Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Jason, you blog that you can't describe how you're feeling, in part about the proposed laws in the USA banning, it seems, Fred Phelps and and his anti-gay, anti-'America' protestors from stirring up trouble. So I'm not sure exactly what your take on it is, nor anyone else's. But if I were a USAdian, I'd be all for banning anyone who goes to funerals and denigrates the deceased, all in the name of Christianity.

I suppose I just see it as just another symptom of the religious malaise that's infected the USA. Doing things 'in God's name' is now politically and socially acceptable - it seems to be the only reason needed. And behind the scenes, the right-wing conservative christians manoeuvre, distancing themselves from Phelps while at the same time still wanting to justify their own actions in terms of the same God. Phelps, in the non-sequitur of the truly deranged, says that he's glad that people hate him because otherwise he wouldn't be teaching the truth - and again because God wills it.

It reminds me of the conversation I had with a Seventh Day Adventist who came to our door a year ago. I said I couldn't believe anything written in the Bible because every group used the same source to justify their own ends. I sent them away with a reading list of Stephen Jay Gould's book "Rocks Of Ages", a book which tries to say that if Religion and Science could only agree to 'explain' different things - the latter everything that we see around us and the former what happens before we're born and after we die - then everything would be OK. (They never came back, and yet it wasn't anywhere near the size of the Bible...) I fear that the USA has a big pendulum going - the 1980s and 1990s were big times for science explaining the universe, so now we have Intelligent Design.

I'd be happy for the pendulum to swing if so many people weren't hurt and killed each time it crosses the floor...