Sometimes the New Yorker’s stable of artists just gets it right on the money;
There’s been a barrage of op-ed pieces about Obama finally coming out (sorry) in favor of gays’ rights to access the divorce courts on the same level as everyone else, and as a matter of social policy it’s all about time. Long past time in fact.
As a matter of politics it just might be a sign that the administration is learning how to play hardball too. It’s no secret that the GOP is struggling with a schism, and not just on social policy. As has been described here on many occasions, the GOP has been colonized, most especially at precinct level, by a resolute band of inflexible zealots nostalgic for the imagined simplicity of the Bronze Age. The development of that phenomenon—as a matter of deliberate strategy— is documented fairly thoroughly in the Dominionist series here. In a classic case of “be careful what you wish for” the GOP is now alienating its own intelligent conservatives and experienced political operatives, and even throwing them out by defeating them in the primary process, Senator Lugar being one recent example.
It’s not just about social policy anymore either. Every week or so a republican congressional member will nervously poke their head above the ramparts and suggest that perhaps, um, you know, maybe that Norquist pledge thing is not what we should be welded to. It’s not what you could call open rebellion, at least not yet, but the ice is cracking. Two reasons for this, I think.
First, on the social issues, is that the American public is not entirely the bunch of repressed curtain-twitching deviants that the religious right would like them to be. For the most part they have grown to kinda like the idea that contraception actually works and is available, and women in particular have come to prefer being able to choose not to carry a pregnancy they weren’t planning to term if they don’t want to without having to deal with coathangers in the middle of the night.
Most people know, and in many cases are fond of, someone who is gay. Many have gay family members, and the idea that they are instruments of the devil just doesn’t wash with anything like a majority. And let’s be clear about that, too—even as the arguments are often framed differently, the idea that “loosening” the laws governing social issues is the actual handiwork of Satan is central to the religious objections, and without the various religious campaigns to impose Old Testament cosmology upon the 21st Century there is precious little organized resistance at all.
Second, and on the economic front, is the increasing awareness that drowning government in the bathtub, a la Norquist, is not as attractive an idea as perhaps it first appeared when it was carefully marketed as “increased freedom™”. Not, at least, when it becomes more obvious what kind of things actually happen when such schemes swing into action and services evaporate. Demanding “austerity” on the part of ordinary people while the wheeler-dealers again announce that, dang it, they lost another couple of billion behind the couch cushions somehow is becoming a tougher sell by the minute. Not that there’s any need for regulations to discourage that kind of carelessness, of course.
So, yeah, things are still logjammed in a big way, but the President’s ploy to just simply announce support for gay marriage, and on the eve of the passage of a State Constitutional Initiative to ban it, is a pretty slick way to raise the temperature, and thus the pressure, within the GOP itself. There are any number of intelligent conservatives remaining in the republican party who don’t buy into either the Norquist monomaniacal dogma, or the curtain-twitching social intrusiveness, and this little move (well, it’s a big move, of course it is) serves to further illuminate that.
So now Willy the Weasel has to figure out what he believes, or what he will say he believes, yet again. If he doubles down on his unambiguous opposition, the numbers start to hurt, and if he tries to finesse it he has to shake the etch-a-sketch again.
Christ, it even cuts Dick Cheney out of the pack for once.
Not bad. Keep it up.
My point exactly.
I’ve always thought that religion, in the terms that we think about it now, or rather monotheism as we experience it now, only came into the world as a reaction to science. or rather as a reaction to the first discernable buds of proto-scientific thinking.
I’m not suggesting that before monotheism people didn’t worship gods. What I mean is, that in those bad old days worshiping gods was just faulty science. If things are going badly that means we didn’t burn the right kind of sheep. Or we failed to disembowel a sufficient number of first borns. Faith as an end to religion only really enters the world when doubt in the entire idea of gods begins to niggle at the brains of men.
Bluthner –– Hereabouts we have a Shambala Buddhist center, and the streets crawl with “Buddhists.” They like to sit in the bookstore café and gush in loud voices to one another about how special they are. If you meet one, you usually find out within 30 seconds that they are “Buddhist.” Their specialness in being rude and demanding and not tipping in restaurants has been documented for years. Your comment really made me laugh.
Madame,
I googled Shambala + cheap bastards and found this:
B,
Heh heh
I’m pretty damn frugal, you know, being a real conservative and all, and that made me laugh. Western culture has even managed to turn yoga into a kind of competition sport for crissakes.
I think we’re at the point where the old zen masters would have just whacked us in the head with a stick.
The idea that science is an alternative to theology took a very long time to be thought, by anyone. Newton didn’t manage to think it, Paine didn’t manage to think it, Whitehead didn’t manage to think it, and it took Darwin a very long time to reconcile himself to it after he read it in his own writings. The reason wasn’t that we were all “religious” in any modern (or anti-modern) sense. The reason was simply that theology was the name we gave to speculations about the ultimate facts behind the world, and speculation seemed for millennia to be the only arrow in our collective mental quiver. Every one of us, from the dullest to the brightest, thought this way, because it was the only way we knew how to think.
To consider the religion we have today to be a survival of this earlier mode of thought is a serious historical wrong turn. If it’s a survival of anything, it’s a survival of some very quaint superstitions that smart people either never bought into at all or viewed as popular irrelevancies — that, and for some very nice people, a practical system of ethics they can’t imagine replacing with anything remotely as effective. I believe that, in some ways, the near-universal intellectual withdrawal from the arena of theological thinking has opened the door for much of the mass idiocy we’re talking about here. There is very little left in religious life that can offer plausible counter narratives to the religiously inclined.
I’m pretty damn frugal, you know, being a real conservative and all,
Me too, i’m a total cheap bastard, and a financial conservative. I prefer efficient with money
But i do tip well. Really bad karma for anyone who has ever been a waiter, that will come back to bite you on the ass.
Well put, Nat.
I’m convinced there was a long time in human life when the very notion that a god could care a fig whether any human believed she or he (or it) existed simply would not have occurred to anyone. In the same way that we now would find it very difficult to formulate the thought that, say, fire cares whether or not we believe it exists. I’m convinced that during that period, what mattered in human dealings with their gods was not faith at all, but merely correct action (or inaction) vis a vis the force that quite likely could and would hurt us, but also might might help us.
And then, much much later, the idea of faith crept into thinking about God (in response to doubt, that maybe He wasn’t all he was cracked up to be) even though, even so, thinking about God was not yet in any categorical way separate from thinking about ‘science’. It was all, as you say, philosophy. And faith was deeply mixed up in it, too.
But now, as you say, we don’t think that way any more. And all that seems to be remain of religious thinking is the faith component. Which once upon a time really did matter to smart people, but of course has no place at all in scientific thinking as we have come to understand it.
Bluth -
Here’s the drill though – what you can’t tell people that believe in a god (i may or not be one of them, i’m an agnostic) is that science can give them any comfort if they’re enslaved, if their spouse or child dies, if a pack of yanks blows up their village. I’m willing to allow them some comfort from wherever they can find it.
As to the Catholic “how could god possibly give a flying fuck about your insignificant sufferings” – if its any god worth its salt, it can give a shit about all sufferings at the same time. Whether it can do anything at all about those sufferings is another matter of debate.
Al Einstein was no atheist. God, dice, and the universe was attributed to him, but there is some debate about that i think. But even i, with my comparably puny and totally insignificant brain, can see that QM is not dice.
I think i’ve outed myself as a Buddhist before. I’ll qualify that by saying that i subscribe Noroughly to the Zen school. Strip everything down to essence, we’re nothing, just all part of the flow. I also leave out the nirvana and satori bit, it’s all about the here and now. And compassion from the Tibetan, on the rare occasions that i can manage to muster it. I’m not terrible enlightened.
*roughly, not Noroughly, wherever tf that came from.
Porn,
I would be a fool if I doubted the power, or indeed the comfort, that faith has over and brings to human beings. I don’t really have any idea if it is correct to even use that word in the same sentence with zen, but I’m thinking that might be a bit like- well what would it be like?
But all of us would be fools not to inquire in the notions, ideas, convictions that people have faith in, if they are on a mission to impose any of those notions, ideas or convictions on the rest of us. Something no true Buddhist I have ever met has ever attempted to do. And which is by far the most convincing way to evangelize a crusty old skeptic like me
if they are on a mission to impose any of those notions, ideas or convictions on the rest of us.
There’s the rub, Bluth. Believe whatever the fuck you want, no skin off my ass. But try to force it on me, we’re in a different ballpark, and i’ll fight you tooth and nail.
Bluth-
but I’m thinking that might be a bit like- well what would it be like?
Well,i suppose you’d have to attempt some sort of zen meditation on a semi-regular schedule to get some sort of a clue. (full disclosure – i don’t do it nearly often enough. By a long shot. Almighty dollar / crust to earn and all of that.).
Well,i suppose you’d have to attempt some sort of zen meditation on a semi-regular schedule to get some sort of a clue.
It is my experience while internalizing these ideas that tells me about them. Judging them only tells me about my thinking, not about the ideas.
It is my experience while internalizing these ideas that tells me about them. Judging them only tells me about my thinking, not about the ideas.
True dat. But if you’re doing Vipissana, you’re observing your thinking and thoughts as well. Which gives you some information about your observation processes.
I suppose we should resurrect the distinction between deists and theists at this point. Deists have got lost in the shuffle in modernity.
It’s not a trivial distinction.
Many of the now-dead white guys that the thumpers often quote and refer to in support of their theocratic aspirations were indeed not atheists, but nor were they theists.
They were deists, and would think the thumpers no less crazy than I do.
you’re observing your thinking and thoughts as well. Which gives you some information about your observation processes.
Absolutely essential information if my hope is to truly communicate with anyone. The other option is to puke my own reactionary fear and blame others for it. A very popular option, by far easier to do as it requires no work or responsibility on my part, but I get nowhere and learn nothing.
PS
Me too.
Paula works in that industry, and has been known to chase cheapskates down in the parking lot to ask them if they were dissatisfied with their dining experience.
I was raised in a restaurant myself, and was waiting table in my early teens. It’s a tough job on a good day, and really hard to do it well.
Paula works in that industry, and has been known to chase cheapskates down in the parking lot to ask them if they were dissatisfied with their dining experience.
Believe it or not, i never actually had the cojones to do that. I figured they could always find something and say yes.
I just made a note of who they were. Then if in the future, if really pressed and busy, i had to make some sort of decision as to who was priority and got served first and who was bottom of the barrel….oh, well.
I suppose we should resurrect the distinction between deists and theists at this point.
After a quick trip to the dictionary I can’t say that I subscribe to either one.There is an energy force that seems to have constants in cause and effect with what seem to be random chaotic elements. Whatever it is,so far, has had to be experienced and cannot be accurately described.
But if you’re doing Vipissana,
I’ve never heard of it but,strangely, It sounds like I do it.
Tipping- Working people always tip well…unless their anally retentive and have a religious belief in lack.
I’ve never heard of it but,strangely, It sounds like I do it.
You might have heard of it as called Insight Meditation. Same banana. Zen meditation is more like just emptying the mind by observing your breath.
Tipping- Working people always tip well
This is definitely true.
Except in Australia. Where -many years ago now- I was chased down the street by a bartender who gave me back a tip. Also when you get in a taxi you get in the front seat.
When i lived in London i insisted on tipping in pubs. My English friend who i was with (and worked in a restaurant with in NY) said when in Rome, but i just couldn’t not.