Archive for the 'Religion' category

The Decline of Satan as a Political Force

Mar 11 2010 Published by under Miscellany, Religion, Society

It occurred to me today that you really don’t hear much about Beelzebub in a political context anymore. I was thinking about my childhood (and gaming in particular – and by gaming I don’t mean video) and remembered all of the dire warnings hurled at me regarding the dark lord.

Dungeons & Dragons was a tool of Satan. Heavy metal music was a tool of Satan. Alcohol was the Devil’s elixir. It seemed like just about everything you might enjoy doing was a tool of corruption placed on Earth by Satan.

You just don’t get that much anymore. I mean, in some pockets, I’m sure those charges are still leveled. They just don’t enter the mainstream consciousness the way they used to. Video games are allegedly bad, but not because they’re a tool of Lucifer, they’re bad for much more concrete reasons. People rage against video games because they claim they rot the minds of our youth or they lead to school shootings, or they’re a gateway drug to heroine. They are no longer simply written off as a tool of the dark arts.

In some ways, that makes me kind of sad. Satan is no longer the guilty party in any activity today’s youth engage in. I actually miss a world where every issue was discussed and debated in terms of Satan’s presence. Even if you partook of the devil’s playthings, there was a certain comfort in knowing it was all part of a great cosmic Yin & Yang. Now we have scientific studies of kids who go on to commit crimes and whether too many hours spent playing Sonic the Hedgehog was to blame. It has become all too sterile, and it’s just not the same.

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On Moral Foundations And Libertarians

Oct 02 2008 Published by under Democrats, Hunting, Miscellany, Political Parties, Religion, Republicans, Sex, Society, Sports, Twitter

One thing I really dig about Twitter is the fascinating links people share. Today I got into a discussion with Kevin McCann about a snippet from this TED talk on moral foundations and the difference between liberals and conservatives.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

The speaker’s point was we live out our collective need for the latter is each by participating in the former in each pair. We have a tribal background that makes us warlike, so we engage in sports. I think the point is fundamentally flawed. I, like most people I know, have a healthy competitive streak, but engage in sports because it’s fun and I get exercise. It’s not because I want to act out conflict issues.

What was more interesting about the TED discussion, though, was the exploration of the different moral values shared by liberals and conservatives. The site drove to a website where you can participate in the mass moral survey. I tripped on over and took the test and here are my results compared to the larger populations of “conservatives” versus “liberals”.

My Moral Compass

My Moral Compass

What I find fascinating is how far out of sync I am with liberals and conservatives. The site doesn’t give you the option to explore your score as it relates to others with ideological interests matched to your own. I’d be curious to see if other “libertarians” had similar scores. I scored far lower on the religion/purity scale than even the liberals, but I also had far less respect for “authority” and “loyalty” than even the lefties. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of my membership in the “leave me the hell alone” coalition.

Some of the questions about “harm” were a bit skewed by the study’s lack of distinction between harming people and harming animals. I’m a hunter. I like to put meat in my fridge. Yet the test asks whether I think “it’s morally wrong to harm a defenseless animal.”

I said I absolutely disagreed for the simple reason that shooting a deer could be described that way. Frankly, I think anyone who has used shampoo tested on animals that had their tear ducts removed or eaten a Thanksgiving turkey that has been force fed growth hormone injected grain for a year or two has done more to “harm” defenseless animals than my one bullet, one kill hunt. But that’s another discussion.

That view does, however, account for the low number on my “harm” trait. It was also impacted, apparently, by my negative response to the statement that the single greatest concern we should have in life is that nobody suffer. Suffering is part of life, and common to every animal in the animal kingdom. We’re never going to change that.

My larger question still remains. Are libertarians dramatically different from liberals and conservatives? If you’re interested in answering that question, and consider yourself libertarian, register at yourmorals.org and take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Once you have, leave me a comment with your political ideology and scores. I’ll compile them and report back in the future.

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What The GOP Doesn’t Get About Gay Marriage

May 18 2008 Published by under Politics, Religion, Republicans, Society, The Law

I’m in the middle of a week long odyssey to Arkansas and New Orleans on behalf of the day job. On Friday night, I had dinner with some colleagues in a little restaurant called Doe’s Eat Place. The food and ambiance were good, but what got me thinking about politics weren’t the pictures of Clinton and company all over the walls – it was the conversation.

As we started talking about politics, one of the guys at the table (we’ll call him Dan*) made a joke that the California Supreme Court decision was going to end up costing him north of $10,000. We all asked what me meant and he proceeded to explain.

In 2004, Dan and his partner were watching coverage of the San Francisco Mayor allowing gay couples to marry. They saw images of the lines around the block waiting for marriage licenses, and decided to hop a flight the next morning to SF to marry. They had been together for 9 years at this point.

As they were making arrangements, Dan called his mom to tell her what they were doing. She immediately booked a flight to California – as did his brother, and father and various other family members. His brother was the first to arrive in San Francisco. Dan’s brother picked up his own brother-in-law and they headed to city hall to hold a place in line. As they stood there waiting, the couples around them asked how long they had been together. They joked, “Since 9 o’clock this morning.” After explaining, they chatted about the couples around them.

Dan arrived in San Fran and over the next few hours, family from all over arrived and began waiting with them. Due to a technical limitation, the city was only able to issue 400 marriage licenses per day. They soon ran out. Dan and his partner were still in line. They and the gathered family stood in line outside city hall for 28 hours, waiting for another opportunity the next day.

The next afternoon they made it in to city hall, got their license, were immediately married by some city official. After getting the license certified, they walked out the door and were showered by strangers who had gathered outside to shower the newly married couples exiting with rice and flowers.

Six months later, the court vacated his marriage.

While they still have their marriage certificate, it legally means nothing. The recent ruling did not reinstate those marriages conducted in 2004.

So now they’re planning to do it all again. In Dan’s words, they are doing so because it is important to them to have some permanent record that they meant more to each other than simply being co-signers on a mortgage.

So here’s what the GOP doesn’t get. For every member of the base opposed to gay marriage, there are independent, soft D and soft R voters who will hear stories like this and get it. They will listen to a friend recount their story of happiness and love. They will tell stories of joyous weddings that rival those any boy-girl combo.

When they hear these stories, these mainstream voters will understand that for two people in love, marriage means more than owning property or getting health benefits. They will see that heterosexuals do not have an exclusive on feelings. They’ll think about their own wedding day and realize what that moment meant to them. They will never again question the motives of two people in love wanting to have it recorded in the annals of our community histories.

Slowly, but surely, the tide will turn against the religious zealotry that makes the absurd argument that somehow, a gay marriage makes mine less meaningful. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the GOP clung to racism to win elections, and has only recently apologized for the error of its past. It will, someday in the future, make a similar apology to those it fought so hard for preventing the recognition of relationships just as real and deep as their own.

* I’ve changed my colleague’s name because I did not ask his permission to retell his story. While I am sure he would not mind, I do not want to identify him absent that approval.

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Religion and Blogs (Sort Of…)

Jun 16 2006 Published by under Bloggers, Elections, Politics, Religion

NewsThis piece from WaPo detailing a slight shift in the ideology of the Southern Baptist leadership would be completely uninteresting if it weren’t for one little passage. The bulk of the article seems to be E.J. Dionne hoping for the decline of conservative evangelicals and their role in politics. It ends with his assertion that moderates, liberals and even conservatives think the conservative movement has gone too far and needs to snap back.

It is really an unbelievably insipid column, but I’ve come to expect that from Dionne. This article seems to be his wishful thinking – a dream that the conservatives will move left.

So what’s the one passage that makes it interesting? This one:

One other force was at work in this year’s Baptist voting: the rise of the blogosphere.

Over the past several years, an active network of Baptist bloggers has opened up discussion in the convention and given reformers and moderates avenues around what Parham called “the Baptist establishment papers” and other means of communication controlled by the convention’s leadership. Thus may some of our oldest and most traditional institutions be transformed by new technologies.

I find it fascinating that he sees in religion what I see in politics every day – the break down of message control. I’m not a religious conservative, and I don’t subscribe to any of their materials, but I find it interesting that they see a strict message control within religion that blogs are breaking down. I hope that’s true.

Throughout history, the barrier to the rise of man has always been information. Those with more information control it, and dole it out in small bites. If blogs (or the Internet specifically) can tear down the hierarchy of politics, religion, and government, perhaps the three great burdens on people will be lifted.

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Three For The Day

May 31 2006 Published by under Democrats, Drinking, Politics, Religion, Sports, Surfing

I ran across three really interesting reads in my morning trek through the papers. They have nothing to do with each other, only one touches on politics, and the other two deal with wingmen and surfers respectively. But they’re all worth a look.

The LA Times has a good piece on the internal debate within the Democrat party over whether or not they need to campaign on those pesky little issues that voters care about. The argument breaks down into two camps. One camp believes they need to give people something to vote for, a contrast with the GOP. The other camp says:

“If you start to [discuss] big government programs ‚Ķ you open yourself up to criticism in all directions, and there’s no reason for Democrats to do that now,” said one senior Democratic Senate aide, who asked not to be identified when discussing internal party deliberations.

So that tells you everything you need to know. The Democrat approach is more government, more regulation, and more taxes. Yet they don’t like the GOP to point that out. They know that doesn’t sell well because people don’t have a fondness for more government incursion into their lives. Small wonder that they think the GOP would poke holes in that and portray it as a bureaucratic solution.

The second article, from WaPo, details the trials and tribulations of the wingman system. It’s really kind of an odd article to run. I don’t think it would fly in any other city. Most people around college age who are clubbing every night are unlikely to read the paper. In DC, however, you’re dealing with a different crowd, so there is a good possibility that some of the target demographic is actually consuming this ‘news’.

Finally, back to the LA Times, it appears there are a great many people who need their souls saved and a fair number of them live in Hawaii and hang out at the beach. That’s where Den Sabate and his flock of surfers for Christ minister to those in need who are hanging out at the beach.

Honestly, if I were lost and looking for meaning, I’d probably be at the beach too. I could live at the beach. There is something very cathartic about by the water, being bit by sand fleas, and staring at the waves rolling in. It salves the wounds of the soul. But the last thing I would be looking for is some guy to come and chat me up about the Bible.

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