On Aug 28, 2005, at 5:49 AM, The Fool wrote:
From: Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The fault with ab-only sex ed lies not in JDG, but in the
implementation. Simply posting the article without specific referent
would have been much more effective, I think.
No the fault lies in the diseased ideology of certain religious
fascists.
For a while I was an angry atheist too. But as sincerely as you might
believe there's abundant evil in religion in general -- certainly the
*capacity* to forgive vicious behavior exists in religions, as well as
the capacity to suggest, even promote such behavior -- the argument is
simply going to be better made with less vehemence.
Specificity helps as well, rather than making generalizations. As an
example, if you draw a parallel between hijackers flying planes into
buildings and True Believers blowing up abortion clinics, you make a
point that can deeply shake even committed right-wing fundamentalist
believers. If you point out that al-Zarqawi's calls for destruction of
infidels are very, very similar to Pat Robertson's recent endorsement
of annihilation of radical Muslims, you've got a strong case that most
people will be unable to ignore.
In neither indictment is there a larger connection made about the
"evil" of religious tendency; in both cases what you do, hopefully, is
get religious people *thinking* about what they believe, what they
preach and, ideally, about how they behave. That, to me, is
considerably more effective than pointing out that Christianity has
disturbing overtones of genocide in its history, as well as ritual
cannibalism.
It's not religious thinking that is the problem; religious thinking
*can* piggyback onto the real trouble, but it is not the actual source
of the trouble. The root problem is *any* tendency to blindly follow
*any* leader, *any* tendency to want to adhere to a creed, *any*
tendency to insist that one's own group is right while The Others are
all wrong.
As such, fundamentalist religiosity *is not the disease* -- it is a
*symptom*.
That tendency was one of the reasons the US was so primed to attack
Iraq on shallow and highly questionable evidence, and that's why you
still get apologists now insisting that Bush and co. did the "right"
thing.
But if you were paying attention in 2002, you saw that many, many
people who backed attacking Iraq were not of a right-wing persuasion.
They were simply afraid, and angry, and wanted to both get revenge on
"those people" (the meaning of the term varied from person to person)
and regain a sense of personal safety and security that they felt they
had lost.
That's not an unnatural tendency, nor is it a bizarre or
difficult-to-understand desire. And it seems to me that *some* people
get involved with fundamentalism for similar reasons: They're afraid of
that which is different from themselves, they want the world to be
easily comprehensible, and they don't feel comfortable with (or perhaps
are unskilled at handling) ethical ambiguity. And there is absolutely
no way you can sway or affect their thinking by, in essence, promoting
a direct frontal assault on ideals which form a major component of
their inner landscapes.
As your quote of Goldwater pointed out, most people tend to be hard
aligned to their faiths. What you might have missed is that the street
goes both ways; just as it's possible for a fundamentalist to be so
hardlined that he thinks it's sensible to kill medical doctors who
perform abortions, it's possible for an atheist to be so radicalized
that he advocates abolition of religion, and sometimes the religious;
this view is every bit as alienating as is the fundamentalist mindset.
I believe they are different aspects of precisely the same outlook: I'm
right, you're wrong, and that's all there is to it.
Which is a totally useless argument; it is, quite simply, dogmatic
thinking, regardless of who is actually doing the thinking.
--
Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
http://books.nightwares.com/
Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror"
http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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