Keeping a low profile will never let you down.

I was curious how many times in the blog the word “trump” would come up in Bart’s posts.

Since the naive measure of the information does take account of our expectations, I would recommend this procedure: count the ratio of posts in the blog from, let’s say 2015, to today and those with the word “trump” and compute the logarithm base two of the fraction between the information given after the count and before.

Anyway, you will find a lot of “trumped”, “trumpet”, “trumpet of God”, “trumping”, “trumped-up” lost in statements like “the Christians’ miracles trump the power of the pagan Gods” or “National Geographic didn’t want someone else’s account to trump their own which was made precisely in order to trump me in a public debate. “

In the last one, I feel Bart should be really proud of squeezing the word twice in the same phrase without sounding redundant.

There are seven posts where, instead, of trumpeting down, we are lucky and find the word, Trump, as President Donald Trump.

1) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

Bart is talking about how not Christian orthodox groups are depicted by their enemies and how possibly this view is presented twisted and not true. He affirms that we should very careful judging these accounts since we don’t have an independent record. Then he adds: ” That is not usually a safe guide to a person’s views, as we realize all so well from the political realm (if instead of Jesus’ birth you’re interested in Obama’s, I’m not sure the best source is Donald Trump….”

The first thing to notice, at least for Grammar Nazis, are the four dots after Trump. Is this a casual event, or, instead of the three dots… four are used to stress the fact that Donald Trump has a very twisted way to take into account his opponents?

The post is dated 2015, and we have to say that Bart has foreseen the actual events, for instance when evidence undermines the Trump campaign’s claims of dead people voting in Georgia.

2) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

Bart is lamenting low sales of his book  Jesus Before the Gospels.

He feels and blames Trump for being too self-centric producing the lack of national media attention aside from politics.

“One thing that is certainly true about the current situation (not much speculation about this part of it) is that this precise moment in time is absolutely the worst to try to get media attention for anything unless you are talking about Donald Trump and the Republican meltdown. Every four years is a bad time to try to publish a bestselling book. And this particular year is uniquely awful. The media has other things it is obsessing with.

So the book is not getting the attention that I would like. But it’s no one’s fault. Well, OK, I do like to blame Trump for most things, so maybe I’ll do that.”

3) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

“You don’t need to take my word for it. Suppose you wanted to reconstruct Hillary Clinton’s domestic and foreign policies from the speeches of Donald Trump. How close would you be to knowing what she has really proposed?

Tertullian was no less vitriolic than Trump. And so using his writings is very, very tricky. But as I’ve said, scholars with all the linguistic skills (e.g., in both Latin and Greek) have worked very hard on the issue.”

The citation is similar to point 1). Bart says the work of Marcion is completely lost, so we have to lay on his opponent’s words and sparse quotations. To note that this time an adjective related to Trump’s speech is underlined, a quality is attached: “vitriolic .”

4) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

In this post we see a word pun, but from Jeff Siker.

“Christians are called to be faithful, not necessarily successful. Sometimes faith and hope prevail (Obama) and sometimes they don’t (Trump!). It rains on the just and the unjust alike. “

But from a question in the same blog:

“It really cheapened the rest of his response, just as the references to the 2d Amendment did an earlier blog post. It really is a good idea to avoid politics on this blog, as you will probably manage to offend about half of your donors with whatever position you take. If I wanted a steady diet of this stuff, there are lots of free political sites that say it much better.”

Bart, solomonic, answered: “I can’t speak for Jeff Siker, but I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say about the second amendment. […].”

5) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

Bart states that our subjectivity makes it impossible for us to be objective, that’s why political and religious views are not purely a function of smarts:” There are some really smart people that I think are simply dead WRONG when it comes to Cheney, Trump, Clinton, Obama, Jesus, Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, and Joel Osteen. Well, OK, not so much with Joel Osteen.”

6) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

This is the most problematic post from what shown before, since Bart says, about posting published books, articles, essays, or poems from his readers: “NOTE: I will NOT be posting anything that is inflammatory or irrelevant, for example, an essay devoted to pleading for the removal of Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi from office; or […]. 

7) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

 Bart reminds that it is only in modern (fundamentalist) times that “counting” people’s name up to 666, the number of the “Beast,” has been fashionable.

“Need I mention Donald Trump? (If you spell “Donald J. Trump, the Evil King,” in Hebrew, and add up the numerical equivalents of the letters, with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet being 1, the second 2, etc., the phrase adds up to 666. Moreover, Trump was elected in 2016 = 666+666+666+6+6+6.)”

P.S.

The posts are in ascending order.