A Gift for the New Year

I am indebted to dailykos for calling attention to what they describe as a GBCW (Good Bye Cruel World) posting on Redstate.com, a passionate conservative blog. The author of this piece and I would not see eye-to-eye on many issues, but he's a good writer. And boy is he an unhappy camper right now. All those news items about how the GOP events in Iowa are drawing about half the numbers the Democratic campaigners are? You know, Iowa, the Heartland of the Homeland? What ought to be secure Republican bastion?

If this post at Redstate is generally reflective of the mood on the hard right, it sucks to be them. I agree that their candidates are either idiots or worse, but I thought their advocates would be willing to overlook all that in the interests of electing someone, anyone, who claimed to be a Republican. It seems that it is not working out that way right now: Here

Conservative blogs really are different, aren't they? One of those who responded to this posting just wrote "Jeremiah 17:9". Say what? Is everyone on that site supposed to know all the sub-sections of the Bible by heart? So fine, I looked it up.

Jeremiah 17:9. When the scripture says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," its ramifications to life are profound. It becomes clearer when we add synonyms: Human nature is dishonest, underhanded, untrustworthy, misleading, crooked, and insincere besides. To appease an appetite or receive instant gratification, it craftily tricks us into discounting plain truths as unworthy or unnecessary.

What a warm and charitable view of human nature! That section of the Bible argues that we are all garbage, that our essential nature is to be conniving crud. When I read something like that I am inclined to reflect, once again, that I got lucky by missing out on a strict Christian upbringing. My father studied to become a Methodist Minister, then decided that he'd really rather not, and set foot in very few churches during the rest of his life. I regret that he and I never spoke about it, but he was big on letting others draw their own conclusions about life. I assume that he did not believe the human heart is "deceitful... and desperately wicked".

Now here is a riddle for all of us. What the heck is this Biblical quote doing in the comments section of a political blog? Does the poster believe that the writer of the piece is "desperately wicked"? or that the Republican candidates are, or that... ? no, I just can't make sense of it.

What I do know is that I would like religion to be extracted from American political life, like pulling a tooth. It strikes me that confronting religious extremism in the Islamic world will be a lot harder if we ourselves are behaving like religious zealots. My clear sense is that much of the Muslim world is fairly moderate and deeply troubled by what is going on. I've had three different conversations with Muslim acquaintances recently where they were at pains to argue that extremism and fundamentalism is foreign to Islam, an aberration that they abhor. I'd like our next President to be someone who keeps their religious life fairly private and well out of the office of the President, so that he could more easily connect with the rational center of the 1.2 billion strong Muslim world. Please.

Arthur