And have fun fighting for the politician who doesn’t posture. Want to take down some windmills while you’re at it?

jb says: Another realist. I’m so glad you’re happy with your world, jrs. By the way, wasn’t Don Quixote the guy who was driven sane by his encounters with a mad world?

jb says: Yeah, it’s the posturing and the sleight of hand. Just because the other guys do it doesn’t make it right. As you said, he isn’t selling snake oil, he’s reaching for a position of power. And how you can bring up the kinds of policies he’ll put in place when he hasn’t got any seems quite ludicrous. Yes we can isn’t a policy, it’s something like a pop song.
Still, if you feel like you can go along with a “largely phony image,” that’s fine, go along. But I don’t feel I can and I’m gonna say so whether it’s Obama or any of the others who feel impelled to lead us.

With all due respect, I think you missed my point entirely, and I suspect you did so on the basis that I didn’t wholly and categorically reject Obama’s appeal to “the faithful” on its face. If so, you not only missed my point, but exemplified it as well. But if I am wrong, I welcome the correction.

Refusal to accept religion as valid on any terms amounts to a form of disenfranchisement. You can tell people bluntly, “You shouldn’t believe that crap,” but you won’t get anywhere that way. Many people have no real problem with, and indeed draw great value from, myth and symbolism. It is their means of tapping into something deeper than the stories themselves.

If you can’t meet and communicate with people where they are, what qualifies you to lead them?

To this I would just add two things:

(1) If you’re smart enough to understand the irrational aspect of religion as well as recognizing its pervasiveness in society, surely you’re smart enough to understand that a politician needs to address it, and in a non-hostile way.

So wouldn’t you rather a politician who invokes Christianity in order to further truly Christian ethics such as universal brotherhood, than one who invokes it for antithetical purposes such as, say, extermination of 1.3 billion Muslims?

(2) If you cannot accept the validity of point (1), then I submit to you that YOUR worldview is as irrational as any religious one you care to mention, because it refuses to accept and meaningfully integrate a whole body of facts that deals with human belief and behavior. This is precisely the same dynamic as stubbornly refusing to negotiate with enemies, based on the prejudicial assumption that they could never have any views worth considering.

So MIRRORS UP, everybody. Before accusing others, take a look at yourself.

That’s Matthew 7:5, by the way.

jb says: This is nonsense, though the argument has been around since the state managed to get itself relatively free from the church. If someone holds religious views, anti-religious or any other kinds of views, that is fine. That is the right of the individual. But it is a personal view, personal opinion, and can have no validity in the working of the modern state, which should rightly uphold the views and opinions of all citizens.
The Christian right, of which you seem to be a representative, or at least a spokesperson, has never accepted this and continues to clamour for its glory days of the dark middle ages when it forced everyone to toe the line.
Move aside, you stand in the way of freedom.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance

jb says: Thanks for that, Lee. Silicon Valley, eh? Who’d have thought it?

jb says: “In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.” Eric Ambler