(Designation/Word Update below.)

After near-clear blue skies and tons of sunshine this Saturday here in California’s Central Valley, we’re now into a quiet early evening — another off-the-record book interlude today as the calendar continues to quickly mosey into a new year.

First off the cuff, a great, big thank-you to tengrain of Mock, Paper, Scissors for his shout-out this morning for Compatible Creatures on Mike’s Blog Round-Up, a daily feature at Crooks&Liars — humbling for a humble blog, which heaps gratitude.

Meanwhile, onto this current post — a kind of personal take on what’s coming during the Superbowl tomorrow. In between commercials for beer/automobiles/cell phones/fire lighters/food stuff/drugs (even the last surviving Blockbuster store, but not on TV, maybe Instagram), there are a couple of ads hawking in a two-sided fashion the image and storyline of Jesus and Christianity. What makes the ads so putrid and disinformative is the hateful, spiteful backers of the project.
Religion is a human mainstay, and yet in most religious cases, the horror of the literal overshadows the spiritual. And what makes this worse is the reality.

My personal backstory on this subject: I experienced a wondrous, momentous event 45 years ago this coming June. It changed my life. And was dramatically personal. My concept of awareness and knowledge off that experience has only grown in the following decades. Maybe more on that moment in a later post.
Right now, the major, big point is the vast difference between Christianity, the religion, and Jesus, The Lord.
Christianity is a man-made religion while Jesus is The Lord. Fairly simple. Although Christianity appears to rely upon Jesus and the Four Gospels in the Bible, the concepts and foundation of the religion are based directly upon the Biblical books, Acts through Hebrews, and one man’s opinion, guidelines, and wishes, Paul of Tarsus. He coordinated the whole original formation of the ‘Church‘ and okayed all the writings.
Nowhere is it obviously written, however, that you have to be a Christian in order to know, follow and love Jesus. Such information would easily bring about the religion’s downfall.
And they — mega-rich Christians along with the entire religion’s infrastructure — can’t let that happen.

Plus, as a horribly-bad bonus to this scenario is the so-called ‘nationalism‘ produced by America’s Christian right-wing in an attempt to dismantle a democratic, more-humane country, and force-feed all of us with their Biblical anti-everything view of life — against those not white and Christian — and in doing so, create a major clusterf*ck.

And why not a Superbowl kick to the masses:

In between star-studded advertisements and a whole lot of football, this year’s Super Bowl watchers are being taken to church https://t.co/P0u2vcXZt0

— CNN (@CNN) February 11, 2023

Details/background via CNN this morning:

“He Gets Us,” a campaign to promote Jesus and Christianity, is running two ads during the game as part of a staggering $100 million media investment. To many, the spots will be nothing new: “He Gets Us” content has been peppering TV screens, billboards and social media feeds since a national launch in 2022.

The campaign is arresting, portraying the pivotal figure of Christianity as an immigrant, a refugee, a radical, an activist for women’s rights and a bulwark against racial injustice and political corruption. The “He Gets Us” website features content about of-the-moment topics, like artificial intelligence and social justice.

“Whatever you are facing, Jesus faced it too,” the campaign claims.

It’s getting noticed. One of the campaign’s videos, titled “The Rebel,” has netted 122 million views on YouTube in 11 months. Google searches for “He Gets Us” have spiked since the beginning of the year.

[…]

The chain of influence behind “He Gets Us” can be followed through public records and information on the campaign’s own site. The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, also known as the Signatry.

According to research compiled by Jacobin, a left-leaning news outlet, The Servant Foundation has donated tens of millions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. The ADF has been involved in several legislative pushes to curtail LGBTQ rights and quash non-discrimination legislation in the Supreme Court.

CNN has reached out to the Servant Foundation for comment.

While donors who support “He Gets Us” can choose to remain anonymous, Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green claims to be a big contributor to the campaign’s multi-million-dollar coffers. Hobby Lobby has famously been at the center of several legal controversies, including the support of anti-LGBTQ legislation and a successful years-long legal fight that eventually led to the Supreme Court allowing companies to deny medical coverage for contraception on the basis of religious beliefs.

Green discussed his involvement in the campaign, and the Super Bowl ad spots, during a November 2022 interview with conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.

“We are wanting to say — ‘we’ being a lot of different people — that he gets us,” Green said. “[Jesus] understands us. He loves who we hate. I think we have to let the public know and create a movement.”

Whoa! ‘He loves who we hate‘ — a two-sided near-word salad. Does that mean Jesus loves blacks, gay people, immigrants, etc., all those in that ‘hate‘ category for Christians? Remember, there are only two Commandments, boiled down by Jesus from the original 10: 1) Love the Lord with all your heart mind, and soul; and, 2) Love your neighbor as yourself. Number two is the hard one.

Politics, not-so-much Jesus is the bottom line — conclusion from Slate this morning:

“He Gets Us” has insisted that they are “not ‘left’ or ‘right,’” but the reality is that using fraught terms like “canceled” and images of Black Lives Matter protests invites viewers to try to map partisan politics onto it. And while it invites questions, it can’t help but spur others: Mainly, is this really the best use of a billion dollars in Christian donations? Wouldn’t the more Jesus-like thing to do with that money be to actually work to reduce problems like poverty and homelessness and the institutional failures of the justice system?

But of course, the funders of these ads think they’re doing just that. As one spokesperson of the campaign told Ad Age, “the ‘He Gets Us’ Super Bowl spots will explore how the teachings and example of Jesus demonstrate that radical love, generosity, and kindness have the power to change the world.” This, ultimately, gets at the real political underpinnings of the campaign: the belief that America will become a much more peaceful, successful, and wholesome place once it has become a more fully Christian nation — a more traditional perspective than the focus on diversity and “radical compassion” and “standing up for the marginalized” implies. On Sunday, $20 million is being placed on that bet.

In conjunction with all that shit, real-time politics are playing a hard-nosed part in Christianity nowadays via the evangelical, more-rabid side of the American version of the religion. A goodly chunk of Americans are all for it, at least according to a new survey out last week:

Data deep dive from @PRRIpoll on the increasing Christian nationalism in the USA + insights on its intersection with other dangerous ideologies:https://t.co/QDJ7Or6scg

— American Humanist Association (@americnhumanist) February 10, 2023

Per the introduction with the Public Religion Research Institute poll:

The rising influence of Christian nationalism in some segments of American politics poses a major threat to the health of our democracy. Increasingly, the major battle lines of the culture war are being drawn between a right animated by a Christian nationalist worldview and Americans who embrace the country’s growing racial and religious diversity … Additionally, the survey explores the influence Christian nationalism has within our two primary political parties and major religious subgroups and what this reveals about the state of American democracy and the health of our society.

A most-excellent look at the PRRI survey from the always-competent Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post last Thursday and the danger of ‘Christian nationalism,’ and the anti-American political horror show to come:

“Christian nationalism is a new term for a worldview that has been with us since the founding of our country — the idea that America is destined to be a promised land for European Christians,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones explained in a news release on the survey of more than 6,000 Americans. “While most Americans today embrace pluralism and reject this anti-democratic claim, majorities of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans remain animated by this vision of a white Christian America.”The poll used the following beliefs to gauge how deeply respondents embraced Christian nationalism:

• “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”
• “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.”
• “If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”
• “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”
• “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

[…]

Who are these people? “Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” Put differently, Christian nationalist adherents are a minority but when combined with sympathizers still comprise a stunning 29 percent of Americans — many tens of millions.

Major point:

Christian nationalists also make up the base of the Republican Party. “Most Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%), while at least three-quarters of both independents (46% skeptics and 29% rejecters) and Democrats (36% skeptics and 47% rejecters) lean toward rejecting Christian nationalism.” In total, “Republicans (21%) are about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be adherents of Christian nationalism.” Some promising news: There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.

Christian nationalist adherents are emphatically out of synch with the pluralist majority. “Americans overall are much more likely to express a preference for the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a variety of religions (73%).” They also are much more likely to hold authoritarian and racist views.

[…]

More than 70 percent of adherents embrace replacement theory, nearly one-quarter harbor the antisemitic view that Jews hold too many positions of power and 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, the poll found. More than 65 percent think Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”

If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”

The bottom line here is Christianity — which carries a horrid 2,000-year-old history — paints Jesus as a Christian. A double-sided scam on America’s (and the world’s) soul. The Lord is not a missionary religion.
Yet the Superbowl is tomorrow and people will cringe.

Due maybe to dolts, nasty, cruel, hypocritical, yes, but still dolts:

Truth is someday to come, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: Salvador Dalí’s 1958 painting, “Meditative Rose,” and found here.)

(Designation/Word Update: Ir was brought to my attention, the word, ‘Superbowl,’ is actually two non-connected words, ‘Super,’ and ‘Bowl.’ Somewhat-grammatically odd how I didn’t notice the horrible event accident until this morning {Sunday}, but it does show how much I regard a superbowel. We regret any inconvenience this error has caused.)