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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (27084)	6/13/2012 3:56:34 AM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 69300

This part is amusing --> American fundamentalism has one huge problem which is that the United States is nowhere pre-figured in the Bible. It worries them a lot, they keep trying to find it there, they try to interpret prophecies to refer to the United States, but they can't succeed - even to their own satisfaction - in getting it to come out right. Enter Mormons & Joseph Smith who looks into his hat containing the magic "seeing stones" & of course the obligatory Angel sent just for him for that ever important direct link-up from above . Problem solved , for here's a new "revelation" that the the Garden of Eden was in Louisianna & we find that the true believers all migrated here to discover America 3,000yrs earlier (sorry Leif Erikson) carrrying the real Bible & true testament of some shallow fanastical historical code with them . Sailing all the way from Palestine on a never-never land adventure , ships filled the chosen people , who had the golden tablets dictated by God and you can be a part of this holy Hallelujah hoooey just place your order today ! But all about invention mixed with obvious scantily hidden literary plagiarism of earlier James Bible, born out of the imagination of some 19th century Peter Pan who grew up in a rural fundamentalist revival in America who's living was made searching for buried treasure & grew up filled with fantasies of swashbuckling pirate stories . Memes feed on earlier memes , the heroic & religious themes . What is thought is knowledge codified by picking & choosing the prophets who's messages survive only for the lineage that survived & here the game is played of "connect the Oracles" & "pick the Prophets" which is as old as mankind itself . And who gets to pick the Prophets & choose the Saints was the way of demonstrating the truth of the power of the Holy unseen to that power one swore his allegience . Unfortunately & fortunately in the parade of human history this selection of who will be remembered & beautified and who demonized or excommunicated , this religiously based form of artificial selection has been blown assunder in the growing expanded modern secular world .

To: Solon who wrote (27084)	6/13/2012 4:10:54 AM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

"Tell me, what is it about Americans and religion? Why is it that religion, often very primitive forms of religion, is so powerful in perhaps the richest, most advanced, most consumerist nation on Earth?" HITCHENS: Why is the United States so prone to any kind of superstition, not just organized religion, but cultism, astrology, millennial beliefs, UFOs, any form of superstition? I've thought a lot about it. I read Harold Bloom's book The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992) about the evolution of what he thinks of as a specifically American form of religion. There was a book by Will Herberg in the 1950s called Protestant, Catholic, Jew where he speculated that what was really evolving was the American way of life as a religion. And that this was a way of life that wasn't at all spiritual or intellectual but in a sense believed that all religion was valid as long as it underpinned this way of life. Somehow religion was a necessary ingredient. In other words, religion was functional. I think that's true but it's not the whole story. In a country that very honorably and uniquely founded itself on repudiating that idea and saying the church and the government would always be separate, and also a country that many people came to in the hope of practicing their own religion, you have both free competition and a sense of manifest destiny. I think it's out of that sort of stew that you have all these bubbles. Chesterton used to say that, if people didn't have a belief in God, they wouldn't believe in nothing, they would believe in anything. The objection to that of course is that belief in God is believing in anything. But there's still a ghost of a point in there: if people are licensed to believe anything and call it spirituality, then they will. Hitchens was very bright , great stuff...

To: Solon who wrote (27084)	6/13/2012 4:52:50 AM
From: 2MAR$	Respond to of 69300

HITCHENS: Yes, she's a poster girl for the right-to-life wing in America. She was used as the example of Christian idealism and family values, of all things, by Ralph Reed - the front man of the Pat Robertson forces. That's a symptom of a wider problem that I call "reverse ecumenicism," an opportunist alliance between extreme Catholics and extreme Protestants who used to exclude and anathematize one another. Ralph Reed , Pat Robertson's deviant little frontman bobblehead , undoubtedly both heroic figures in the life of brumar here , can remember when they did pay some holy lip service to her but always Pat Robertson's thinly veiled contempt for any other denomination besides his own little sneering Pontificate would doom any such holy alliance from the start . Being the right hand of God on Earth leaves little room for any competitions. As it turned out our little manipulating Peter Pan, Ralph Reed representing the "Christian Coalition" had his own little fall from grace learning that he who casts stones should not do so when he's sleeping with the devil. In this case manipulating Christian voter base while later the steady revelations about his ties to convicted G.O.P. superlobbyist Jack Abramoff & Indian Casino scandals surfaced eroding his credibility . The Rise and Fall of Ralph Reed time.com his business ties to Abramoff, his friend from their days running the College Republicans in the early 1980s. For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal--a hypocrite. He had once called gambling a "cancer" on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn't help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington's system of "honest graft" was eager to be part of it. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.