Sunday, May 10, 2009
The Year of Mark Twain
When the goal of a political party is to establish a quasi-theocratic, national security police state, permanently at war with Muslim enemies without & atheist enemies within, it's difficult for it to settle for anything less. It becomes a magnet for ideologues, bigots, bulliies, & religious fanatics, & if you don't qualify as one or more of those you aren't welcome.
They dream up stuff like this: H. CON. RES. 121
Encouraging the President to designate 2010 as ‘The National Year of the Bible".
Co-sponsored by Republiban backbenchers, carefully worded with truisms, some non sequiturs, it serves no purpose but to please the local party ultrareligious base &, they hope, embarrass the President in their home districts.
The old Christian far right is having problems accepting three things:
1. They lost the election for both president & congress.
2. President Obama is toning down state religious observance to the traditional place it held prior to Ronald Reagan's deal with Moral Majority. He's comfortable doing this because
3. the adjustment is overdue, & Barack Obama, at age 47, is well within the cultural & religious mainstream of adult Americans between the ages of 21 & 60. That's one reason why he's so personally popular. He, like most educated, middle class, mainline believers, is not dogmatic.
2010 is the 100th Anniversary of the death of Mark Twain (or as I prefer, the year he rode away on Halley's Comet). Also Tolstoy.
***
America has changed. I like to believe that if Thomas Jefferson were alive in a later era, Monticello would be hosting Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Bahais, Taoists, Sikhs, whomever the always-curious host could entice there for dinner conversation. The Dalai Lama? Definitely. I think those two would strike up a correspondence. Maybe even a Pope or two, after they began accepting some fait accompli results of the European Enlightenment. & it is the ideals of the European Enlightenment, not the scriptural Bible, that Jefferson would most defend at the dinner table, & then offer his guests a telescopic view of the University sprawling up the hill on the other side of the valley. "There's the new arena. Men's basketball sucked this year. Women were good."
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
They dream up stuff like this: H. CON. RES. 121
Encouraging the President to designate 2010 as ‘The National Year of the Bible".
Co-sponsored by Republiban backbenchers, carefully worded with truisms, some non sequiturs, it serves no purpose but to please the local party ultrareligious base &, they hope, embarrass the President in their home districts.
The old Christian far right is having problems accepting three things:
1. They lost the election for both president & congress.
2. President Obama is toning down state religious observance to the traditional place it held prior to Ronald Reagan's deal with Moral Majority. He's comfortable doing this because
3. the adjustment is overdue, & Barack Obama, at age 47, is well within the cultural & religious mainstream of adult Americans between the ages of 21 & 60. That's one reason why he's so personally popular. He, like most educated, middle class, mainline believers, is not dogmatic.
2010 is the 100th Anniversary of the death of Mark Twain (or as I prefer, the year he rode away on Halley's Comet). Also Tolstoy.
***
America has changed. I like to believe that if Thomas Jefferson were alive in a later era, Monticello would be hosting Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Bahais, Taoists, Sikhs, whomever the always-curious host could entice there for dinner conversation. The Dalai Lama? Definitely. I think those two would strike up a correspondence. Maybe even a Pope or two, after they began accepting some fait accompli results of the European Enlightenment. & it is the ideals of the European Enlightenment, not the scriptural Bible, that Jefferson would most defend at the dinner table, & then offer his guests a telescopic view of the University sprawling up the hill on the other side of the valley. "There's the new arena. Men's basketball sucked this year. Women were good."
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, blogging against theocracy, religion
