"I guess if you base your religion on the torture and death of an innocent man then you probably shouldn’t have a problem with torture and death. Still, when 90% of your followers believe that waterboarding is ethical, then Jesus need to come down and kick some serious ass.
I’m so furious I can barely type."
Wow--learn something new every day. Not only didn't I know that my religion was based on the torture and death of an innocent man, it stuns me learn to 90 percent of my kind think waterboarding is ethical. Paul's proof? A poll at OneNewsNow, where (when I checked, at least) nearly 85 percent of respondents disagreed with a "high profile Baptist leader" named Richard Land, who feels waterboarding is wrong. According to onenewsnow.com, Land is one of "a growing chorus of religious leaders" who do. But 85 percent of OneNewsNow respondents aren't with Richard. (I voted with the mere 9.16 percent who are.)
Is that 85 percent rate very surprising? Well, consider the Pew poll which revealed that 71 percent of the public is okay with torture to some extent. Kind of puts things into perspective a little, no? And consider the fact that OneNewsNow.com "is part of the American Family News Network, an offshoot of the American Family Association founded by arch-religious right conservative Donald Wildmon," according to Salon.com. Would we expect a low rate of support for waterboarding at such a site?
And why would someone assume that such views are those of the Christian community at large, blatant assholes though we may be? Thanks, Paul, for presuming that my views are in alignment with people whose social and religious views differ from mine in any number of vital respects. But I guess Jesus is going to kick my ass along with the others'.
At any rate, I don't support waterboarding at all, ever. Not even for people who misrepresent my most cherished beliefs.
The blatant stereotyping of whole groups of human beings seems to be a trend, anymore, on the cyber-left, though I wish it weren't so. I wrote earlier about the Social-Darwinistic mentality of the neo-atheist crowd, in which their brand of "logic" and "reason" constitutes, in their humble view, the only path of hope for the species. Well, those folks seem to have taken over the cyber-wing of the Democratic Party. When it's not someone assuming I'm a fanatical apologist for Bush because I suggest that church/state separation still stands firm in spite of anything the guy did, then it's someone concluding I support public-school prayer because I point out that "no law respecting" means "no law in regard to."
Never mind that I gave neither person any reason to think I'm a Bush apologist or supporter of public-school prayer (and every reason to conclude otherwise)--apparently, anything short of a loud, lock-step party-line declaration isn't good enough.
Progressivism will cease to have a future the moment it turns into a series of pledges. Sameness of thinking shouldn't be the goal--uniting people around a common cause or series thereof, yes--but recited values are simply words. I'm beginning to think that the Internet is accelerating the devolution of our language into mere word units. Maybe it's the say-it-quick nature of cyber-writing, though I suspect it's context that loses its power on the Net, given the medium's unprecedented ability to slice and dice whatever tries to pass through it (text, picture, sound, etc.). Context is the glue that holds ideas together, that forms the basis for meaningful comparison and contrast.
Just as numbers, when divorced from Math, become magical symbols, don't words follow suit when divorced from the higher language of context? This may be what we're witnessing.
No comments:
Post a Comment