The Republicans are milking more political "capital" from the Pope's passing, as this amusing Jon Stewart piece reminds us. Why aren't Democrats doing the same?
Consider: The Republican core voters are the evangelicals, and they were motivated in 2004, to a large degree, by the Apocalypse porn allegedly "co-written" by Tim LaHaye. LaHaye has actually spoken at Republican conventions.
And he's one of the staunchest Catholic-bashers in this nation's history. LaHaye may downplay his religious bigotry nowadays, but in the 1970s and the 1980s he never stopped shouting his belief that the Pope (whoever the Pope happened to be at the moment) was the AntiChrist.
The G.O.P. won the Catholic vote in the last election. With that party so closely tied to bigots like LaHaye, how could this happen?
2 comments:
The world is not divided between religious sects anymore; it hasn't really since, let's say, Galileo. Instead the world can be divided roughly into two camps, who differ by central doctrine:
(a) Man is an animal, and must live like an animal species -- territorially, fighting for scraps, etc. -- and is "good" only when shepherded.
(b) Man is not an animal, but a species capable of one thing no animal species can do: to retain the accomplishments of previous generations and build upon those accomplishments.
Belief in (b) leads, for example, to the conclusion that Man can learn, eventually, how to feed practically everyone who lives, and how not to generate more individuals than can be fed at a time. Belief in (a) leads to beliefs like Hitler's, that the survival of the German people depended on stealing farmland from Poland and the Soviet Union. That territorial principle is true for sheep and coyotes, but not humans. Both Protestantism and Catholicism are based on doctrine (a). So is Judaism, and so is Islam, and it hardly stops there.
The world order founded on doctrine (a) is collapsing, and has been collapsing visibly since Isaac Newton showed that the principles of operation on the earth were exactly the same as those in "heaven." The forces of doctrine (a), therefore, have a common enemy, namely doctrine (b). In their desperation, they sometimes join forces despite their mutual hatred.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1932360964/qid=1112149299/sr=1-18/ref=sr_1_18/104-2683964-5391959?v=glance&s=books
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