Reality
Bill Moyers is one of our truth tellers. He doesn't rant, he just points to what he sees. In fact, when people tell him he is their hero, he reminds them that journalists only pass on news, don't make it. So he regards himself as no hero.
But he points out that for the first time since perhaps the enlightenment, we now have a ruling group in our nation and beyond who regard the non-rational - if not irrational - as a proper basis for decision making. Remember James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, who said in congressional testimony that we need not spend too much energy worrying about the environment because Jesus would soon return and bring history to its close?
Remember Ronald Reagan seriously discussing the rapture - when the elect will be swept up to heaven and the rest of us will be left to face death and destruction - in the Oval Office?
Remember George Bush, when asked during his first campaign for president, when asked who his favorite philosopher was, said Jesus?
As a parish priest for 30 years I grew somewhat used to people's flights of fancy based on what they understood religion to be about - an escape from reality. But I always had confidence that when it came to making decisions, about the environment, about facing down a hostile nation, about product development, rational thinking would retake center stage. I knew smart, tough business people who left their clear thinking at the church door.
Could it be that George Bush believes that in Iraq we are fulfilling biblical prophecy about how the world ends? Is American support for Israel, which sometimes seems to ignore the fact that there are others in the region who also have just claims, based on the belief that Israel will be the site for the last great Armageddon?
I am in an ongoing conversation with a couple of friends about whether we ought to abandon religious practice and language until this madness passes. I have held that we cannot do that because our language would not only be impoverished, but there are vast areas of experience that cannot be expressed in literal, positivist language.
But this descent into superstition in the name of religion threatens to take us even deeper into disastrous foreign policy and environmental degradation than we have already gone. If it is true that more than half of all Americans believe that so-called intelligent design has some reasonable basis, and that the Bible is literally true (whatever that might mean), then we are headed for an Armageddon of our own making.
But he points out that for the first time since perhaps the enlightenment, we now have a ruling group in our nation and beyond who regard the non-rational - if not irrational - as a proper basis for decision making. Remember James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, who said in congressional testimony that we need not spend too much energy worrying about the environment because Jesus would soon return and bring history to its close?
Remember Ronald Reagan seriously discussing the rapture - when the elect will be swept up to heaven and the rest of us will be left to face death and destruction - in the Oval Office?
Remember George Bush, when asked during his first campaign for president, when asked who his favorite philosopher was, said Jesus?
As a parish priest for 30 years I grew somewhat used to people's flights of fancy based on what they understood religion to be about - an escape from reality. But I always had confidence that when it came to making decisions, about the environment, about facing down a hostile nation, about product development, rational thinking would retake center stage. I knew smart, tough business people who left their clear thinking at the church door.
Could it be that George Bush believes that in Iraq we are fulfilling biblical prophecy about how the world ends? Is American support for Israel, which sometimes seems to ignore the fact that there are others in the region who also have just claims, based on the belief that Israel will be the site for the last great Armageddon?
I am in an ongoing conversation with a couple of friends about whether we ought to abandon religious practice and language until this madness passes. I have held that we cannot do that because our language would not only be impoverished, but there are vast areas of experience that cannot be expressed in literal, positivist language.
But this descent into superstition in the name of religion threatens to take us even deeper into disastrous foreign policy and environmental degradation than we have already gone. If it is true that more than half of all Americans believe that so-called intelligent design has some reasonable basis, and that the Bible is literally true (whatever that might mean), then we are headed for an Armageddon of our own making.
posted by Blayney at 8:12 AM
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