Here we are, at the beginning of the 21st Century (in a calender based on the birth of a religious figure) looking down the barrel of a media and a vocal minority that wants to drag us back to the dark ages.
To paraphrase Pink: "200 channels of religious shit on the TV to choose from."
Even on all of the internets, you can't get away from it.
So, as my fellow Americans dance in grief around the tube like animists around a sacrificial pyre, what's a secular boy to do?
Shout into the flames, of course.
Master showman that he was, John Paul shuffled off this mortal coil shortly after sundown, wonderfully timed so that St. Peter's could be lit up in all of its splendid glory for the television cameras. A promise of the glory waiting in heaven, all gilt and marble and expensive sweeping vistas, midnight funeral masses on the Sabbath.
We're told what a unifying force religion, and a religious leader like John Paul, is, bringing together people from all over the world. Except, of course, people who believe in another religion, another leader. Except, of course, those who believe in nothing but this world, and the evidence of their own senses and the evidence offered by the fruits of observation and reason.
For two-hundred plus years, there was a concerted attempt to insert reason into civic life. Our country was founded by people who had hoped to build a system of government based on the ONE thing that all human beings have in common: our ability to apply reason to problems, then work together toward shared solutions. Those solutions may not be as neat, as comforting as the balms and platitudes of Theocracy, but they have greater potential to bring people together. Religions define those who are OUTSIDE grace as assiduously as they define the faithful, then set them against one another to cement power and fill the collection plates.
An exterminator-turned-Elmer-Gantry-clone runs the House of Representatives. A "born again" child of privilege is President of the United States, possessing the power to destroy all life on earth at a whim. Jesse Jackson betrays decades of service to maintain a place at the faith-based money table, and a religious zealot like Randall Terry is given a platform from which to spew his hatred, only a short time after he'd been calling for the assassination of doctors. A corporate media sells SUVs and boner pills with pictures of the faithful, and they are happy in their exploitation, both as consumers and symbols of piety.
For those grieving today, I hope you find some comfort, but it angers me that so many on the left are cooperating in this insertion of personal piety into the public square. It corrodes the possibilty of reason as a force for public good. It may feel good now, but after Delay is done with the judges, after the Theocons have cemented power with your help, then it will be YOUR communities that they'll come after.
Here, at the outset of the 21st Century, the great experiment in Enlightenment Government is in danger of collapse. As the Europe our ancestors left becomes more and more secular, having learned its lessons about the dangers of theocracy, we betray two centuries of progress. A smaller, petty and shrinking people, going back to a time where superstitions trumped reason, where fear and bigotry are the main public currencies, where we justify and support torture and crusade because we are Good, Godly People, with just a few of us shouting into the flames of the conflagrations YOU are helping to feed.
crossposted at unbossed