St. Patrick did make a serious
mistake when he drove the snakes out of Ireland, though he did it gently. Had he had the benefit of the knowledge of modern science, knowing the snake's importance to the ecosystem, I'm sure he would not have done so. I'm certain that he would approve of my plan to reintroduce the Irish Emerald Serpent. (Pictured here) to Ireland. Today, Ainnir Mitchell, Seamus O'Lingle, Bébhinn O'Connor, and I will release twenty pairs, first at Croagh Patrick, and then in various rural parts of the isle. Erin Go Bragh!
24 comments:
Where is st. patty when you need him? We need someone to drive the snakes handlers if not the snakes themselves out of American politics, so we can get back to dealing with issues on a rational basis.
Yesterday I saw a very interesting sight in Jonesboro, AR.; protestors out on the sidewalk with signs demanding health care reform! Jesus Christ, I would have been no more surprised to have rounded the corner to a polar bear! Rural American out on the streets for rational social policy? My first impulse was to think that ASU had gotten too big (for the local culture) then I noticed that the theme was “people of faith for health care reform.” “love thy neighbor, support health care reform”, etc. What at first blush seemed an encouraging scene in my eyes, suddenly turned sour. What the hell does faith have to do with being for or against health care reform (whatever that has come to mean).
Upon full absorption I realized that I was looking at a hand full of old hippie democrats orchestrating a scene to support their hero’s (another form of emotion) now tragic effort to achieve something, seemingly anything, that can be called reform in health care.
That it is seen to be necessary to evoke faith in that debate says too much about how deep the snake of religion has come to be buried in American politics. That persons in the progressive spectrum of politics succumb to using faith is emblematic of the continuing failure of the progressive community to take on the right honestly and directly on the facts. The nation that first formally declared separation of church and state, is staggering under a growing burden of complex problems which reason based technological progress (reason being alive and well in the private sector) have brought it (all solutions bring new problems), which cannot be solved as long as the snake handlers can disrupt rational discussion of the issues by manipulating religion and other emotional based impulses. It is discouraging.
Personally I have come to think that the problem is that progressive leadership lacks faith that the American people can be talked to directly and honestly. The rational middle can never compete with the extreme elements of the political spectrum (either end) on emotional grounds. Trying to do so blunts the tool of reason which is the foundational tool for progressive policy. Obama is failing in this same way. It is a disease that the democrat party can’t seem to shake. It is getting old.
Bruce: Don’t be an idiot---it is about time that progressives take Jesus back---I am sorry that you have such a distain for faith….and it is that obvious distain that gives the right wing grist for their mill……it is not only that you distain religion, but you think faith is based on superstition and irrationality…..This is the thing, helping the poor has everything to do with Christianity---“do unto others” is supposedly the cornerstone to its belief system as is this:
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,f you did it to me.’
41“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Amen! A look at religion in the United States and elsewhere" appears on the Benton County Democratic Website.
http://www.bentoncountydemocrats.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44:art-hobsons-nwat-column&catid=11:bubba-bill-williams&Itemid=11
I was quite upset when I read it. We must all grab our pitchforks and go and take care these outrageous ideas post-haste!
My book of 365 Saints says that Patrick centered his life in Christ. Everything he did was done out of a passionate belief in the message of Christ...thus, Patrick's life became a living gospel.
Our lives reflect the gospel we advocate. If we adhere to the gospel of materialism and consumerism, our actions will demonstrate our conviction. If we follow the gospel of self-interest, it will be apparent to all we meet.
Thoughts of St. Patrick today cause me to wonder....what does how we live say about us?
Damn apostates. Doesn't the author of that article for that atheistic Democratic Party know that the more we suffer, the more is shows that God loves us and wants us to appreciate heaven all the more when we get there? Soooo, all those heathen countries that are doing way better than us only shows that they are being punished by God! Yea, that's the ticket.
May I suggest Pastafarianism, a kinder, gentler,approach to those things that needlessly annoy so many.
Well, as Mark Twain said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics……
America has a much, much lower suicide rate than France, Japan, Denmark, and Sweden or any of the other countries named in the article. Moreover, more people die of suicide in America than homicide---so, that means, the Japanese, Swedes and Danes are killing themselves at a higher rate than Americans are killing each other….Maybe those numbers mean that people who don’t believe in God, are miserable---or maybe it is just the weather, or cultural views of suicide …
Eileen, I say unto thee, “Render unto Caeser what is Caesar’s and unto god what is god’s.” Was Jesus not distressed by corruption in his own faith emanating from the alliance of the church elders with Roman Government? Were the money changers in the temple not an outgrowth, in his view, of this worldly corruption of the church? Until the Republican party took over portions of American Protestantism the importance of separating church and state, religion and politics was an article of faith among the bulk of the American faithful, rationally understood to be important to the purity and security of both. Religion and politics do not mix and doing so distorts and corrupts both.
Does the history of the Catholic Church not proven that beyond any doubt? Do you not agree that the early Christian faith more accurately represented the teachings of Jesus before Constantine co-opted it for his own political ambitions, turning it into an organ of empire and government? (I see little evidence that anything Jesus taught has survived that occurrence in the sense of any organized religious body, least of all the Catholic church which has allowed itself to corporatized and materialized precisely as the Jewish religion in Jesus’ time had.)
The root revelation underpinning Western Civilization’s progress has been that religion can and should be divorced from public policy, indeed all matters dealing with the material and physical world. Since Galileo’s time we have replaced the mythological presumption that the gods manipulate the world with the reality that physical laws, which can be understood through observation and reason, do. This makes us masters of our own destiny and the source of our own distress, not pleading, praying, sacrificing victims of the gods. There is no more fundamental revelation, it is the difference between the oppressive dark age cultures of Islam and the rest of the developed and developing world, the later having grasped this simple reality, are rising out of their long standing cultural traps, adopting reason based social, economic, technological and political structures evolved in the western world out of this very “enlightenment”.
That our country and culture is regressing on this fundamental lesson is at the core of our national deterioration and unique in the developed world. A nation that a generation and a half ago could fight a war on poverty, seek to eradicate from its culture and thinking a racism of immense depth, fight a protracted cold war on a global scale, rise to meet the environmental challenges of modern society, go to the moon and elect a leader that could challenge voters to not ask what their nation could do for them but…today is experiencing a crumbling middle class, can’t regulate its own financial markets and can’t have a reasoned debate about a reforming a consuming unsustainable health care system, precisely because the corrosive confusion of religion and faith has been accepted into political debate. The little street demonstration I saw being exhibit A. Voters are overtly and obviously being manipulated by their faith (not just religious faith there are other forms all equally pernicious to reason) by special interest for self interest. They use faith to redirect debate. Public policy is not about the issues it is about alliances, alliances that have become defined by faith and religion. The fault lies with the progressive middle class Eileen, because we have accepted this taking place and indeed legitimized it by trying to play the same game rather than calling it out for the fundamental evil that it is.
It is empirically obvious over time and geography that there is an inverse relationship between slavery to faith in a culture and the degree of material and philosophical progress in it. Faith, allowed to enter the public arena, is everywhere and always a tool of repression and exploitation, a bridal on the masses a harnesses of ignorance that works to misinform and redirect debate to the benefit of the few that are willing to manipulate it. It turns debate into emotion, belief and faith and away from reason and reality.
The validity and utility of faith in one’s own individual life aside, it is an illusion to think you can harness faith to achieve reason in public policy; faith leads to reason like water makes fire. Where faith is operative the processes of reason are necessarily blocked and irrelevant and visa versa.
A progressive society by definition is a rational one. Speak on the basis of reason or say nothing at all should be the cultural rule in public debate. Injection of any article of faith into a public policy discussion should be meet with unabashed rejection - booed and hissed as being out of place and inappropriate as breaking wind in an elevator. The heavy guns of political correctness should be employed to this end. Reason is the one faith we all should be able to believe in. If you have only faith for your argument then you have no argument. If you have reason then you don’t need faith. A person of faith should take his prayers to the closet, as Jesus instructed and bring only reason to a public podium.
We have earned out national distress and deterioration because we have allowed, with little protest, a major political party to overtly politicize faith. This is a corruption of a foundational principle that has defined this nation from its beginning and the fault of people like you and me that should know better and at best said nothing about it, or as you and the amen corner would argue condone it by responding in kind. That is the worst possible response.
Addressing the personal nature of your comments, which should not be read to imply offense as I take none and know none is intended, let me say that I can view your faith as a matter deserving my general indifference, though terribly archaic and unbecoming of an educated person in my opinion. However, I cannot condone the view that it is acceptable for you or others to inject religion into the political process by which I and my progeny are governed.
This country is on a huge and scary detour from a path of progress with roots century’s deep. A path defined by the liberation of philosophy and government from the constraints and distortions of religion, religious conflict and repression. I am afraid this detour will not resolve short of a real disaster sufficient to re teach a lesson once learned. I regret that my children face that prospect. The health care system in this country is a real world problem. It requires no injection of faith in anything other than reason to address it. We can’t get there because politicians are getting away with thumping the bible.
Whoever can get the snakes out of the heads of middle class gun totin Amurkins, and teach them to quit rooting for the guys who are making them poorer and dumber, that's who I'm with. Jesus, Karl Marx, Somebody, Please!!! Before it's too late!
Here is where I see one facet of the problem: Eileen and Bruce can both be right, and they both know it. But the Far Right refuses to acknowledge that they could be wrong…thus their literal reading of the Bible, which cannot possibly be read literally given the history of linguistics alone, not to mention several other factors. So whatever else WE do, let’s stay willing to engage in healthy and vigorous debate without getting cross with one another.
Yes, and emotion based views can refuse to see reality even when plainly reduced to statistics. You don’t reject the data but take the suicide rate and reject all the other points of definition because you want to believe. Let us think rather than believe for a moment Eileen, while we contemplate your facts. In this country if an elderly ill person, who has played out life wants to terminate protracted health care and die, a psychologist is called in and they are labeled clinically depressed and put on meds. Suicide is illegal and a physician can be prosecuted for helping a patient achieve an end to a life that is over. This has irrational religious roots that permeate our culture. It is a shameful and embarrassing thing in this country to take one’s own life and calculated in consequence to embarrass one’s family and cause unnecessary grief. This stabs right at the heart of my point. We are mortal and mortal for a reason. Life plays out and when it is done it is not irrational to reject the protraction that technology makes possible but it is a “sin”. Other cultures chose reason over dogma and are more accepting of suicide in that context. The historians Will and Aurial Durant took their lives together. It was a great shock and tragedy to many in this country, it was a rational and moral thing to do in European eyes. A low suicide rate can therefore be yet another measure of the social distortion that our nations obsession with dark age religious views suffers from. Unnecessarily protracting life, denying people a rational way out at the end at the pain of hurting ones loved ones, is just another cost of living in our culture and another reason that our health care system costs us so much more than other advanced nations spend. So we deny our children an adequate education so we can afford to spend huge sums of money protracting the lives and misery of the living dead. Who among us on this list wants to spend ten years in a nursing home like Leland did? If that is dealt us, will we have an option out in our culture? Only at great cost due to the religiosity of our culture.
One can think or one can believe, you can’t do both.
Here ,here !
Eileen knows full well that there are few people on this planet that I love more or have more individual respect for than her. In fact, she is one of my greatest heroes. None on this list has a keener mind (that I know of) a purer heart or more courage. (She is also a fountain of historical and religious information and hence a joy to talk to and debate.)
So I am not cross, nor is she. I just have come to the conclusion that the quarantine of religion that has allowed human progress to occur over the last several hundred years has, at least in this country, reach a point that it is no longer sufficient. Reason brings solutions but also new problems and they require reasoned response. Religion bought itself an extended lease in the western world by agreeing to overtly limit it role. In this country the truce has been broken and in consequence religion has placed itself in the way and having done so invited the inevitable the final resolution that someday had to come. Further human progress from here requires we get over it and that requires that rational minds quit condoning it.
This describes Eileen-"Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another." - George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
Cathi
See,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ship-of-fools-johann-hari-sets-sail-with-americas-swashbuckling-neocons-457074.html
Cathi
Damn Bruce—take a joke---I was trying to point out that numbers can be correlated to anything…..even my completely scientific son, Aaron, believes that “scientific data” correlations are a complete joke….that article was ridiculous, and its implication was that religious beliefs impede progress because America is so dysfunctional….well, BULLSHIT…
In the first place, you cannot compare America to any other country in the world, and this is why:
America has a strong culture of “individualism” which is the foundation of America…this individualism fosters an “everyman for himself” culture --- America’s working class does not view itself as being part of a immutable class---like in Europe, where class division have been set since the Middle Ages…. European working classes are keenly aware of where their interests lie….In America, everyone thinks that they have the possibility of moving into the wealthy classes, and seem to identify with the wealthiest individuals, rather than the other “losers” like themselves who struggle to make ends meet…..
Moreover, America is not only the most populated country after China and India, but it is not homogenous---and therein lies the rub---Where Denmark is primarily populated by Danes who go to Churches (the ones that still go)that were established by government in the Sixteenth Century---America is populated by Irish, African Americans, Italians, Chinese, Hispanics and on and on….they all have varying belief systems---such diversity creates cycles of poverty which are created and maintained by racism….The African Americans were brought here in chains for God’s sake….thus, working classes and lower classes can be divided against each other by racial and cultural differences…..
Fundamentalism is also a distinctly American phenomenon---and again is a product of “individualism” where every man or woman who can read thinks that they can understand Scripture, pitch a tent, and start preaching.
Your fear of mixing politics and religion is misplaced…..all of our opinions have a basis in what we believe to be right and wrong—in other words, they are formed by moral judgments….to say that this political policy is moral (such as universal health care)because it conforms with deeply held beliefs rooted in Christianity, or the Torah, or the teaching of Budda….is not trying to establish a religion as the one true religion…..it is simply explaining the basis for a moral judgment…..the fact is, the republican tactics are absolutely morally bankrupt….and unchristian --- and only other Christians can successfully point that out
Moreover, since the right wing clothes itself in Christianity, progressives must argue, without being embarrassed, that right wing Christians are WRONG, and are big hypocrites….it is up to Christian progressives to point out that the right wing is misusing Christianity to make judgments which contradict the actual teachings of Christ… the right wing have aligned themselves with wealth, with the death penalty, with war, and with racism –
Every great progressive movement in America began out of Churches---this includes, the anti-slavery movement, and the civil rights movement….Martin Luther King was a Baptist preacher---his message of equality was grounded in Christianity….and he made that point over and over again……and that is what moved the nation to accept the fact that discrimination was morally wrong….If the civil rights movement had not used Christianity as their banner, it would have not succeeded as quickly (granted, it has a ways to go) --- the labor movement was begun by Irish Catholics, who were encouraged and protected by their churches, the Catholic Church is protecting Hispanics against oppressive emigration laws now……Many Catholic Priests were at the forefront of the anti-war movement…..the whole idea of non-violent resistance was based on Hindu and Christian ideals…..Quakers ran the underground railroad for God’s sake---- my father and your father quoted from scripture liberally to persuade juries to do what was just: “Let Justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream” ---
Just because someone believes in God, doesn’t make them some pitchfork, intolerant dumbass, so I resent that implication….. Einstein believed in a Creator—and the Catholic Church has always accepted evolution…..so, just because someone believes in evolution, doesn’t mean that he or she is secular….the damn “big bang” theory was first propagated by a Catholic Priest….and Pope Paul thought the big bang theory proved the existence of God…..Finally, there is big difference between religiosity and spirituality…..Einstein believed in a Creator because of the complexity of the universe…..and Human beings do have a side that longs for the sublime--
Eileen, The pitchfork remark came from me, not Bruce, and your reaction to the remark seems to indicate that you cannot take a joke either.
For whatever it is worth, it seems that you and I would agree that religion can be (and has been) used to justify our noblest motives to each other. Look at Genesis 4:9. Did you ever notice that God never actually answers the question. It hangs there for eternity. But the entire Bible seems to set out the answer - Yes! The answer is a resounding yes. Your previous email eluded to that. Remember when John the Baptist questioned Jesus if he was the Messiah? His answer? Yes, I go to church all the time and I have this theology, blah, blah, blah . . . Of course not. You know what his reply was. This was not peripheal. His reply went to the very heart of justifying his identity. Matthew 11:2-5. Your earlier email again points to the central point - judgment day. Come on in to the Big House because you have this theology or that, blah, blah blah . . . We know better. Again, the question of Gen. 4:9 is being answered indirectly. Yes, yes, yes! This goes to the heart of the Christian Faith.
So, you're right. Christianity and everything that we learned in Bible school should the be principles and morals that drive our political opinions, and, in my humble opinion, lead us to champion a government that helps lift people up, not a government that holds them down. This is the basic dichotomy of modern politics v. medieval politics. And yes, the morals of Christianity help lift us out of that medieval way of thinking.
We all also know folks who wear religion on their sleeves and fight for the very opposite of Christian principles.
Rev. Sandi:
Can you step back in and keep these Christians from killing each other?
I think that lively debate is a good thing, done kindly and respectfully. No doubt, we will forever disagree on some issues, agree on others. Reading everyone's comments has been interesting and has given me much to ponder. We, of course, don't want Christians killing each other, Virg, but doubt I have the ability to prevent that!
I agree with John Wesley's approach to life....First, do no harm. If that makes sense, what does doing no harm mean in our individual life and in the life of community? How willing are we to "think and let think." What's the picture look like, everyone "letting think"?
I do need to say that I can believe and I also can think...I don't find them exclusive.
How's this approach feel? In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity? I know, I know...it throws open the discussion of who defines essentials.... and on we go....
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