Shibboleths of Stupid

The men of Ephraim were called to arms, and they crossed to Zaphon and said to Jephthah, “Why did you cross over to fight against the Ammonites and did not call us to go with you? We will burn your house over you with fire.” 2 And Jephthah said to them, “I and my people had a great dispute with the Ammonites, and when I called you, you did not save me from their hand. 3 And when I saw that you would not save me, I took my life in my hand and crossed over against the Ammonites, and the Lord gave them into my hand. Why then have you come up to me this day to fight against me?” 4 Then Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and fought with Ephraim. And the men of Gilead struck Ephraim, because they said, “You are fugitives of Ephraim, you Gileadites, in the midst of Ephraim and Manasseh.” 5 And the Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. And when any of the fugitives of Ephraim said, “Let me go over,” the men of Gilead said to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” When he said, “No,” 6 they said to him, “Then say Shibboleth,” and he said, “Sibboleth,” for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and slaughtered him at the fords of the Jordan. At that time 42,000 of the Ephraimites fell. 7 Jephthah judged Israel six years. Then Jephthah the Gileadite died and was buried in his city in Gilead.

Judges 12:1-7 (ESV)

The word “shibboleth” comes from this passage in the Bible. It is a word that those in the tribe can say and others cannot.

Every group has words foreign to outsiders—words the others cannot say or will not say. These words set people apart as inside or outside the tribe.

In postmodern Marxist thought, shibboleths give power. The existing powerful people say things, and the way to reverse power is to shut them up and say new things. Get everyone saying the grass is blue and the sky is green, and pretty soon, the sane people are the ones who look crazy.

As I have written before, progressives exist on the left and right. They are about the acquisition and control of power, not ideas. Power is the only idea, and they will say and do anything to gain that power. Part of using that power is tribal control and identity.

Thus, we come to people on the right tied to MAGA now screaming that the government is steering a hurricane to Florida.

To be clear, most of them do not believe it. Some of them are morons and do.

They’ve taken the idea of cloud seeding, a geoengineering technology, and conflated it with experimental, unproven, and/or alleged technology, added in a few old patent ideas that were filed by cranks and have conjured the idea of goverment control of hurricanes. They reject manmade climate change but embrace manmade hurricane control.

Led by, of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene, they are loudly insisting that Hurricanes Helene and Milton were conjured by the government and steered towards the Southeast United States during hurricane season to suppress or kill Trump voters to steal the election.

Here’s the tell that we are dealing with idol-worshipping progressives.

One of the very first thoughts uttered by these people was not for the care and concern of American citizens in harm’s way but for the potential to deny them power politically. They made it about Trump and the election. That was their primary reaction.

You need to understand that they don’t care about the truth. They are trying to separate the true believers from everyone else. If you are willing to embrace the absurd with a straight face, you’re on the inside. You can say shibboleth.

If you are unwilling to embrace it, you are on the outside. It is a very Marxist behavior.

They have no guiding ideology and no real principles. They want power. Like progressives on the left, the progressives on the right are willing to grow and wield government power to reward their friends and punish their enemies. And, increasingly, their enemies are those unwilling to side with the absurd idea that the government is conjuring hurricanes to steal elections.

This is, needless to say, unhealthy, and yes, again, this is a rightwing equivalent to the absurd leftwing progressive demands that we refer to girls as boys and, upon transition, retroactively embrace that Caitlyn Jenner always was. The pregnant girl in the movie Juno was actually played by a boy all along.

Often, Christians who are politically aligned with the right will look at Romans 1 and think of the sexual proclivities of the left.

21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Romans 1:21-23 (ESV)

What you need to understand is that the dramatic shift towards foolishness, lust, and mythology does not know earthly ideological parameters. It will happen across the spectrum of people, and we are watching it happen in real-time, including here, as people have given up the worship of God for power. They seek a political savior for spiritual problems and what they’ve done is embrace the spirit of the age as they reject the Holy Spirit.

All of life is theological, whether you acknowledge it or not. When a person gives up the sound theology of God and His sovereignty, they begin to utter the shibboleths of the stupid. As Paul warned Timothy, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” 2 Timothy 4:3 (ESV)