Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 945 Editor's Choice: 126
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For D Robert
[Read the article: God grief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If I didn't make it clear enough in my original letter, let me make it perfectly plain here and now: I have no patience with any sort of evangelical, fundamentalist anything. It doesn't have to be religion. It can be pretty much anything that's put itself in a box with knives and guns poked through the sides of said box, demanding with inflexible authority that the rest of us recognize that those inside the box possess the only truth regarding any issue you might want to name. Chief among these, however, for me anyway, is religious evangelicalism and anti-religious evangelicalism, two sides of the same coin, both trapped in the same box, flailing away at each other like good idiots. That's why, in my original letter, I said that fundamentalist believers (Christians, Muslims, whatever)deserve the beating they get. They do! Let there be no question about where I stand on that issue.
That being said, a reaction is just reactionary. If we are to rid the world of fundamentalism (or at least get some relief from it) there is no way in heaven or hell that an equal and opposite reaction is going to accomplish that. It is nothing more than the equivalent of our troop "surge" in Iraq or Israel and Hezbollah duking it out over the fence.
What causes you to believe (or should I say assume?) that I have "...been tolerating the murderous excesses of the other side for so long without a peep"? You certainly didn't learn that by reading letters I've written here at Salon, because I have been relentless in my prosecution of idiocy of all sorts, and that most definitely includes the Religious Right and all that led up to it, for a long (and long-winded) time now. And I don't just sit and write letters to Salon.
You've mistaken me for someone else, with the usual presumptuousness of those who believe inverting a thing is the same as setting it right.
As for your question as to how we manage to get the Other Half of the nation who believe the "world is no more than 10,000 years old" to grasp the urgency of, say, the global warming crisis, my answer is you become a missionary, and that if you don't do it right you get eaten. But if you approach people with the least bit of respect, try to understand how they got the way they are and help them learn to think, you would be amazed, I am quite certain, at the progress that can (as has been) made among my own tribe of wingnut hillbilly relatives concerning not only the "Sins of Scripture" (apologies to John Shelby Spong), but about the clear and present danger to the planet. They actually can be taught, but not by people who sneer down their noses at them and feed on their backwardness.
A little humility and a little less knee-jerking and you might be workable. You first need to realize that your presumptuousness about people you don't know is causing them to become more entrenched in their belief that you and your family are a threat to them. And that makes my job of bringing them to the debate at all a lot harder.
They're over there on the right. You're over there on the left. This is why so little is ever accomplished, at least without bloodshed.
And I apologize if I'm a little apoplectic about this house of mirrors in which we seem to be trapped. The Way Out is the Way In.
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Moloch Leaves Lynchburg, Seen Heading Toward Virginia Beach
[Read the article: The stone is cast]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When one believes in God and Satan as a couple of guys who do things to us for utterly arbitrary reasons, it is incumbent upon such a believer that he remember which is which. It was Falwell's confusing himself with God (and God with Satan) that brought about this ignominous end to a lifetime of perverting Christianity and promoting hate. Or maybe it was the perversion of a religion of love as one of hate that attracted God's lightning.
It's times like this when I really want to believe in a personalized, anthropomorphic God. Dammit, I just can't do it. Falwell was a bloated caricature from the hellish imagination of Bill Burroughs. No celebration is necessary, but perhaps a heavy sigh went through the universe as the Lynchburg Windbag deflated.
Perhaps this really is a sign of something. I'd like to think so.
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What You Call it Doesn't Matter
[Read the article: Anywhere that's wild]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you, GK, for at least putting Rashaan Roland Kirk and John Muir in the same article, and for having acknowleged something that might resemble a soul in some of we more deluded types who can get down with Muir or Kirk and who know just what you're talking about.
Whatever one calls it, it's good. Some of us would just go right on and drown in it.
And, with all due respect, I would only add: Amen.
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A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste
[Read the article: Michelle Obama's sacrifice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]DD, you are terribly kind not to "blame" Ms. Obama for making a life choice of her own. Of course when one has isolated herself from reality to the extent you have it pays to be kind to those who could quite possibly be useful to you should things go the way they ought. For god's sake, is this all your mind can do? Is this the legiron you've volunteered to wear?
Why is it that someone as intelligent...oh. Sorry. That was an assumption not supported by the evidence. Feminism for its own sake, Equaliy being synonymous with Sameness, and above all the need to drag all your sisters into lock step with your own frustrated, confused thinking...to whose benefit is all this tripe, really?
Keep an eye on Michele Obama. You may yet learn something.