religion – Martin Simpson

What Makes People Happy, Part 2 (posted 7/13/26)

On Friday I started a series of articles about happiness, and I talked about how money and income, along with career and gender, impact happiness. I’m heading toward some thoughts on how politics and political ideology affect happiness, but on the way I’d like to consider a couple of other factors: the impact of social media and social connections, and the impact of religious belief.

First, it’s pretty easy to see social media as a big dose of brain poison that you’re inviting into your house and life on a daily basis. But I won’t go nearly that far. I think the internet is like many things in life, in that it is not intrinsically good or bad. It offers many possibilities that you can use to either improve your life or degrade it.

Sure, there’s lots of porn and conspiracy theories and political dreck that takes over way too many people’s lives. But there’s also smart conversation and music and all of the great achievements of humanity at your fingertips. And there’s the possibility of making a network of social connections, too.

Regular readers will remember that I only started this page because an impressive guy calling himself CO (the Cautious Optimist) started a Facebook page called Cautious Optimism over 10 years ago now, and invited me to join some early members and write occasional pieces there. The site dealt with everything from culture to music to politics and humor, and people were free to contribute links and commentary for everybody to discuss. A great person volunteered to police the site and kick out the trolls (Shout out to Laura Belveal!), and soon many hundreds of smart and interesting people started chiming in, and a great community of over 30,000 members grew up there. Facebook inexplicably shut the site down last November for no reason that they were willing to disclose, and that was a real loss to many of us – which is a sadly ironic testament to the positive impact that social media can have in our lives.

By the way, some of you have regularly been asking me if the mysterious CO might ever start the page up again. I can only say that I’ve been in regular contact with him, and have been encouraging him to do so; he seems to be considering it, but I don’t know more than that right now.

Anyway, having said all that, social media still has obvious downsides that impede personal happiness in ways that I think we’ve only started to grasp. Some of them are simply the opportunity cost involved in anything that takes up that much of your time. If you’re spending many hours a day consuming social media on screens, you’re by definition not spending those hours interacting with people in the real world, or reading books, or learning a language or an instrument, or walking in the woods.

Also there is the big problem of comparing yourself to others – most of whom have painted a falsely positive picture of their own lives in their online posts – which is a recipe for misery, and also for feeding the narcissism to which we are all susceptible. Everybody wants to be an influencer of some sort, with their own podcast or website, and will seemingly sell their souls for clicks. (And I say that as someone who has been on a few podcasts, and writes my own columns and has recorded a few videos for this, my own website!)

(Sidebar: Narcissism is terrible, whether it is exacerbated by social media or not. The quality that is opposed to narcissism – humility – is an old-fashioned and misunderstood virtue, because we often think of it as putting yourself down or feeling inferior. But I love CS Lewis’s definition: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”)

Another problem with social media is the way it can cut us off from community, social networks and inter-connectedness. (And of course, it is good when it does the opposite, as I think it does when people use it to establish worthwhile and nurturing online communities like the late, lamented CO site.)

Researchers who study happiness have long pointed to having friend networks and social connections as a reliable index of personal happiness, and though social media has clearly exacerbated the deterioration of these connections, it was already going on in America before the internet.

Robert Putnam wrote an influential book in 2000 called Bowling Alone, in which he documented the trend. He pointed to the marked decrease of people participating in social organizations like scouting (for children), and civic or fraternal organizations like The Lions Clubs, Elks Clubs, Rotary, Kiwanis, etc. for adults. His title comes from the fact that while slightly more Americans were bowling, many fewer were bowling in organized leagues. Hence “bowling alone.”

The declining participation in fraternal organizations – some of which were religiously affiliated, such as the Knights of Columbus or the Hibernians – was mirrored by decreasing church attendance and participation in religious organizations. And that trend influences human happiness, too.

There is a large body of research that suggests that actively religious people are happier than irreligious people. Some studies point to variations within the larger finding – looking at the way the connection between religious participation and happiness may be shaped by differences in nationality, economic status, and others – but the overall connection appears to be consistent.

A recent study from Pew Research of survey results from the US and 25 other nations is fairly typical. Those studied were categorized into three groups: the actively religious (who worship at least monthly), the inactively religious (who identify with a religion but attend less frequently), and the unaffiliated, or “nones” (i.e. the non-religious).

In most of the countries surveyed, the actively religious were more likely than those in the other two categories to describe themselves as “very happy.” In the US, 36% of the actively religious – compared to 25% of the inactive and 25% of the “nones” – described themselves that way.

The same pattern held when looking at how often the three groups also participated in other types of non-religious organizations, such as charities and clubs. Among the actively religious, 58% also participated in at least one nonreligious voluntary organization, as compared with 51% of the inactives, and only 39% of the “nones.”

I know it’s wise to tread lightly when it comes to religion, but I will say that I find these patterns both intuitive and counter-intuitive, in different ways. Because of my own bias – I’m a Christian – I’m predisposed to think that my faith would naturally make people generally happier. The word “gospel” means “good news,” and the idea that a loving Creator made me in His image is pretty sweet.

On the other hand, I can also see ways in which religion could make one unhappy, and atheism could make one happy. Because the idea of adhering to a moral code that forbids a lot of pretty alluring things – hookers and blow are off-limits, as is smiting the many idiots in life who strike me as quite smite-worthy – and teaches that at the end of this life I will be called to account by my Maker for every word and deed in my life? Not so giddy-making.

Conversely, atheism – to the extent that it sees humans as animals with a more developed frontal cortex, morality as human-devised and arbitrary, and conscience as an illegitimate restriction imposed on the individual by others in their own self-interest – gives one a desirable permission slip to do what feels good or serves you. Hookers and blow and smiting the smite-worthy are back on the table, along with raping and pillaging and all else that you can do without getting caught.

(Or, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, “If there is no God, nothing is impermissible.”)

Now I’m not here to tell you which is the One True Religion. I’ve made my call on that, but you’ll have to work that out on your own. (I recommend doing so with fear and trembling, so….)

But this last point provides me with a transition to my remaining thoughts about happiness, which I will explore next time.

Here’s a preview: politics strongly affects happiness, with conservatives generally being much happier than leftists.

My previous point suggests at least a partial explanation, because Republicans are per capita much more religious than Democrats. Another Pew Research Center study that has been conducted three times since 2007 – this one looking at the “religious identities, beliefs and practices” of over 35,000 Americans – includes the following findings:

81% of Republicans identify with a religion, as compared with 50% of Democrats

52% of Republicans pray daily; 41% go to church as least monthly; 48% say religion is important in their lives

For Democrats, those numbers are 35%, 24% and 28%, respectively

Another study found that even as the percentage of Republicans who are irreligious has grown, there is still a large “God gap” between the parties. This phenomenon played out in the 2024 election, when 80% of Trump voters identified as Christians, compared to just 40% of Harris voters. Two-thirds of Harris voters “seldom” or “never” attend church.

So if religious people are happier, and more conservatives than liberals are religious, that pattern partially explains the happiness gap between the left and right.

But only partially. If you’ll hang in there with me, I’ll look at some of the others causes in my next column.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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A Little Political Taxonomy(posted 6/4/25)

Perceptive and regular readers of my columns may have noticed that I am periodically annoyed by our elite leftist leaders in DC, the MSM, and the Ivy League.

If by “periodically” I mean “7 days a week, when I’m not asleep.” And if by “annoyed” I mean “infuriated.” And I do, in both cases, mean that.

But there is another type of nationally prominent lefty who just frustrates me, because they demonstrate the ability to think clearly and call out problems on both sides…but then can’t sustain that and come to the right conclusion.

There are so many people of the first type from whom to choose, and their failings are so obvious as to need little explication. So for today I’ll discuss just one, and his actions just this week, on just one issue.

The Dem in question is Jamie Raskin, and the issue is the terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado on Sunday.

By now you all know the basic details: Muslim illegal immigrant named Muhamad (unexpectedly!) who hates Jews (unexpectedly!) uses a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to badly burn 8 Jews who were peacefully marching to plead for the release of the hostages still being held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. (The terrorist reportedly used fire in his attack because he had been unable to get a gun, due to his illegal status.) At least two of his victims had to be airlifted to a hospital, and if they survive, will face a long and extremely painful recovery.

A few more details make the story even more infuriating. At least one of the victims was an octogenarian Holocaust survivor. A local police official – hours after video had widely circulated showing the terrorist screaming, “Free Palestine!” and, “I did it for Gaza!” – insisted that the scumbag’s motives were not known.

Then a genius named Juliette Kayyem got on CNN late that evening and blasted Kash Patel and Dan Bongino for having declared that the obviously targeted terror attack was a “targeted terror attack.” Juliette was not buying that small step to a well-supported conclusion.

But soft! What ditz through yonder camera speaks? Tis Juliette, and she’s a total moron: “It makes law enforcement look disorganized, and it makes the FBI look so juvenile, like why are you getting ahead of the police chief who says, ‘I don’t know what this is?’”

Did I mention that Juliette is a former DHS official in the Obama administration, and a former Harvard professor? Because of course she is.

Anyway, Muhamad came to the US on a tourist visa in 2022. When he broke our laws by overstaying that visa, the Biden administration demonstrated their “tough on crime” bona fides by… rewarding him with a work visa for two more years! And then he illegally stayed again, when that visa expired. (Please insert an all-caps “Unexpectedly” after each of the three previous sentences.)

So to recap: an anti-Semitic Muslim illegal immigrant carried out a horrific attack using fire. From that set of circumstances, one might logically draw the conclusion that we have serious problems involving vicious anti-Semitism, mass illegal immigration, and even a statistically over-represented tendency to violence among some (not all) adherents to a certain Religion of Peace. And possibly a “fire-control” problem.

But not if one is Jamie Raskin D-(‘oh!)- Maryland, who turned his awesome Sherlockian powers of deduction toward Boulder, and quickly arrived at the culprit: Guns!

The poor dunce went on MSNBC, and said, “We are still in the midst of a gun violence epidemic…. This is why we are for a ban on military-style assault weapons in the country. Our lax gun laws are a danger to everybody in America.”

I’m not making that up. He looked at a multi-faceted crime with zero guns involved, and decided that guns were the problem.

I thought about guns when I saw that news story, too. But my thoughts were more along the lines of, “I wish that had happened in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, or some other free state where citizens exercise their 2^nd amendment rights more vigorously. Because if it had, that hateful creep would have been lucky to light up his first octogenarian before he was stitched with bullets from his tiny groin to his evil cranium.”

And THEN we would have all been spared that smoking bullet-magnet’s idiotic political slogans, and Juliette would have been justified in scratching her empty head and wondering what his motive had been.

So Juliette and Jamie are the type of leftists who drive me crazy, because they are propagandist hacks who wouldn’t tell an inconvenient truth or make a good-faith argument if their lives depended on it.

But the second type – and there aren’t a lot of them – are frustrating, because they often show that they are capable of clear thought and smart criticism, and yet continue to make common cause with those like Raskin, Schumer, et al.

John Fetterman is one. Since he recovered from his stroke, he’s frequently been a beacon of sanity in the Dem congress. He’s called out the anti-Semitism on the left, praised Trump’s closing of the border, and criticized his party’s shameful coverup of Biden’s physical and mental infirmity. But he still votes with them the vast majority of the time, even though he’s proven that he knows better.

The best example of this type is Bill Maher, who I think I’ve written about before. He’s a condescending egotist who I wouldn’t want to hang out with, but he’s intelligent and often very funny, and he regularly takes a scalpel (and a machete) to woke errors and idiocies like nobody else on the left. And yet, at the end of the day and after demonstrating that he’s got 20/20 political vision…he puts his leftist blinders back on and returns to rote conservative bashing.

Or, as one of my favorite Bible verses puts it, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”

I don’t watch Maher’s program, but I often watch clips of it that show up on my various political feeds, and his discussion of Harvard’s self-destructive arrogance this past weekend was a good example.

He spends nearly 6 solid minutes tearing Ivy League education a new one, with insight and sarcasm. He points out that students aren’t being educated but indoctrinated, and indicts woke intolerance, feckless administrators, and the hypocritical arrogance of gullible, entitled youth. He points out that Harvard is “an assh*le factory.”

But then – so frustrating! – he puts on his pinko-colored glasses, and goes every kind of wrong.

The pivot comes when he grudgingly says that Harvard does turn out some decent people. But his first example tells you all you need to know: “But for every Barack Obama, there are two Josh Hawleys.” And he doesn’t mean the comparison as an insult to Obama – which it should be – or a compliment to Hawley. Which it should be.

For the next 3 minutes, he lobs evidence-less ad hominem attacks at Hawley, and then lists those on the right who have Ivy League degrees with an acid tone of disdain: Vivek, DeSantis, Cruz, SCOTUS members, etc.

That’s it. He just lists them. He doesn’t cite any stupid or evil things they’ve done, or any of their flaws. He just sneers their names, and his audience of trained seals applauds accordingly.

I keep finding myself thinking of the Parable of the Talents, and how those who squander greater gifts are judged more harshly than the less gifted who don’t make much of themselves. I look at dullards like Hank Johnson, AOC, or Eric Swalwell, and I’m not sure they even know how dumb or wrong they usually are.

But then I look at someone like Maher, deftly dissecting the destructive foolishness of the Left, before immediately backsliding into juvenile, simple-minded smears of the Right. I watch him proving that he knows better, and then acting like he doesn’t, and I shake my head.

I don’t know which is worse.

But I do know that I’d rather be on our side – even with all of our squishes and weasels! – than on theirs.

Hamas delenda est!

Israel Continues to Win, and a Hurricane Approaches (posted 9/27/24)

Before I get on to personal stuff, I saw that Israel took out yet another Hezbollah big shot yesterday, this time the head of their drone unit, a guy named Mohammed. (Unexpectedly!) He had an apartment on the third floor of a 10-story building, and the IDF managed to put three missiles into his apartment.

The tone of the media coverage is interesting. The AP mentioned that Mohammed’s apartment – it used to be turn-key, but now it’s a fixer upper – is in a building very near the one where the Dirty Dozen Hezbo commanders were flattened last Friday. The story noted that Thursday’s strike was the fourth to hit a specific area in Beirut, calling that neighborhood “a Hezbollah stronghold.”

The AP needs to look up the definition of the word “stronghold,” because I think they’ve confused it with “missile magnet.”

You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the no-win situation the terrorists have gotten themselves into. They can’t use cell phones, pagers, radios, walkie-talkies or smoke signals – unless the smoke involved is rising from their braised hands or genitals. They can’t meet out in the open, and they can’t meet in an office building.

And now they can’t spend time relaxing in their own apartments, flipping through potential matches on Goat Tinder™.

And you know that none of them saw this coming when they decided to fire off a few hundred missiles at Israel, thinking that they were preoccupied with the terrorists in Gaza, and wouldn’t be able to respond effectively.

How does that old cliché go? “Everybody has a plan until their pager blows various appendages off?”

On a personal note, I am writing this from Tennessee, where I have once again come up to visit my mom, while my sister and her husband took a previously scheduled trip for a few days. Regular readers will remember that mom is dealing with Alzheimer’s, which makes every trip to see her both precious and a little heartbreaking.

This trip is a little more fraught because I’ve inadvertently left my wife at home in Gainesville, to ride out a hurricane! When I got up here on Tuesday, Helene was tracking out in the Gulf, around 300 miles from our home in the middle of north central Florida, so we expected some heavy rain and only some moderately gusting winds.

But the storm grew stronger in the last two days, so even though the track has not come closer to our area, the expected winds are stronger. As I’m writing this overnight, my wife has texted to say that she’s lost power, and she’s going to be updating me regularly. She’s got the company of our Wonder Dog and three moderately-useful-at-best cats, and her brother lives nearby, but it feels lousy to not be there with her.

Of course we are praying for the residents of the Big Bend area where the storm has made landfall. The expected devastating effects there will dwarf any that we expect to see in our area, so we won’t be complaining about any clean-up that we’ll need to do in the coming days.

At a time like this I’m grateful for our excellent governor, and the efforts that our state has made to prepare for and respond to this storm. And I hope to be able to report good news and then get back to the usual commentary and snarkery next week.

Hamas delenda est!

Deadspin Dies, Stupid Criminals, & Celebrations of Excellence (posted 3/15/24)

First up today is Schadenfreude Corner:

You might remember the leftist sports site Deadspin because of its senior writer Carron “Karen” Phillips. He’s a lovely little whitey-hater who managed to work race into many of his stories over the years, culminating five months ago when he smeared a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan as a racist for wearing “black face” at a game.

Of course the kid wasn’t wearing black face; he was wearing the team colors, both red and black. He was also wearing an Indian headdress, which allowed Phillips to go for the vaunted “racial arsonist two-fer,” accusing the kid of “[finding] a way to hate black people and Native Americans at the same time.”

You don’t have to search Phillips’ entire oeuvre to see if he has ever expressed outrage at a certain albino-adjacent Massachusetts Senator who has parlayed the actual use of “red face” into a lucrative academic and then political career. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Because of course he hasn’t. Besides, he doesn’t think that kid was “hating” Indians any more than he was “hating” blacks.

The idiotic leftist fixation about Indian sports mascots has always driven me crazy. Everybody knows that you pick sports mascots because of their positive qualities.

That’s why teams with animal mascots pick animals admired for their strength or ferociousness; you’ll see tons of lions, tigers and bears, but no weasels or skunks. Bird mascots include eagles, hawks and ravens, but no pigeons or vultures.

And the same goes for human mascots, obviously. Minnesota didn’t pick the Vikings because they hate big, blond white guys. Towns didn’t pick Oilers, Packers or Steelers because they despise working stiffs. And the “Pittsburgh Pedophiles” didn’t narrowly edge out “steelers” in a naming competition!

So the many Braves, Chiefs and Indians in sports are compliments, not insults. And even though I can see that “Redskins” may have been a little much, I think Washington screwed up by not just re-naming the team the Warriors. They already had an iconic helmet with a big “W” on it, for crying out loud.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Carron/Karen Phillips is a racist jerk, and Deadspin is a woke enough outfit that they hired and supported a jerk like Phillips.

Aaannnndddd… this week Deadspin was sold, and every staff member there was immediately fired.

HA! I can only hope that there is a factory that makes racist dog whistles and is looking to hire a tester, because Carron/Karen would love that job.

Except that he’d get fired within a week, since every single sound he ever hears sounds like racism to him.

So learn to code, Carron!

In the “Stupid Criminals” category, I bring you the tale of New Yorker Sheldon Johnson, a career criminal and drug dealer who was sentenced 25 years ago to 50 years in prison, for what news reports coyly describe as “attempted murder and assorted other offenses.”

Because Johnson committed his crimes in New York, where the Democrats in charge spend most of their crime-fighting energy on trying to send Republican presidential candidates to the electric chair for taking out giant real estate loans and then paying them back with interest, he appealed to Alvin Bragg and Governor Hochul for clemency.

In his letter to Bragg, his first paragraph demonstrated how he has taken full responsibility for his crimes: “I am a product of systemic racism; intergenerational incarceration. A product of trauma, the school-to-prison pipeline and crack-era Reaganomics.”

Got that? His grandpa went to Alcatraz in the 1930s, and then when Johnson was a freshman he took a left out of the cafeteria and instead of heading to Biology he got into the prison pipeline, plus Reagan got elected. So what chance did poor, young Sheldon have?

Naturally, Hochul gave him clemency and let him out last May. He got a job as a counselor for at-risk teens in the Queens public defender’s office, and received fawning attention from the usual leftist suspects, who touted him as a great success story.

Aaannnnndddd… a week ago police responded to a wellness check call at the Bronx apartment of Collin Small. The cops found Johnson in Small’s apartment. They also found Small’s torso and feet in a garbage bin, and his legs, arms and head in the freezer.

They took Small to a hospital, where he’s listed in stable condition.

HA! I kid. He’s dead.

The cops arrested Johnson and started an investigation that found, and I quote, “Smalls and Johnson were in Sing Sing prison at the same time, and it is believed that there was animosity between them.”

Good lord, I hope so! Because if Johnson murdered and dismembered Small and they were besties, I don’t want to know what Johnson would do to someone he felt animosity for!

“Okay, Martin,” you may be saying to yourself, “you’ve established that Johnson is a criminal. But is he a truly stupid criminal, as your entertaining new column feature suggests?”

Oh ye of little faith. I hadn’t gotten to the part about how Johnson got caught yet:

First, Johnson killed Smalls in an apartment building, with a gun. And no, the gun was not equipped with a silencer.

In fact, several neighbors reported hearing two gun shots, followed by a man saying, “Please don’t, I have a family!” followed by several more shots.

The building superintendent then checked security camera footage and saw a man walking in and out of the apartment multiple times, and changing clothes each time. For one trip he wore a plaid golf cap and pushed a plastic, wheeled storage bin.

For the next trip he wore a different jacket and a fisherman’s hat – because nothing is more common than a guy in the Bronx following his golf outing with a fishing trip – and carrying two bags. (News reports don’t specifically describe them as “foot-sized bags,” but I think we know.) (And ditto on the “torso-sized storage bin.”)

On the third trip he wore a puffy coat, sunglasses and a blonde wig. (I hope Bragg has added a second-degree cultural appropriation charge for that wig!)

Yet even though he’s a master of disguise, the superintendent somehow figured out that something was up, and called the cops.

So great job, New York Democrats! If you’d kept Johnson inside, Small would be alive today.

I mean, unless he was foolish enough to take the subway, in which case he probably would have been shoved onto the tracks by a violent psychopath and dismembered anyway.

So just never mind.

Finally, I have two entries for my “Celebrating Excellence” category:

Two weeks ago, a Senate Bill signed by Ron DeSantis last year went into effect at my alma mater, and UF ended all contracts with DEI vendors, closed its DEI department and fired all staffers who were employed in DEI positions.

As a liberal arts professor for 30 years, I cannot tell you how difficult that is to believe. As far as I know, it’s the first time a university DEI department has been shut down anywhere in the country.

I know that many schools will continue to fight this, especially after DeSantis is out of office, and he is certainly hated by many academics all over the state right now. But if you can judge a man’s character by the nature of his enemies, DeSantis has given conservatives one more reason to admire him.

Man, I hope we can have that guy as our president some day!

But we don’t just find excellence in humans like the best governor in the nation. We also find it in our animal friends. And no, I’m not referring to Cassie the Wonder Dog and her much-deserved place in the Canine Hall of Fame.

I’m referring to the site of a Scottish shepherd, “Seanthesheepman,” which I recommend you all check out. Regular readers will remember that one of the highlights of our trip to Scotland last summer was a highlands visit with a shepherd and his amazing border collies. Sean is not the same guy we saw, but his site is great.

It features his great Scottish accent, lovely highlands scenery, and a lot of cool Scottish sheep. But the stars are the collies, and they are gorgeous and brilliant. Some of my favorite videos feature a dog-cam – a camera mounted on the dog’s shoulder to give a dog’s eye view as he trots and sprints around the countryside.

If I ever need a quick pick-me-up, there are several videos that will always do the trick. There’s the edited coverage showing Hillary supporters going from ecstasy to agony on election night in 2016, and videos of great music, and ones showing servicemen and women homecomings, and surprise twin birth announcements.

But there’s nothing quite like watching a dedicated dog sitting stock-still on an ATV seat one second, and then on a signal, leaping off and tearing across a field in a graceful blur. They’re obviously doing what God made them for and men trained them for, and I’m convinced that watching them is good for your spirit and your blood pressure.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Hamas delenda est!

Stupid Criminals, Lefty Atheists Tell Christians What Jesus Really Taught & Sunny Hostin Discovers She’s White, and Owes Reparations (posted 2/16/24)

There are a lot of stories to cover today, so let’s get started.

Right after Christmas 2022, Christopher Jason Hovis, 42, was arrested after he scared the hell out of a couple of children when he broke into their house in Decatur, Alabama and started stealing stuff. He was arrested shortly afterwards.

Even though he had a long criminal record, and even though this happened in Alabama, he was out of jail again by last week. I know what you’re thinking: the citizens of Alabama ought to demand better. They ought to insist that Hovis is put back in jail before he can commit another—

Oh no, wait. A homeowner took care of that particular problem last Saturday, when Hovis began kicking his way through a door of his house at 4:00 a.m. The homeowner got his pistol (because: Red State!) and called 911. Cops headed his way immediately.

But as the old saying goes, “When seconds count, the cops are only minutes away.” In this case, Hovis won the race between himself and the police, kicking his way into the house before officers arrived.

After he collected his prize — a traditional gunpowder greeting from the homeowner – a news story reports that Hovis celebrated his victory by “retreat[ing] outside, where he succumbed to his injuries.”

Yes! I can’t think of a better place for a would-be home invader to die than “outside.”

Since the story doesn’t mention another weapon, I’m assuming Hovis was unarmed, which would trigger many lefty crime-justifiers to caterwaul, “How could the homeowner shoot an unarmed man?!”

Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven had the right answer, which I am paraphrasing: “He should have armed himself, if he was going to violently kick in the door of a gun-owner’s house.”

Roll tide!

If you watched the video I posted on Monday, you know that I cited CS Lewis in my thoughts about our current election cycle. But as much as I love his clear thinking about Christianity, I also really enjoy being lectured about my faith by non-Christian leftists who are 100% sure of what Jesus meant when he taught things that they imagine him teaching.

So I was in luck this week, when two theological giants shared their doctrinal wisdom with us all.

First up was Megan Rapinoe, the obnoxious, America-hating soccer player and professional malcontent. “Highlights” of her “career” include repeatedly dissing our national anthem, whining that female soccer players don’t get paid enough, and badly missing a penalty kick to kill the American team’s chances to advance in some meaningless tournament.

In her last game, while walking alone on the field – far away from whatever counts as “action” in a soccer game – she somehow managed to tear an Achilles tendon. Then, as soon as her career was over, she signed a letter opposing the “Protection of Girls and Women in Sports” Act, which would prevent men who pretend to be women from playing women’s sports.

Which tells you a lot about Rapinoe. She’s the special kind of jerk who would happily subject other female athletes to getting the crap kicked out of them by creepy male athletes, once she was safely retired.

After her injury, Rapinoe waxed theological: “If there was a God, this is proof that there isn’t, because this is f**ked up.”

Move over, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, because mediocre Megan is rocking the exegesis!

Rapinoe appeared on a podcast this week and discussed how surprised she was by the blowback she received from Christians and non-Christians alike, most of whom thought that her hilarious injury seemed more like proof of God’s existence than the opposite.

She now says that “there is a special place in hell” for people who celebrated her karmic downfall. She also said, “Someone needs to check in on the Christians; they’re not okay. They also missed the whole joke.”

No, no, we got the joke. You’re an entitled little Christophobe who got wildly overpaid to play a boring game and spew hatred, and at the beginning of your last game ever, you blew out your Achilles while walking slowly in soft grass all alone.

That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard since Norm MacDonald passed away.

Not to be outdone by the sapphic Solomon, Rob Reiner was out pimping his upcoming “documentary” God and Country, which explains that politically active conservative Christians are actually voting in ways “completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.”

Because whenever I find myself thinking, “I wonder what Jesus would do in this situation?” I always like to consult a far-left celebrity like Rob Reiner.

And it turns out that the Gospel according to Rob teaches that we should abort babies until the moment of birth, enable addicted wretches to die in the streets and satanic doctors to castrate confused kids, and teach racial hatred and envy of people more successful than yourself. Also, Hamas isn’t so bad, and Death to America. Amen.

As we polite southerners like to say, “Bless your heart, Meathead.”

Speaking of meatheads, our vice president assures us that she is ready to serve, in the event that something happens (unexpectedly!) to Joe Biden.

As a rebuttal of Que Mala’s utterly unjustified self-confidence, check out the twitter video from Elsa Kurt, as she narrates Harris’ attempt to plug in an electric car at a photo op. (It’s several years old, but I just saw it for the first time.)

The VP stands beside the car holding the charging plug. An off-camera voice says, “Go ahead and plug in,” and she says, “Okay,” and then takes way too long to plug it in, as if she’s never used an appliance before.

Then she holds onto the plug for the rest of the multi-minute clip. She says, “There we go,” and the guy offscreen says, “And that’s it.”

And because I was wearing my conical wizard hat while watching and could read his thoughts, he spent the next agonizingly long minutes thinking, “Ok, you can let go now. Let go. Just ease your hand off. For the love of God, please don’t keep standing there and holding that thing!”

The actual dialogue, which I am not making up, goes like this:

Que Mala (QM): And there’s no sound, or fumes!

Off-camera Guy (OCG): There… there is nothing. And that’s all there is to it.

QM: And for all of us who are used to, to filling our tank, you usually can smell it and, and hear it, you can hear the guzzling.

Off-camera Guy’s Thoughts (OCGT): Guzzling? What? No. You can’t hear electricity!

QM (still holding the cord): How do I know it’s working? How would I know that?

OCGT: Not by the smell. Because electricity doesn’t have a smell. Unless it’s passing through the body of a condemned man sitting in an electric chair. Which is where I wish I was right now.

OCG (out loud): So typically, you’d use a card, and then (pointing at the bright green lights lit up on the charging station) this light would come on.

And this makes Kamala cackle like she always does when nothing is the least bit funny.

Good lord, how hard can this be? You’ve got a male plug and a female receptacle. You just plug the male into the fe—

Oh, wait a minute. I get it. Kamala is one of those leftists who can’t define what a woman is, and thinks that a man can become one. So… how can I put this delicately? A process that involves the meeting of male and female is not their strong suit.

But of all of the leftist elites, I would have thought that Que Mala would at least understand that process. Especially since it was her entry into politics, under the tutelage of Willie Brown.

Gotcha! I bet you didn’t know that THAT was what “tutelage” means, did you?

Wait a minute. As a professor, I tutored many, many college students. Could I have been doing it wrong, all of those years?

I mean, yes. YES! If Willie was doing it right, then I was definitely doing it wrong.

Luckily for me, since my Norwegian wife would rip me limb from limb (that’s in her viking DNA) if I had been “tutoring” college students the way Willie tutored Que Mala…

Finally, I can’t not mention the hilarious Sunny Hostin story from this last week.

The empty-headed race-baiter from the View has always prided herself for being half-black and half Puerto Rican, but when she appeared on a genealogy show last week, she found out that her ancestors were actually Spanish slave owners.

In fact, they’d only moved to Puerto Rico because slavery had started getting suppressed in Spain, so they took their slaves with them to the New World.

Now for you and me, that wouldn’t be devastating news. Because we’re not racist weirdos who think that we are responsible for the deeds of long-dead ancestors, either good or bad.

But Sunny is a dimwitted racial essentialist, and she’s argued that she and other “people of color” deserve reparations from the descendants of evil white slavers. So this was not good news.

She fidgeted and laughed very awkwardly, and stammered about how she never imagined she came from Spanish slaveholders! But she soon tried to philosophically distance herself from this horrible rebuke to her self-conception: “I guess it’s a fact of life… that this is how some people made their living… on the backs of others.”

Not “some people,” Sunny! YOU! You have been a privileged slaver, and now your shameful secret is out.

When Sunny got back to the View and talked about this awkward new knowledge, the irony was delicious. She talked about how painful it was to find out she was half white, and how her blonde and light-eyed mother and family members had always thought of themselves as “racially black and ethnically Hispanic,” for whatever that’s worth.

Spoiler alert: it’s not worth a lot.

Sunny tried to put the best face on things by trumpeting the fact that she’s 7% indigenous Puerto Rican. And the dullards in the View audience applauded. “Yay, non-whiteness! Hooray!”

And sure, 7% is a lot, when compared to the .00001% Cherokee in Grandma Squanto’s background. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But we’re not buying it, Whitey! You’ve pushed this stupid, racist and tribalist binary of oppressors and oppressed for your whole life, and now it’s come back to bite you on the arse. The lily-white arse!

I almost developed a tiny bit of respect for Sunny though, when she stuck to her guns after this revelation, telling the View audience, “I still believe in reparations!”

For a moment I thought that she deserved a little credit, and wondered how she was going to figure out how much reparation money she owed to minorities, and how she was going to go about paying that.

But nope! Right after saying that she believes in reparations, she said, “So all of you can stop texting me saying that I’m a white girl, and don’t deserve reparations.”

So for all of you who have asked the eternal question, “How dumb is Sunny Hostin?” you now have your answer.

She’s so dumb that even though she now knows that she’s a multi-millionaire descendent of slave holders, she STILL thinks poor white people with no connection to slavery should pay HER reparations!

Hamas delenda est!