Letters to the Editor
Mishima666
Published Letters: 125 Editor's Choice: 28
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Different for an adult
[Read the article: Reformed school girl]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's one thing to be a fundamentalist as a child, but quite another to be a fundamentalist as an adult.
The loss of faith as an adult, even a young adult, is an awful experience. Imagine your most sincere beliefs slowly decaying in your hands. You do everything you can to save them, but nothing works, and over the period of a few years everything is gone.
The loss of fundamentalist faith also entails the loss of fundamentalist friends. So almost everyone you've ever known outside of your immediate family is estranged from you -- and worse than that, you have become the enemy. You are the one who has betrayed Christ. You are the dog who has turned again to his own vomit. Some fundamentalists who stray from the fold literally lose everyone -- all friends, all family.
Along with the loss of fundamentalist faith is the loss of any feeling of purpose. One year you are part of the kingdom of God, one of the chosen, filled with insight and spiritual wisdom, and the next year you are nothing and have nothing -- except the realization that you were wrong about that which was most important to you.
All of this takes years to get over, and I suppose some of us never do get over it completely. There's the counseling and the anti-depressants, and those help. But like the amputee sensing a phantom limb, a quarter of a century after my fundamentlist days I continue to have a vague spiritual sensation -- like something should be there -- but nothing is.
So I'm glad the author of the book ended up with funny stories and interesting experiences, and that her fundamentalism was just a part of growing up. But for many of us the whole experience is devastating, and is more like death than growth.
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The interesting thing
[Read the article: We shall overcome ... liberals]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The most interesting thing about such a gathering is that it wouldn't have been possible not many years ago.
What has happened is that there has been a fundamental shift in how conservative Chrisitans identify themselves and their enemies. Conservative religion always needs an enemy. For years conservative Christians had each other for enemies. Fundamentalists hated Catholics. Catholics hated fundamentalists. Catholics hated Eastern Orthodox. Eastern Orthodox hated Catholics. And so on.
Today the situation is utterly different. Conservative Christians now get along with each other. The theological differences are still there, but don't really matter that much. Now you even see right-wing Jews supporting Christian fundamentalists. You see Christian fundamentalists listening to Michael Savage. Now these people are all one big happy family operating under the self-given title of "people of faith." Theological differences are forgotten, and it's all about lining up allies for the "culture war." Twenty years ago the big issues were related to biblical interpretation and the nature of the church. Today the big issues are homosexuality and abortion. Twenty years ago their enemies were other Christians and other religions. Today their enemies are the "liberals" and liberalism is the new heresy that must be extinguished.
In other words, for conservative Christians, the critical issues used to crystalize along the theological axis. Today they crystalize along the political axis. And this change is going to have very profound and negative consequences for both religion and politics in the U.S.
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Here I am, tear me apart.
[Read the article: My lunch with an antifeminist pundit]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What liberals don't realize is that many of these right-wing pundits are not scholars or authors who are trying to have a reasonable discussion about issues. They're like chess masters. They know the opening, the middle game, the end game. They are not there for a friendly discussion; they are there to win. And not just to win but to vanquish with scorched-earth ruthlessness. For every move you make they have a pre-planned, pre-studied counter-move. For every statistic you have they have 20 statistics, all memorized, and it would take you a month just to figure out where all their statistics came from. They know all your arguments before you even open your mouth. And they have a hundred pre-packaged refutations for anything you might say.
It's time for liberals to understand what's going on. There is a culture war. It's just that we don't act like it. When some poor liberal goes up against O'Beirne it's like a minimum-wage security guard with a nightstick going up against a Navy SEAL with a submachine gun. The author of this article says that when Kate O'Beirne came up against a former head of NARAL that "it was a bloodbath." No shit it was a blood bath. That's what O'Bierne DOES. That's what she trains for.
When these "discussions" happen in a public venue it makes the liberal look dumb and inept. What we have to realize is that these things are not discussions. They are combat. The conservative hit-person is not there to discuss. He or she is there to kill you and mount your scalp on a hundred right-wing blogs. Here's what the American Enterprise Institute said about the match-up:
"Watching the Kate vs. Kate debate on Meet the Press this past Sunday--it was our own Kate O’Beirne vs. Kate Michelman, formerly of NARAL Pro-Choice America--how out-of-date the latter's rhetoric seemed, how diffuse and filibustering her language was, over against the precision, citation of telling facts, and self-confident argument of Kate O'Beirne."
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.23678/pub_detail.asp
Bloodbath indeed. The tragedy is that we liberals participate in it, we run to it. The early Christians at least had to be *thrown* to the lions. We liberals walk into the lions -- "here I am, rip me to shreads." If you're going to confront the lions you need to be a lion. And where are the liberal lions?