I posted an excerpt from an interview of an extremely authoritive and knowledgable source on this problem of American christian fundementalism, in
a post , five hours before this thread was started. Granted.....the problem was not linked to Sarah Palin....she is an nearly irrelevant symptom.... but the interview in my post describes how we got here.....the taking down of the wall between Jesus and our government..... how it hurts us, and the dire consequences that are already taking place because of it.
My post has one response...and the thread has entire 41 views. Must all problems now be framed around the idiot's pick of an even greater idiot?
Quote:
.....Let me make one final point about that missionizing impulse, and the way it transcends right and left. One reason we're in Iraq today is because, in the 1990s, the left was split on the question of American violence, the proper use of American power. It was split over the issue of what was called "humanitarian intervention." There are times, it was argued, when the forceful exercise of American power is necessary for the sake of humanitarian causes. Human rights, beginning in Jimmy Carter's day, became a new form of American religion. If conservatives go abroad speaking the language of freedom; liberals go abroad speaking the language of human rights. And if we have to destroy a nation so that it can exercise human rights, so be it. That's why, in the early days of the Iraq war, so many surprising people supported it.
The liberal embrace of humanitarian intervention is part of what set loose this new phenomenon of the Bush moment -- an explicit appeal to religious motivation in the exercise of American power. Since George W. Bush came to power, the religious right has been set free to use overt religious language, missionizing language that actually moves from "freedom" to "salvation," as a justification for American power. We cast ourselves against Saddam Hussein entirely in terms of a binary evil-versus-good contest. Bush's appeals to evil were a staple of his speechmaking from the earliest days of this war. The purpose of his war was, he told us, not just to spread democracy, but to end evil. You see what's happening. We've moved into specifically religious categories and that was all right in America. ..... -James Carroll Sept., 2007
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