micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
God, guns and meat The U.S. military is too strong and needs to be weakened, U.S. President George W. Bush said yesterday in the signing ceremony for the National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2004. More important than this fictional shocking change in policy, yesterday Bush took time out of his busy schedule to “pardon” –yeah it is unseemly given Bush's relationship with the death penalty- "Stars, the turkey" and "Stripes," another turkey. This traditional practice actually had a process: This year's turkey was picked from among a group of 40 birds hatched on July 10 in a turkey barn in the Carthage, Missouri area.What those "responsibilities" are or how the turkey is chosen isn't clear. Here's some of what Bush said: This year, as in other times in our history, we can be especially grateful for the courage and faithfulness of those who defend us. Every man and woman who wears our country's uniform is a volunteer, facing hardships and sometimes peril, because they believe in this country and our cause. We're thinking of them and their families. We think of the military families that have suffered loss. We can be grateful to live in a country that has produced such good and brave people who stand between us and the dangers of the world.I’m not particularly knowledgeable about science but I suspect that it is scientifically impossible for any event to be more of a symbolic ritual than this. It has the trappings of acting on the belief that turkeys are creatures who do not deserve to be killed solely for the pleasure of humans but that isn’t is the message at all. If it were, Bush couldn’t say the people of the United States have “compassion” knowing that so many of them will eat turkeys later this week, and that many do it every day. However, apparently it is fun to pretend that turkeys can feel pain and deserve to be left alone by humans so let’s do it! *** On Thursday Bush said he believes Christians and Muslims "worship the same God." "Evangelical Christian leaders expressed dismay yesterday over President Bush's statement that Christians and Muslims worship the same god, saying it had caused discomfort within his conservative religious base," Alan Cooperman writes in Saturday's Washington Post: The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, ...issued a statement contradicting Bush.I have to love that message of love from Haggard's group: June 29, 2003They of course say that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong. Because they are probably more familiar with at least English translations of that book than me, I will take their word for it, but why? Why make such acts sins? Their God supposedly controls everything and thus has bound all of the negative qualities they say are associated with homosexuality to homosexuality, so why would he want to associate negative qualities to the act? Answering this question means either accepting that God has some limitations or is a cruel asshole, both of which go against their general worldview. The same thing could be said about a lot of "sins" that don't harm anyone else except for, in some cases, the sinner. Some like murder make sense, but that just raises the question of why would God allow so much suffering in the world? (Any religion that posits that there is a an all-powerful God pissed off at the world has this problem.) In fact, why would God need to be worshipped or have a path to salvation? This sounds like a creature with entirely too much time on her/his/its hands. Perhaps we should create a holiday based on eating the Almighty? *** I was having fun writing this entry till I recalled a passage from Joel Schalit’s Jerusalem Calling: A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Everything World (Akashic Books, 2002): …it is of utmost importance that those involved in struggles against religious conservatism grasp the whole picture and avoid indulging in the snotty hyperbole that many educated radicals tend to proffer, speaking about religious people as though they were backwards or stupid. Many of the people involved in the religious right are not ignorant so much as alienated. Like many minorities and people of color in the United States, they are disenfranchised. Their “backwards” worldview, for all of its inconsistency and prejudice, represents and attempt to compensate for their exclusion from decision-making.I guess I agree with Schalit’s general point and that the way to get around this has to be to create a better "narrative," and by "better" I mean "more attractive." |