If DaVinci had painted it, he'd have called it the Jonah Lisa.
Via TBogg, we see that Poppin' Fresh is staying true to his usual high standards of informed discourse.
I think JPod's point is basically right, but I think it misses an aspect of the American political landscape worth emphasizing. While the numbers of people who identify themselves to pollsters as agnostics and atheists is demonstrably small — as John demonstrated — I think the number of people who are closet agnostics is probably much larger. I also suspect that a very large number of people suffer from cognitive dissonance and think they believe in God but at the same time live their lives on a daily basis as if they do not. I don't have evidence handy at the moment, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. And I think this reality results in a lot of people disliking or resenting authentically religious people for a constellation of reasons, high among them envy. And that has very real consequences on our political debates even though, according to the polls, our culture wars are between God-believers of the left and God-believers of the right.
Keep in mind that while The Corner may feebly attempt to posture as some sort of breezy middle-management table talk at some exurban strip-mall Appleby's, Goldberg actually gets paid for his opinions, and not just in Riblets™. Think about that for a second, ponder what you do to make a living, and figure whether he's working too hard for his money. He must get paid either by the baseless assertion, or the inadvertent confession that he doesn't really know what he's talking about, because he does both with such regularity, like rhetorical Metamucil.
We don't envy "authentically religious people", we simply want them and their counterfeit brethren to piss up a rope and mind their own damned business already. Seriously folks, we're not impressed at your righteousness, and we're not envious of your purity. We don't care. The stupid culture crusades keep regenerating because that's all the god-botherers have so that's all they keep returning to, like the proverbial dog to his vomit.
Perhaps Bush could take a semantic lesson from Duh Pantload; instead of prefacing his next baldfaced lie with "British intelligence has learned", he could just say "I don't have evidence handy at the moment, but I'm pretty sure I'm right", and have done with it. That's basically what he's been doing the whole time anyway.
Hey Craig, good to see you. Still gotta get down to pub and grab a pitcher, one of these eons.
ReplyDeleteIt's a funny coincidence that you mention your grandmother as an "authentically religious" person in your formative years, because that's exactly how it was for me. My grandmother was sort of the center of my (rather extensive) family as well, and while she was the only one with any declared religious beliefs, she didn't feel the need to evangelize too terribly much. Some light churchin' for the younguns just to get some formalized moral grounding into their heads, but most all of us got out of that before our teens. Even just a generation ago, it really was a different time.
The main difference -- and this is exactly how the Democratic Party needs to start approaching this issue -- is that it's a political issue, not religious. Religion is merely the fulcrum of organization which these hucksters and grifters use to leverage their political will.
The only true solution is pretty much the same as for the War On Some Drugs -- tax it, regulate it, monitor it. Once you take the money out of it, most of the problem will disappear overnight.
Which is why it will never happen, which is why it's so crucial that we hellbound secular heathens start getting on the same page and working together. Cynically genuflecting to them for a sliver of voting points is just a monumental waste of time.