Thursday, February 21, 2008

Special to Fundamentalists: There IS a Difference Between The New Yorker and The Communist Manifesto


Aaaah...Is there a resemblance?




Today, February 21st, marks the publishing of the Christian Right's two most hated publications:
The Communist Manifesto (1848) and The New Yorker (1925).*
Neither of them are displayed on the coffee tables of double-wides.
Why are so many Christo-Fascists afraid of people who think? As the erstwhile King of Siam would have said "Tis a puzzlement!"
*The New York Times is in a different league altogether: it's Demonspawn!



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Knuckleheads like Dobson and his ilk rightly deserve skewering for their corruption of Christianity, but it isn't particularly challenging work. I think you need to look at the people who are supporting these jokers: they're not all living in "double-wides." If you don't understand the number and influence of white college graduate suburbanites, with minivans, SUVs, and sport Utes, you need to get down to your local megachurch this weekend.

The Bible is an incredibly library of books written thousands of years ago, and to fully grasp the wisdom in that library it has to be studied in its own historical and cultural light. The fundamentalist chooses not to engage the big juicy brain God endowed him/her with, because it's a lot of work and mostly leads to having a headache and LESS certainty. It's simpler for most (and more "comforting" I think) to take The Bible literally, and listen to people who "tell you how it is." Clean. No ambiguity. No anxiety. No doubt.

All that being said, you succumb to what I would call "liberal fundamentalism" when you use snide classist remarks like "neither of them are displayed on the coffee tables of double-wides." These may be comforting words with all the hipster progressive intelligentsia in San Francisco, but all they do is create more ill-will and create a larger divide in America. The challenging work is to have some empathy for the "other" and attempt to find some common humanity between differing world views. It just continues to build walls of separation and distrust when progressives use dismissive language and stereotypes: aren't we supposed to be the smart & tolerant ones? There are all kinds of fundamentalists, it's just not all of them are Christian.

Peace be with you.