Thursday, September 25, 2008
Speaking in Lungs (get it?), Loud Ones!
I want it to made perfectly clear, folks. In no way do I find it unseemly to be critical of religion. In fact, if you do an exhaustive search of my early postings, you'll see that I've been quite critical of religious dogma myself. The main problem that I have with what some in the far-left blogosphere have been doing lately has to do with their cherry-picking; their targeting of one particular faith for ridicule and, yes, their doing of it for some cheap partisan political advantage...........................................I mean, don't get me wrong. Some of the stuff that the Assemblies of God believe probably are a smidge on the peculiar side. But, come on, to single them out when the Catholic Church, say (just as an example - don't shoot me), still thinks that the bread and wine given during communion is the actual body and blood of Christ, seriously, shouldn't that alone be enough to give us pause here?..............................................And like I've said before, there is also a fair amount of variability within the Assemblies of God. I mean, sure, there are in fact the core beliefs and all but with 12,000 churches nation-wide to choose from, I think that, yeah, it's probably just as unfair to generalize here as it would be to generalize about Muslims (that they blow people up, etc.)..................................................Bottom-line, folks, I don't give a rat's ass about Palin's church. I don't give a rat's ass about Obama's, either. I just care what comes out of their mouths. And, no/unfortunately, I'm not exactly impressed by what I've been hearing from either of them lately. It's time for me to pray, too, I guess.
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2 comments:
Hey Will,
Does this sound like anyone we know?
"What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events....
The plausibility the paranoid style for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure, in this appearance of the more careful, conscientious and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable.
The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two-way communication with the world outside his group--least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter."
-Richard Hofstadter
From his book: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"
Published in 1979 about politics in the 1950's...
That's great. I always thought that these guys were kinda "textbook". There was also that line from "Pulp Fiction"; "There are 2 types of people. Those who listen and those who wait to talk. Which one are you?"
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