Obama’s new nominee to the Supreme Court has already made the right wing apoplectic, so she must be a good choice…and what little I’ve been able to read so far (I’ll look deeper into it tonight when the university releases its clutches on my time) she sounds like a good choice.
A good column by James Carroll in the Boston Globe criticizes the absurd piety being peddled in the military, especially the discovery of Iraq war briefings laced with militant Christianity. He lists 7 reasons why it is a bad idea that the military has become wrapped up in religious jingo.
Single-minded religious zealotry bedevils critical thinking, and not just about religion. Military and political thinking suffers when the righteousness of born-again faith leads to self-righteousness. Critical thinking includes a self-criticism of which the “saved” know little.
Military proselytizers use Jesus to build up “unit cohesion” by eradicating doubt about the mission, the command, and the self. But doubt – the capacity for second thought – is a military leader’s best friend. Commanders, especially, need the skill of skepticism – the opposite of true belief.
Otherworldly religion defining the afterlife as ultimate can undervalue the present life. Religion that looks forward to apocalypse, God’s kingdom established by cosmic violence, can help ignite such violence. Armageddon, no mere metaphor now, is the nuclear arsenal.
Religious fundamentalism affirms ideas apart from the context that produced them, reading the Bible literally or dogma ahistorically. Such a mindset can sponsor military fundamentalism, denying the context from which threats arise – refusing to ask, for example, what prompts so many insurgents to become willing suicides? Missing this, we keep producing more.
A military that sees itself as divinely commissioned can all too readily act like God in battle – using mortal force from afar, without personal involvement. An Olympian aloofness makes America’s new drone weapon the perfect slayer of civilians.
A bifurcated religious imagination, dividing the world between good and evil, can misread the real character of an “enemy” population, many of whom want no part of war with us.
The Middle East is the worst place in which to set loose a military force even partly informed by Christian Zionism, seeing the state of Israel as God’s instrument for ushering in the Messianic Age – damning Muslims, while defending Jews for the sake of their eventual destruction.
I read that and agreed with it all…except for one thing. Those criticisms don’t just apply to the military, they also apply to our civilian population. Maybe #5 is a bit of a stretch — most of us don’t have military drones at our disposal — but scale it down a bit, and picture a religious fanatic with a rifle aimed at an abortion doctor. It’s the same principle.
Strip away the specific references to the US military, and that whole thing is an argument that could have come straight from the keyboard of a New Atheist criticizing American culture in general.
I suppose it’s only a surprise that it took them this long, but Liberty University has shut down the college Democrats. They were able to put up with the existence of a few very conservative Democrats for a whole 6 months before pulling the plug.
Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.
“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.
Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.
According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.
Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.
“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.”
Yeah, right.
Well, I’m at a secular university, where our traditional values are built on the Enlightenment, open-mindedness, free inquiry, reason, and secular humanism. I guess I need to go down to the administration building on Tuesday and point out that we have a few organizations — the Young Republicans, Campus Crusade for Christ, etc. — that do not support our mission, and have them shut down.
Oh, dang, I forgot! We’re also committed to free speech (FOR REALZ), so we have to allow our students to express even weird ideas that are the antithesis of rational thought. Rats. I guess I just need to encourage all of our students to speak out on their own personal views in public and private argument.
President George W. Bush was a god-fearing child given control of our military apparatus…or perhaps he was a child manipulated by a military that found religion a convenient hook. Frank Rich describes the internal propaganda used during the war. What I find shocking is that Bush received regular intelligence briefings with covers that invoked a combination of G.I. Joe war imagery and militaristic bible verses.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
Well, now they’ve leaked. Here’s an example.
It’s appalling on so many levels: that Rumsfeld thought that polishing up his report with the jingoistic equivalent of a clear plastic binder would win him points; that it apparently worked; that religion was used to promote war in the White House; that it was used despite the fact that it could worsen our chances of success. And we still have Dick Cheney doing a cheerful media tour encouraging us to support torture, which really wasn’t torture, but if it was, it was good for us.
We lived under the rule of monsters for eight years. We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, we need to fight back in the courts to condemn these people and their actions.
I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. James Dobson gives up.
I want to tell you up front that we’re not going to ask you to do anything, to make a phone call or to write a letter or anything.
There is nothing you can do at this time about what is taking place because there is simply no limit to what the left can do at this time. Anything they want, they get and so we can’t stop them.
We tried with [Health and Human Services Secretary] Kathleen Sebelius and sent thousands of phone calls and emails to the Senate and they didn’t pay any attention to it because they don’t have to. And so what you can do is pray, pray for this great nation… As I see it, there is no other answer. There’s no other answer, short term.
Oh, no…wait. They’re going to start praying? Don’t do that! When they’ve got the power of their almighty god behind them, they’ll be unstoppable! Please, conservapublitards, don’t do that. Don’t spend all your time on your knees, praying. That would give you such an unfair advantage! Play fair!
The Republicans, apparently feeling that there are no other pressing matters of concern in the governance of our country, are pushing to designate 2010 as the Year of the Bible.
I may surprise you a little bit. I endorse this resolution…with a few caveats. I say the Democrats should vote this bill up as long as there is a little quid pro quo: the Republicans reciprocate by going along with the next couple of Supreme Court nominations Obama makes. Fair enough, I think.
Then, since 2010 is the Year of the Bible, we get to say that all subsequent years are Not the Year of the Bible, and be done with it.
(via Kos)
Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well.
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.
Pierce then goes through several sublime instances of American Idiocy: the Creation “Museum”, the Terry Schiavo case, the Dover creationism trial, the War on Terror, right-wing talk radio, climate change denialists, the Republican roster of candidates in the last presidential election…it’s terrifying and humbling that this country has so excelled at churning out such appalling stupidity. And, of course, he points out everywhere how our journalists simply gaze on approvingly, churning the chum and making money out of mindlessness. He uses one of my favorite (for a version of “favorite” flavored with schadenfreude) examples, the way the NY Times covered creationism and evolution, and especially that willing palimpsest, Jodi Wilgoren. Wilgoren, by the way, has since been promoted at the Times — I think for vacuity above and beyond the call of duty.
Lest you think Pierce is doing nothing but delivering a thunderation of his own, he also often reveals a fondness for the quirkiness of cranks and kooks — he clearly thinks they spice up American intellectual life. He even starts his book with the tale of a famous local kook, Ignatius Donnelly, a 19th century visionary who founded a utopian city on the banks of the Mississippi…a dream that failed dismally, after which he turned to writing bestsellers about Atlantis and Velikovskian (although he long preceded that crank) cometary catastrophes. He was a crank, but he was an entertaining crank, and most importantly, there was little risk that he could rise to run the country as president.
That’s the heart of the problem. Wild, loony ideas aren’t dangerous in themselves — what’s dangerous is when criticism is set aside and wacky ideas are given unquestioning acceptance and allowed to set the national agenda. It changes the dynamic: no longer do kooks have to work to get their voices heard, but the more insane their claims, the more likely they will be given media attention, promoted and passed around, given the imprimatur of authenticity because, well, Larry King featured them on his show.
What has America become? America has become an episode of The Office, where lovable assholes are put in charge to fumble their way along incompetently, coasting on the slack, disinterested efforts of their underlings. The show is a comedy, and it can be hilarious, in part because there is some stinging truth to it.
You won’t laugh very much at Idiot America, though. It’s too real.
Chris Matthews ask Representative Mike Pence a simple question — “Do you believe in evolution?” — and Pence spends 5 minutes squirming avoiding giving an answer. He changes the subject repeatedly, to global warming and stem cells, and tries to pretend that the Republican party doesn’t have a serious problem with an anti-science agenda, which he himself is demonstrating.
I have to commend Matthews, too: he bulldogs that question and won’t let it go. Let’s see more of that from our media, please.
My prior post on Missouri’s bill permitting pharmacists to neglect their responsibilities was incorrect on one point: the bill has not been passed. The bill has only been proposed. It’s the usual situation:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives are, to a member, well and truly insane. Â They offer all manner of idiotic bills and amendments that will never see the light of day, and Emery attaching his bill as an amendment to SB 296, legislation dealing with professional registration, is merely supporting evidence of same.
They’re dangerous and destructive, and erode the mission of our soldiers — and they also seem to be remarkably stupid. In the latest incident, people in Afghanistan are unhappy with the Christian evangelism that accompanies the US military. I can’t blame them.
In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, tells soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.
“The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.
“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”
I think it’s the business of the secular officer corps to hound these vermin with courts-martial.
