Recovery is coming slowly. I think it all just caught up with me and I'm just coming out of a case of severe exhaustion. But it is getting better. Better enough that I actually decided to do a post on something that caught my eye this morning.
I've been maintaining for a while that one can find in just about any sacred text from any religious tradition something that will justify doing what you wanted to do anyway. There's a very good post at Mahablog that delves into this idea in more detail. The key comment:
Add things like patriotism to the mix and you get a good picture of phenomena such as the Tea Party movement, for which "America" is inextricably intertwined with "the Bible" and "the Constitution" without any clear concept of what those ideas entail. There's the same tendency to cherry-pick those parts that the devout want to follow and ignore those parts that don't fit the agenda. Thus we find egregious assholes like Joe the Plumber coming out with comments like "your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
Unfortunately, in any viable society, they do.
Read the whole post at Mahablog. I may come back to this later, after I've done some more thinking.
I've been maintaining for a while that one can find in just about any sacred text from any religious tradition something that will justify doing what you wanted to do anyway. There's a very good post at Mahablog that delves into this idea in more detail. The key comment:
When we hear about violence associated with religion, we tend to think that religion caused someone to be violent. But it isn’t that simple. Most of the time, when you look closely at “religious” violence, there are all kinds of historical, cultural and political factors mixed in as well. This is true even of episodes like the Spanish Inquisition that appeared to be about doctrinal purity; much else lurked beneath the surface. Indeed, most of the time the historical, cultural and political factors are the real drivers of the violence, and religion is called in mostly to act as a moral cover or justification.
Add things like patriotism to the mix and you get a good picture of phenomena such as the Tea Party movement, for which "America" is inextricably intertwined with "the Bible" and "the Constitution" without any clear concept of what those ideas entail. There's the same tendency to cherry-pick those parts that the devout want to follow and ignore those parts that don't fit the agenda. Thus we find egregious assholes like Joe the Plumber coming out with comments like "your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
Unfortunately, in any viable society, they do.
Read the whole post at Mahablog. I may come back to this later, after I've done some more thinking.
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