Now this is more like what I was expecting yesterday: overblown Christian hysteria in reaction to Election Day’s free reality check. Writing for forbes.com, Bill Flax weeps and wails over the imminent demise of Biblical Christianity in America.
And it’s all a terrible misunderstanding. Christians never wanted a culture war, you see. They just wanted to be left alone. If only those mean old liberals had just given them the chance to stay quiet and neutral on issues of society and morality.
In the election’s aftermath, the culture war looks like a rout. Few ever relished this fight; most preferred simply to be left alone. We aren’t community organizers. Sadly, neutrality was not realistic. No, being Switzerland was never an option. By not defending America’s heritage of limited government, free markets and biblical morality, we’re being overrun a la Belgium.
Yes, those poor disorganized believers who were barely able to raise billions of dollars and initiate successful drives to add anti-gay amendments to the constitutions of roughly two-thirds of the states in the Union—they aren’t community organizers. They’ve never defended limited government, free markets, or biblical morality. They’re all just weak and helpless victims here.
Come on, work with me on this one.
And who is to blame for this horrifying and tragic outcome? A dark and sinister organization known as…”The Left.”
Powerful forces array. Christians consider this battle in spiritual terms. Conservatives sense a political donnybrook. Others deplore eroding standards of conduct and lost liberty. The Left vies for our children’s hearts, souls and minds. While no majority, progressives dominate the dissemination of thought. The mainstream media, entertainment industries, education system and much of government skew very far left.
Yes, darn Fox News and all those other mainstream media folks for forcing their leftist views onto innocent viewers. Sure, mainstream media is one of those free markets things we’re supposed to be in favor of, where advertising revenues are tied directly to viewer ratings, and where the successful programs are the ones that deliver what viewers really want. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still blame the media for the direction society is headed. Or, you know, education. Whatever.
Take same-sex “marriage.” Shifting attitudes reflect in part, an academic establishment inculcating progressive cloud dancing. It’s rotten that Hollywood mocks the “Modern Family” then thrusts “666 Park Ave” in primetime, but TV can be tuned out. Regardless of your opinion on marriage, public schools on taxpayers’ dime have directly assailed what had been deeply held convictions of most parents.
Clearly, there should be a ban on academic inculcating, and probably on public schools as well. And… well, you get the idea. Flax’s jeremiad just goes on and on in a depressively manic and disjointed gabble of finger pointing, dire warnings, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth. If he was sober when he wrote it, he did a damn good job of hiding it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go see what I can do to help inculcate progressive cloud dancing. No clue what that means, but hey, if it cuts down on the bigotry…
Heh. The centre looks like the far left to the far right.
Biblical Christianity (TM) will lose its struggle “for our childrens hearts and minds” mainly because it is batshit crazy and the things it says are demonstrably false.
I love the movie “Reefer Madness”. A bunch of right wing christian folk make a propoganda movie completely divorced from reality. They reason that even though its not a representation of the truth about pot, that lying to scare kids away from it is for [cultist_voice]THE GREATER GOOD[/cultist_voice].
Kids try pot, discover that they dont become insane whackjobs from just one puff, and promptly ignore everything their elders say on the subject.
The christian right will lose the fight on their own because they are actively fighting against reality. They shoot a new reefer madness every single day. Say it with me now, religites:
[cultist_voice]THE GREATER GOOD… THE GREATER GOOD… THE GREATER GOOD[/cultist_voice].
But what if you really are a Utilitarian.
“biblical Christianity”: what the Christian wants to believe his god really really meant whilst ignoring those parts that are inconvenient. 2. the thousands of various sects of Christianity that do not agree with each other, each having no more evidence of being true than the next.
see hypocrisy, willful ignorance
When a person starts with using “The Great Book of Multiple Choice” as a moral guide, there can be no agreement. The book itself is so inconsistent that it cannot be a source of any moral code without serious cherry picking. This is true for fundamentalists and liberals alike. There can be no such thing as “Biblical Christianity” that believers will ever agree upon.
I was at a wedding recently. There was a religious ceremony in which the couple exchanged their vows. At the end of this can the most important part where the pastor signed the paperwork associated with the marriage license. No matter what ceremony one has, in the end it is all about a legal contract between two people. Without the signed contract, there is no marriage. God,its church and the bible are irrelevant to anything beyond tradition.
It takes a warped mentality to see the current right of center president as a crazed liberal.
Actually, a marriage is a contract between *three* parties. You, your spouse, and the State. That’s why you need a license to establish one and a court order to dissolve one.
“Right” and “Left” have largely lost their meaning. Now it’s just two rival gangs fighting for control of the State. No matter which party holds the White House or a majority in Congress, the ratchet keeps clicking toward more laws, more surveillance, more of the GNP absorbed by government, and more concentration of the nation’s wealth into fewer hands.
Americans once went to war with a superpower because (among many other grievances), its King had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
Your libertarian canting is tiresome, Steve R. Not all laws are equal, nor is the government’s use of a significant portion of the GDP intrinsically a problem. These depend on what laws are passed, and what the government does with the money and production it uses. Proposals for increased surveillance and further concentrations of wealth are not being pushed by both the right and the left, but only by the right. You may be confusing “Left” with “Democratic Party” which could be the source of your confusion. Many politicians elected as Democrats are still legislating from the right, not the left. So spare us the “Both sides are equally bad’ nonsense and grow the hell up.
What left?
The US Democratic Party is to the right of the British Conservative Party. The US Republican Party is to the right of the British National Party.
Even the US Green party is to the right of the British Green Party.
That is in essence the problem you have. How the fuck could anyone vote against free medicine?
I somehow managed to read the last few words as “rending of teeth and gnashing of garments” and had to go back and read it again. I kind of like it my way!
Heh, it is better that way.
I love how specific he is about the liberal assault on Biblical Christianity (BTW: is there a nonbiblical Christianity?).
Equality for gays.
You can truncate that a little bit.
Equality.
Biblical Christianity is against equality.
Say it over and over and over again. Biblical Christianity is against equality.
That’s why it lost. That’s why it’s going to continue to lose.
40 or so years ago, it was extremely rare to see a mixed-race marriage. After all, that’s what the movie “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” was all about. How darned rare it was, and the potential horrible prospects that could be expected for a white girl to marry a rich, well-educated, highly paid black man. HORRORS!!!!!
Now? Meh. Watch that movie and tell me it doesn’t feel positively medieval.
That’s way ‘teh gay’ has become with today’s young adults and those coming after them. It’s just a fact of life, no different from Obama being the child of a mixed marriage.
50 years from now, the “Biblical Christians” will be telling us they were for gay rights all along.
Even nowadays, some southern churches kick out mixed race couples
sickening
50 years from now, the “Biblical Christians” will be telling us they were for gay rights all along.
Indeed; they certainly like to claim they were responsible for ending slavery – while conveniently forgetting one of the chief organisations fighting to keep it was the church.
I’m not sure that ‘limited government and free markets’ are even compatible with Biblical Christianity. The Old Testament (for a while) proscribes a theocracy (when it’s possible) but otherwise, the New Testament is fairly apathetic politically, basically just telling people to shut up and pay taxes, and I’m sure most of that revenue went to finance the Roman occupation.
Overall, this stuff is dying the way that anything else that isn’t based in reality and doesn’t get results is dying. It might take a while for the masses to reject bad ideas, but educated, intelligent people will be the first to dismiss nonsense which is why schools are no longer indoctrination mills for ‘traditional values.’
When people whine about their lost freedom, I’d like to see concrete examples, and then contrast this to how people outside of the historical norm fared.
In 50 years, it will have been their idea all along and the liberals opposed them.
“Cloud dancing” sounds like a fun activity you can do when you’re not weighed down by bitterness and hate.
Oh man, I had no idea things were so bad for these guys! Is it too late to help? Maybe we could start a telethon for these poor, disadvantaged people.
Given the fact that no one even knows how many Christian denominations there are, what “biblical Christianity” is, or is not, isn’t exactly clear.
What Biblical Christianity?
It would be interesting to see how Flax would react if he had to live even a month in a country like England or Canada, and saw how even the right wing in those countries governs in a way he’d denounce as left wing.
It’s funny that he mentioned 665 Park Avenue. A show that he probably never watched, just like the majority of US TV viewers didn’t, leading to its quick cancellation. A bunch of the ones that did watch it didn’t hang around, but it’s hard not to suspect many potential viewers stayed away simply because of the 666 part.
Shorter AIG:
You atheists are awful, sad, evil people. So you should totally give us money.