I’m frustrated because I can’t blog from work. I am emailing myself my blog entry and posting it later on tonite. My computer has blocked off access to blogger.com. Very frustrating. Not that I have anything important to blog about or anything burning to say. It’s just the principle of the thing! Ha!
Netscape featured an interesting website today: LiberalsLikeChrist.org. This website offers a nice, if scary, treatise on what Christian Conservatives believe.
I think it is ironic that people like Steve’s father support the agenda of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Right, since most fundamentalist Christians believe that Catholicism is a cult.
The article reminded me of when I was in school at UT (before I temporarily joined the God Squad) and I was protesting apartheid. The Christians would come and heckle us and try to get us into debates with them. Their reasoning was pretty screwy. According to those students, you can’t argue about politics until you’re “right with god.” Not only is there no room for tolerance, but there is no room for debate unless you agree with them. Which is circuitous, because there’s no debate if you agree with them. It was frustrating at the time and the perspective continues to bother me.
Most of the casual Christian students at LSU adhere to fundamentalism without really understanding what it means. As one black woman I know says, “The KKK strung up Catholics just like they strung up black people.”
Anyway, check out the site; it’s pretty extensive and very interesting.
Having grown up Baptist, I recognize the circuitous logic you note and have to agree with Nietzsche’s condemnation of the “herd mentality” in a lot of fundamentalist Christianity. The messianic mythos and literalism leaves little room (or need) for any kind of introspection or debate. At least LA has the laid-back Catholic thing going, whereas the TX Cowboy buckle of the Bible Belt is far less tolerant of dialogic reflection upon unquestioned assumptions. hrmph
Snowing here, which is nice. Good luck at BRCVPA this semester! Anna’s blackbox show on Madwoman Feminism is 1/31-2/4, be sure to check it out!
~Shaun