God. Methodist Hillary Clinton was the evangelist in the last presidential election. Are you saying that it’s time for her to reevaluate her religion?

@WilliamFleming The issue, William, is the credibility of fundamentalist claims to moral authority and to be arbiters of virtue. They are the ones busy going around condemning sinners, and have condemned many for far, FAR less than the Citrus Caligula has repeatedly and unrepentantly done.

So the claim isn't that Trump signing some people's Bibles is an invalidation of Christianity; it is that some people giving such adulation to Trump as to solicit him to sign their Bibles in the mistaken notion that he's endorsing and sharing in their faith, is a complete moral, ethical and epistemological fail on the part of those believers.

Similarly, pulpits that promoted "Judge" Roy Moore for Senate from Alabama -- and who likely will do so yet again if he decides to run for that office again ... same deal.

Similarly, Jerry Falwell's son publicly fantasizing about shooting AOC in cold blood with one of his guns ... same deal.

None of this invalidates Christianity generally, although it's hard to imagine how a thinking person would not question whether Christianity doesn't ultimately lead to this kind of perfidy if it's assiduously (or at least, literally) practiced. But it certainly invalidates the paranoia and nihilism of Christian fundamentalism as typically practiced in the US.

@mordant I am not a Christian and I agree with you to some extent, however, I do not share all of this hatred for our president, and I do not share the condescending air of criticism toward the local people who asked for Trump’s autograph. Having survived tornadoes, they were gathered together for mutual support—very few of them are much interested in politics. IMO, anyone reading hypocrisy or some sort of evil and sin into this story is way off base. It was just a group of good-hearted locals with no trace of “perfidy”, paranoia, or nihilism, making no claims to moral authority or to be arbiters of virtue. And they are not stupid or beneath you intellectually, morally, or any other way.

@WilliamFleming I don't hate Trump. I simply assess him as the morally corrupt sociopath and narcissist that he demonstrably and objectively proves himself to be, daily and consistently. If my assessment is fact-based (and it very much is), then it is not hatred to accept those facts.

I am not inclined to confuse the man with the office he inhabits and has greatly diminished. If some folks, in a misguided effort at equanimity and "fairness", want to be sanguine about Trump, that is their right. If I see him as an existential threat to what's left of the republic, that's mine.

Nor do I dehumanize or classify as somehow beneath me, the people who solicited and accepted those signatures. It is entirely possible that they really are such simple folk that they don't know to consider who or what Trump is beyond his vapid claim to be "one of them" or "on their side" or the equally vapid apologetic that he is a "modern King Cyrus", a secular ruler being mysteriously used for God's purposes.

To be frank, I don't think that little of them. I think they are smarter than that, but willfully resistant to the data right in front of them, because they fear the implications to their views of reality more than they fear Trump. I would be degrading them as human beings if I could imagine them ignorant / indifferent to politics and just blindly reaching out for some strong many to save them, just like all the strong men in history have ever done. To believe that about them, I'd have to think very little of them indeed.

It's precisely because I think they're better than that -- or at least capable of / have the potential to be better -- that I expect them to rise to the occasion.