Voltaire, in his discussion on Adam in the Philosophical Dictionary, discusses the nature of people's personal, private hotlines to God. He writes about how a certain lady had her own hotline to God hundreds of years before the invention of the cell phone:
Pious Madame de Bourignon was sure that Adam was a hemaphrodite, like the divine Plato's first men. God had revealed this great secret to her, but since I have not had the same revelation, I won't say anything more about it.
Voltaire goes on to discuss other hidden revelations that he has heard from other people with a special hotline to God. All of them are highly contradictory and ridiculous. Then, he concludes:
What don't they say? As for me, I don't say a word; I leave this research to the Reverend Father Berruyer of the Society of Jesus; he is the greatest innocent I have ever known. His book was burned as the work of a man who wanted to make the Bible ridiculous: but I can testify that he intended no such malicious enterprise.
Books which challenged the notion that people could have a hotline to God were burned and banned. Sound familiar? Now, we have a similar situation. Bush and Blair say they have a personal hotline to God. They both say that they invaded Iraq because God told them to. When people call them out on it, hysterical Republicans scream that we are somehow speaking out against people who are simply sharing their faith.
In fact, these so-called Christians do not believe their own Bible. Their own Bible teaches in I Kings 13 that if someone else comes to you and claims to have a message from God contrary to your values and beliefs, it would be spiritual suicide to listen to the other person and forget where you came from.
Now, we come back to modern times. We have leaders in George Bush and Tony Blair who claim to have a message from God saying that they should have went to Iraq. Fine. But the problem is, none of us have had any kind of revelation from God saying that the War in Iraq was justifiable. In fact, most of us, if we believe in God, would say the exact opposite. Therefore, either God does not exist because of all the contradictory messages we have gotten, God is schizophrenic and there are so many people out there that he doesn't remember what he told to whom, or else no authority can stand between the believer and God, even someone claiming to have heard a message from an angel in heaven. Or maybe God simply does not give a rat's behind and is laughing at all our pathetic attempts to presume to speak for him or her.
When you completely sacrifice your soul and sell it to some cult figure or whatever, that is when we come to people like the Reverend Jim Jones or Lyndon LaRouche. But we cannot really thumb our noses up at people like that, like the media would have us do. This is because we as a society are much more like these people than we would ever care to admit. How else can you explain the cultic devotion that so many people have towards Bush and believe that he is incapable of doing anything wrong, even as any reasonable outsider would say otherwise?
And even people at liberal blogs like Daily Kos are not immune to falling prey to the cult of personality. How else would you explain the hordes of adoring followers of Bev Harris who honestly believed that she could do no wrong, even as she made threats against people like Keith Olbermann who were totally willing to give her air time, or outed the private information of people who she did not like? Or how about the equally devoted true believers in the theory that Bush bombed the World Trade Center without any scientific evidence to back them? I would simply note that around half the professors and intellectuals signing on to this theory are either philosophers or theologians.
In evaluating leaders, the main thing to look at is whether they give you the power, or whether they give themselves all the power. People like Howard Dean are good leaders because they are concerned with giving more power to the people. This explains why he encourages all his people to run for office themselves. It also explains why he would give all the money to the state parties and rebuilds their infrastructure. But people like Bev Harris are poisonous because they do not teach you to think for yourself, and they will not submit their work for critical review or make themself accountable in any way, shape or form. Instead, they will make threats against anybody who dares to question whether what they are doing is a good thing.
Let me tell you why I am so adamant that Bev Harris was a cancer to this community and needed to be banned. Back home, we had a school district that was in the middle of an acrimonious consolidation war and a nasty court fight with a neighboring school district over territory. In the middle of that war, we had a superintendent who came in and got a bond issue passed that required a 2/3's majority for a new gym and elementary school building that greatly eased overcrowding and modernized the facility. The campaign was held in the middle of a record blizzard, and this man worked tirelessly throughout the blizzard to bring the school district together and get the bond issue passed.
But that was only the beginning. He let it get to his head. He became drunk with power and got to the point where he would make threats against anybody who dared to question him. Board meetings became events where members would mumble with their mouths full so that nobody could hear anything. He would always do business over the phone and would never get bids from anybody, driving up the cost of doing business and leaving the school vulnerable to con artists.
It got to a point where all the teachers knew that if you were called into the office, it was for only one thing - he would yell and curse at you. He would stand over students who wrote articles critical of the school and would make them completely write them over again. He would fire teachers who uttered a word of criticism and would replace them with incompetent teachers who never had any kind of experience in their field and who would be completely economically dependent on him because they could not get a job elsewhere.
My parents and a local columnist led the opposition against the administration. For their pains, they were threatened with libel suits if they did not stop their opposition. The school board members would vote in lockstep with the superintendent and would join in. One member said to my parents, "I'll see to it that you're driven out of town and that you never come back again." The superintendent would get on the phones and threaten not to do any business with merchants who advertized in our paper. My parents and the columnist would ask tough questions at the meetings, cumulating in an outburst by the superintendent: "Boy, you're lucky! You know....you're really lucky. You're lucky I didn't come across the room at you."
We finally won that struggle after a tough fight, when all of the lockstep members either got voted out or didn't seek reelection, the superintendent finally quit, and we elected some intelligent board members who were not afraid to hold the superintendent accountable.
This is why this is not so much a struggle against Democrats against Republicans - it is more than just that. This is a struggle against those who would turn this country into a dictatorship through threats, intimidation, and bullying, and those who would fight for our freedom to think for ourselves without the fear of being threatened, bullied, or intimidated.
To say that Bev Harris was a champion of voters rights totally misses the point. Yes, Bev Harris was a crusader against the evils of Diebold. But she is more of the same cloth that Bush and Rove are than she would ever care to admit. She would do so only by becoming just as dominating, bullying, and dictatorial as the people she claims so much not to like. That is just like Boromir, who would destroy the Dark Lord by becoming a dark lord himself.
The Democratic Party has thrived in the past thanks to charismatic leaders who would charm the masses. But this is our Achilles heel right now. Too often, we are looking for the next JFK or FDR to lead us to the promised land, making us vulnerable to people like Harris or the 9/11 bombing theorists. It is a fact of life that there will always be times when there will be no such people with these qualities. Therefore, regardless of how lousy the DC Democrats are doing in Congress or how DINO Hillary is, the only solution lies with us. We need to learn to think for ourselves and not sacrifice our principles or give up reason even when someone seduces you with the claim that they have a hotline to God.