Archives for October 2004

October 31, 2004

on election day..

...let's please remarginalize these morons. (stolen blatantly from thepoorman.net)

posted by scott pilutik at October 31, 2004 08:26 PM

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October 26, 2004

"people said 'amen' when he spoke"

"George Bush did what God wanted him to do," one U.S. voter told a reporter. "Who cares what the rest of the world thinks?"

Washington Post's Jefferson Morely scares the crap out of us with a fantastic article that looks at the flip side of Bush's much pondered over reliance in god - his borg. Morely views the Bush Faithful through the prism of various international reporters, who are freaked, to say the least:

Correspondents for El Correo (in Spanish) in Bilbao, Spain, and the Guardian in London attended Bush rallies in New Jersey and came away "shaken" by Bush's religious appeal.

"What deeply alarms many non-Americans," writes Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis, "is the prospect of a second Bush term dominated by a coalition of evangelical Christians, Christian 'Rapturists,' American partisans of Israel's PM Ariel Sharon, and rural voters from the Deep South who reject evolution and think French is the native language of Satan."

posted by scott pilutik at October 26, 2004 08:36 PM

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October 25, 2004

God Elect

From the Globe n' Mail - home of the horrible/URL/that/goes/on/forever/%20:

Erin Randolph cannot imagine voting for a U.S. presidential candidate who does not believe in God.

"That would be a scary thing," said Ms. Randolph, 22, who is studying to be a teacher. "I lead my life based on belief in a higher power to give me direction. Without a set of core beliefs, you can do whatever you want."

Where to start. While I don't want to necessarily pick on Erin, I think her rationale is shared by far too many people, who all hold to a discriminatory belief that the absence of a belief in God (I could say 'a god' but let's not kid ourselves about who Erin and her ilk have in mind) automatically equates to a lack of a substantive value system. It's difficult to know why this idea still festers in the absence of any evidence, but it probably comes from the fact that born-again Christians often see it as their mission to truck around to parochial high schools where they relate horrid personal stories to malleable captive audiences. These stories are all similar and basically attribute each person's drug-addled, alcoholic, wife-beating misery to an absence of God, rather than any specific failing of their own. Regardless of the source, many people have arrived at that same false dichotomy which currently pervades our national consciousness.

And it's this false dichotomy that results in de facto discrimination towards Athiests and Agnostics today, as pointed out recently by Michael Newdow in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow

QUESTION: Do we know --do we know what the vote was in Congress apropos of divisiveness to adopt the under God phrase?
MR.NEWDOW: In 1954?
QUESTION: Yes.
MR.NEWDOW: It was apparently unanimous.There was no objection.There's no count of the vote.
QUESTION: Well,that doesn't sound divisive.
(Laughter.)
MR.NEWDOW:It doesn't sound divisive if -- that's only because no atheist can get elected to public office. The studies show that 48 percent of the population cannot get elected.
(Applause.)

The greater irony to Erin's statement is, of course, that a religious beilef is far more likely to justify doing "whatever you want" if that means breaking the law than a 'non-belief', as Erin might term it. (References supplied upon request, but really - if you have to ask...)

Finally, self-identifying Athiests or Agnostics have given the matter of god's existence as much if not more thought as 'believers', and as such, their beliefs should be characterized as core beliefs, rather than non-beliefs. Use of the term "non-belief" is narcissistic and reflects a self-serving world view that leads to the discrimination.

posted by scott pilutik at October 25, 2004 01:12 PM

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October 24, 2004

How many pom-poms would Jesus wave?

The Toronto Star's Tim Harper describes the surreal scene at a recent Bush campaign stop in Jacksonville, Florida:

In the hours before the president's entry to the stadium through clouds of dry ice, a sun-splashed crowd more realistically put at 30,000 was serenaded by country music, entertained by pom-pom waving "Dubya cheerleaders" and heard testimonials to their commander-in-chief suffused in religious and biblical references.

Among the thousands of signs in the crowd, one read "God Wants Bush.''

The U.S. president won a testimonial from a Canadian-born former National Hockey League star, Ron Duguay, followed by Duguay's wife, model Kim Alexis, who called the U.S. president "God's gatekeeper."

"One man can determine the nation, in God's mind,'' she said. "How can one man deliver so much? Well, only by the grace of God.''

She also likened the U.S. military effort in Iraq to the armies of Israel which "as long as they pleased the Lord, they could not be defeated.''

posted by sangwyn at October 24, 2004 07:56 PM

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the lyndon larouche cult

As befitting a blog that will cover the unfortunateness that inevitably occurs when politics meets religion, post # 1 will laud a fantastic article by the Washington Post's April Witt on the cult surrounding presidential-candidate-for-life Lyndon Larouche.

I remember first reading about Larouche back in the mid 80's and while he was clearly nuts then, he's morphed into a far deeper brand of nuts - the type that requires a paid staff to nurture properly. Or, in lieu of payment, a fervent set of mantras that approaches religious intensity.

Winstead was pretty much in trouble. He turned out to be not much of a true believer after all. He thought meetings where members professed that they were unworthy to follow LaRouche were like parodies of tent revivals. He wondered why, for all their talk of saving the world, LaRouche activists didn't seem to accomplish much other than raising money and recruiting new members.

He was stunned, at first, to find out what happened when he asked questions or complained. "Maybe you are too [expletive] busy [masturbating] thinking about your mother to go out and organize," he recalls one of the leaders barking at him. "How much money did you raise today?"

"I'm caught off-guard, like, what the hell just happened?" Winstead recalls. "The yelling goes on for maybe five or 10 minutes while I'm furiously backpedaling."

Eventually, he became accustomed to the humiliating insults and tirades. "They call it making somebody a self-conscious organizer," he says. "It is about getting somebody to break down and cry, just to have an emotional collapse. Once you do that, then people are malleable."

Additional Lyndon Larouche links:
Wikipedia
Rick Ross
Larouche in 2004
What happened to Jeremiah Duggan?

posted by scott pilutik at October 24, 2004 06:01 PM

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