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Edited on Wed Dec-01-04 07:44 PM by KoKo01
I wasn't quite sure where to post this. But one of my Repug Religious Fundies that I converted to vote for Kerry is in a total state of Rebellion thinking he should never have voted Dem..because we let him down..and he's in a battle with his Religious Fundie Father who lives in Georgia and is a sucessful Dentist who doesn't believe in anything unless Rush, O'Lielly or Fox says it's true. This "Editorial" from this website is fantastic...please read it!!!!! And, check out the incredible website! ===================================================================== From the Director: "The Jesus Seminars" coming to you! An Advocate for Religious Literacy..The election results of 2 November 2004 make it clear that Westar has not fulfilled its promise to raise the literacy level in American society. Whatever your politics, you will have to admit that the fundamentalists and moralists carried the day. 'Moral values' undergirded by Christian conviction drove the debate and decided the election. Those values, unfortunately tell us a great deal about the righteous right and its real values.
In his New York Times editorial on 3 November 2004, Garry Wills announced that election day was the day the Enlightenment in America went out. The torch of the great American secular tent was snuffed out. It is now clear that a minority of evangelical Americans want to dictate what the rest of us believe and how to act. The wall separating church and state has been breached and is in danger of being torn down. It will be a sad day and the end of the republic if that were to happen.
Garry Wills asks: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" He is referring of course to the poll that indicated 83% of Americans believe in the virgin birth, while only 29% believe in evolution. That statistic indicates, among other things, that the dogma of the virgin birth has become a secular artifact rather than merely a Christian dogma. But it also indicates how scientifically illiterate Americans have become. And it tells us once again how woefully ignorant the general population is of the advances in biblical and theological scholarship since Copernicus.
The tenor of the political campaign reveals another troubling aspect of the current climate: the loss of civility. The campaign was down and dirty. Negative ads were apparently effective. Only John McCain complained about the attack on his Vietnam record. The decline of civility is reflected prominently in much of current TV programming, which appeals to the lowest elements in human societies. In that element, pornographic reporting, emotional demonstrations, shouting matches, name calling, and worse are exceedingly common. The presidential rhetoric and ad exchanges were mostly at the level of Jerry Springer and even Oprah. And the Congress, too, seems to have given up decorum for name calling and foul language. The Vice President seems especially good at it.
A third huge factor in the election campaign was the secret conviction, on the part of most Americans, that they too will someday be millionaires. The burst of the dot.com bubble does not seem to have burst the bubble of that dream. These unfounded utopian aspirations are no doubt the product of more than a half-century of unrelieved affluence. People in America and in all industrialized societies have become extravagantly self-indulgent. Americans in particular have become soft. We embrace the comfort of plenty and endorse the false self-esteem that comes with self-assigned moral superiority.
In the corporate world, the bottom line gets shorter, now down to one quarter and often one month. There seems to be little concern for market share, quality of product, customer satisfaction and service, and the long term prospects of the company. CEOs and CFOs have only one goal: to make themselves rich. Laborers tend to adopt similar interests: money, fringe benefits, coffee breaks, vacation time, retirement. Too often there is little or no concern for product and company integrity.
Current corporate culture is driven by the prospect of instant riches, ethics be damned. Think of the energy crisis and the collapse of Enron. Think of the enrichment of Halliburton through the Iraq crisis. Recall Tyco and even poor Martha Stewart sitting in her prison cell. The corporate disease threatens to upend capitalism. If the evangelicals are so concerned about moral values, where is there criticism of the reverse Robin Hood strategy: rob the poor to enhance the rich?
Americans are undoubtedly full of fear. No one in the campaign, on either side, advocated that Americans should go quietly about their lives, uncowed and unsullied by the terrorist threat. Reverting to fundamentalist assurances that God is in his heavens and all will be right with the world if we just embrace the moral convictions of the traditionalists is a way of hiding fear under the bushel of theistic reassurance. God does not send the rain on the just and unjust alike; God favors the just, especially if they are Americans.
Weak self-identity prompts people to flock to cults, to fundamentalisms, as a way of ascertaining their identities. We wear T-shirts and display license plates and bumper stickers to identify us because we do not know who we are.
Weak self-identity is betrayed in the text of so many issues with a sexual subtext. The Christian right believes that gay marriages will undermine the sanctity of marriage. Hey, I thought the divorce rate and the two-income family had already done that. I thought that the liberation of women was responsible for the decline of traditional marriages.
In a related trend, the Roman Catholic bishops insist that abortion and euthanasia are not negotiable, but keep silent about the priestly abuse of children in the sacred precincts of the church. The church still opposes contraception, although the vast majority of members practice it. We are deeply indebted to Augustine for this jaundiced view of sex that plagues our society.
The political campaign was a clarion call for us in Westar to reclaim the Bible, the Christian and Jewish legacies, and the moral high ground. We can do by salvaging the liberal legacy, practicing civility, becoming uncompromising advocates of economic and social justice, reestablishing an exchange with the sciences, reuniting the churches with their own creative scholarship, and expanding the parameters of our community as radically inclusive.
— Robert W. Funk, Director
Westar Institute
Santa Rosa, California
3 November 2004 See a list of articles on this site
See a list of book excerpts on this site
The Link to this Site:
http://www.westarinstitute.org/index.html========================================================================== |
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