Thursday, May 01, 2008

musings

Lately I've been too busy (or too tired) to post, but here are some random thoughts that might make the cut to formal post stage someday:

1) Isnt it funny that Republicans seem to hate Muslims so much? Because, in all the world, is there anyplace more conservative than the Muslim part of it? They seems like natural allies.

2) Christianity basically says that God sent his only child to earth to be tortured to death for the purpose of providing a portal for humans to enter Heaven through. This they believe to be true, and yet so many of them resist the idea that millions of years worth of buried CO2, pulled from the earth and burned into the atmosphere, is causing the planet to warm up. Which is the crazier story?

3) Maybe it should be no surprise that religion is involved in national politics. After all, isnt pretty much everything that we know about the national scene second-hand information, at best. We personally witness very little, and so have to take the word of others on what's happening. How does that differ from religion?

4) All anyone has are a few facts gathered in the now. Everything else has been colored by memory or has been recieved second-hand (at best). Truly, even things you witness right now are filtered through your own prejudices and beliefs, and so will be seen differently by someone else. The point here is that we all have merely a shadowy idea of what's going on that's only half-informed. Everything else is filled in by our imagination. It is myth-making. We tell ourselves stories, and believe them to be truth.

Feel free to agree or to tear into me.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

On numero three:

Politics has only been a major force in politics since the Rethugs brought it in this decade. So for me, it IS a surprise that we allow the two to mix. They should be..cough.separate but equal? ;p

daveawayfromhome said...

Dusty, I'm guessing you meant "religion", rather than "politics" there at the first. And I dont think that Republicans brought religion in. It's been there, to lesser and greater degrees, since the beginning. Remember how there was concern over JFK's Catholicism, and the temperance movement was certainly religion-based. Let's not forget anti-slavery, and the never-ending (apparently) debate over evolution. I could probably go on, but I'm not a particulary good historian.