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December 03, 2003
Religious wars suck!
This story furnishes more evidence (as if more evidence is needed) that politics is becoming a religious war. Want to know how Americans will vote next Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before.Of course, the damned "Culture War" is largely also a religious war. And (according to an evangelical leader quoted in the Boston Globe) that means a war between religion and sex -- especially homosexual sex and fundamentalist Christianity. Homosexuality is a defining issue for evangelicals, Chang says, because "it calls into question what the authority is governing your beliefs and your group. Is it changing public opinion or is it Scripture?" He argues that the debate is really a table-setter for the biggest issues to come, when genetic cloning and manipulation of human biology take center stage. "At root is: Do we all have the right to self-define?"Win the war? Hey, I thought the war was in Iraq! Now it's (yes!) a war over definitions! The bottom line, according to an increasingly large, constantly growing number of people, is that we have a religious war right here in the United States. Party of God versus Party of Secular Heathenism? (And if you don't fit, about all you can do is get all pissed off and blog.) Is religious war in the United States a good thing? I have complained about it from day one, and I can't stand it. I want it to stop. I want the Republicans to go back to being decent, civilized human beings who believed that Americans' privacy was their own business and not that of government. Religious wars should be fought somewhere else, because religion is personal. Hey, isn't sex supposed to be personal too? I can remember the time when both religion and sex were personal. But now, even the most personal things we do are everyone else's business -- and therefore the business of government. Last night I posted (as a long update) an email from a man named Vernon Robinson who clearly thinks heavy-handed fundamentalist religious views must be promoted, aided and abetted by government. Prominent, mainstream Republicans are backing him. The philosophy appears to be that it's OK for him to be doing that, especially because his anti-sex pitch masquerades as minority self-help: For instance, the greatest threat facing young blacks today has nothing to do with white racism or displaying the Confederate flag - it is ILLEGITIMACY, which has reached a shameful 71% among American blacks.And that's just a "for instance." Liberals, on the other hand, tend to see the problem not as requiring Bible-based penis control, but gun control. I do not countenance social engineering of either the "conservative" or the "liberal" variety. That it must be excused because it happens to be directed towards black people strikes me as patronizing in the extreme. Black people are not children -- any more than the American people are children. Unless, of course you think that we're all in a vast national kindergarten -- or that the American people are all a bunch of sheep in need of a shepherd. I don't. And I am staying on the "anti" side of this detestable "Culture War." Sex versus religion is a false dichotomy -- at least as false as guns versus penises. The whole Culture War stinks. Definitely un-American.
[which] authority is governing your beliefs and your group. Is it changing public opinion or is it Scripture?"Changing public opinion" versus "the Scripture"? "Governing" my beliefs? People like that really think Americans are sheep to be led. Putting aside the issue of what "Scripture" is or how it is to be interpreted, "public opinion" does not and should not "govern" the beliefs of any free American. A classic false dichotomy; a non-choice being cast as the only "choice." Right there, staring me in the face. And I missed it! (Well it was early this morning, and I was feeling rushed....) posted by Eric on 12.03.03 at 08:00 AM |
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Excellent, once again. Yes, I do have the right to define myself. And, yes, sex and religion are synonymous for me, not opposites. As to that false alternative "Scripture or public opinion?" I answer: _my_ opinion, drawing upon the mythic wisdom of the ancients, before Christianity. I reject the premise, so prevalent in our culture today, that any pro-sex, pro-homosexual viewpoint has to be relativistic and "fuzzy" while the anti-sex side is conceded a monopoly on absolutes and dogmas, the enemies of passion a monopoly on passion. "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity..." at which point the best cease to be any good.
Seeing how the gun-banners love to sneer at guns as "macho" phallic symbols, they, too, are in the business of penis control (or castration) albeit through a somewhat more indirect route.