Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 83 Editor's Choice: 1
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Re "Magisterium"
[Read the article: A moral "Compass"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have to agree with those who find "His Dark Materials" to be broadly anti-theistic rather than either anti-Catholic, or harmlessly (that is, harmlessly from a Christian POV) anti-authoritarian.
In part because of its strongly intellectual tradition, Catholicism has a specific word for "The divinely granted authority to decree what shall be taught as truth and what shall not," and that word is "Magisterium". This makes it useful for Pullman's anti-authoritarian purposes. I'm unaware of any other tradition that has an equivalent compact term for the same concept. So Pullman made use of it. "Mosque" and "synagogue" are not comparable words, and don't carry the same inherent assertion that the individual mind must submit to top-down dogma. (Many other religions make that assertion, they just don't provide a handy term for what they're asserting.)
IIRC, Pullman's "Magisterium" is headquartered in Geneva. Calvin's theocracy is every bit as much in the author's sights as the Inquisition. He is an equal opportunity anti-theist.
I'm a Christian, and I loved these books, for their vivid storytelling, entrancing characters, and deep moral seriousness. But attempts to say that the books aren't opposed root and branch to Christian theology itself, not just to its occasional organized intolerances, are disingenuous. Yes, I think the first two books would cheer rather than trouble any parent who wanted her kids to think for themselves.
The third, though - while it's great fodder for thought and discussion - constitutes an emotionally powerful tract in favor of active sexuality beginning in the early teens; and against the idea that life after death is even something to be wished for. Those are more frontal attacks on what most ordinary Christians believe than the death scene of an intentionally lame caricature of a sky daddy figure. It's hardly shocking that religious parents wouldn't want their children to be drawn in to those ideas by unsupervised exposure to the glamour of an atheist's well-told tale.
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@Moraine16: pro-life voters and anti-abortion politicians
[Read the article: Harry Reid's pro-life stance vs. Ron Paul's ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would answer the language question a little differently from Glenn.
(Full disclosure: I have always been in the mushy middle on abortion -and I think the middle is the Big Dog's "safe, legal, and rare." Any abortion seems to me to lie in morally suspect territory; and any attempt by government to dictate via criminal law how a woman deals with her unwanted pregnancy to lie squarely in morally wrong territory.)
I've met a lot of rank and file Christians who are actually pro-life. They don't like war; they want born children, and born adults, taken care of by the community when they're in need. They just happen to have been taught, and to believe, that a zygote is a human being with a full panoply of human rights. Criminalization of abortion is a nearly unavoidable logical consequence of that belief. Those of them (the majority, I'll grant) who are basically authoritarians cannot be budged from that belief; but many of them could potentially be engaged by rational dialogue.
These people, many of them empathetic and in other respects the salt of the earth, call themselves "pro-life". It is ordinarily a matter of simple courtesy to address and refer to people by the names they choose for themselves. Refusal of that courtesy shuts off pretty much any chance at opening minds. Plus, it's bad manners.
On the other hand, the "pro-life" politicians who pander for the votes of these misguided souls, who manipulate their trust to ram through all sorts of anti-life policies, who do not extend to pro-choice individuals the courtesy of calling us by our preferred name, ought properly to be called "anti-abortion". I don't know whether Ron Paul fits into that category, though I suspect he does. I am quite sure Harry Reid, furious though I am at him, does not. If he wants to class himself as a pro-life politician, I'm willing to forgo the scare quotes.
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More attention to the fine print, please
[Read the article: The grave Iranian threat to world peace]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani warned of the dangers of a preemptive strike. "Part of the premise of talking to Iran has to be that they have to know very clearly that it is unacceptable to the United States that they have nuclear power," he said.
So the threshold for dropping nukes on other countries is now their use of nuclear energy to generate electricity?
Yeah, yeah, that's probably only what he said, not what he meant. Can somebody tell these clueless jerks that we're living in the 21st century? With supersonic ICBMs instead of twenty knot torpedoes? These days, loose lips sink planets.
You sort of get the impression that when an entire political party sets out to replace its brains with testicular matter, they wind up with mush up there instead.