Let's Talk the F-word (Faith): It's O.K. to believe in invisible beings--but only if you're Arianna

Otherwise, watch it. Arianna Huffington, who shamelessly exploits each and every item that might bring readers to her comment forums in hot-headed form (but who is otherwise the model of web-lisitc integrity), is up to her usual nonsense with Will Hill Kill Bill for Lying About Iraq? Her piece begins, "I'm hearing that Hillary is ready to kill Bill. But it has nothing to do with his roving eye -- and everything to do with his Rovian lie."

Elegantly-written trash, yes. But trash is trash. You know, I once thought that Huff-style liberals wrote this way in ironic response to O'Reilly, Goldberg, and Coulter, but anymore I'm afraid they're operating under a double standard--namely, that such cheap journalism is fine if the left does it, and not so fine from the right. Naturally, I'd love to believe that the left has higher standards than their ideological enemies, but Huff-Po has, for me, pretty much shit on that illusion.

To date, Arianna's major insult to fair play has been been her practice of throwing believers to the raving, faith-hating lunatics in her audience (gotta get those numbers--the pop-up advertisers insist on it), only to turn around and reveal that she, herself--that is, Arianna--believes in some kind of God herself. As in, the old-fashioned, invisible-being-type God. Her New-Agey reasoning for believing in God the Daddy has something to do with how we dare not believe that science is all, that's there's Nothing Out There. (I'm paraphrasing her twaddle.) We need to believe in Something More. It's like something out of the second grade, only written by someone with a mild gift for prose.

I've always wanted to type "worded her twaddle in babble."

Believing in some Invisible Something Out There is apparently O.K. for progressives to do, but NOT for evangelical Christians (and, by extension, all Christians, because in Huff-Po Land, all Christians are evangelicals). I hope you were able to keep up all the logic there.

To review, Arianna routinely plays host to snarky and classist ridiculing of believers. Then she writes about how it's O.K. to believe, so long as you do it like Arianna or the late Norman Mailer. I'm happy to report she's gotten a fair amount of comment-section bashing over this, but not nearly enough, because she's also gotten an equal share of compliments from the site's ass-kissers.

I guess I'll have to link to her vapid essay. Fear of Faith.

Note Arianna's inane thesis (a false and self-serving dichotomy): "In the twentieth century, the response to fear-filled religiosity has been atheism and fear-filled alienation from all things spiritual." This false, nothing assertion sets things up for her to promote a middle ground--a response that lies between "fear-filled religiosity" and the other extreme. Never mind that members of the latter extreme are periodically given the run of Arianna's blog. Which might suggest to them that she really doesn't have an issue with their stance, after all.

Her middle-ground response? (Let's see.) Oh, here we are. It doesn't amount to a bubble in the bathtub, but here it is: "Without faith in a higher order and the existence of something outside ourselves and our everyday lives, life can become emotionally unbearable and filled with fear."

Again, woe be the "evangelicals" (Huff-Po's word for Christians) who believe in "a higher order and the existence of something outside ourselves and our everyday lives." We are brainless, critically clueless, mob-oriented, victims of groupthink, pawns of the right, and we don't clip our toenails except for special occasions.

On the other hand, if you're someone with no thoughts of her own but a certain ability to write, AND you hang with the progressive crowd and flash a model's smile on TV, it's O.K. to believe in something supernatural. Logical, even. Smart, too.

We lefties need Arianna on our side. To remind us of what our side's positions sound like when drained of all integrity.


Lee