“What we have to do now is embrace this new technology …” — John McCain

Freddie at L’Hôte says he’s not religious in any way, but the New Atheism has no appeal to him:

The new atheism has made its challenge, then. And here is my answer. I don’t believe in God, in any meaningful way. I am not a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Jew, or whatever else you will. In questions of public policy I feel religion has no place, and rational discourse has to rule. I don’t want religious artifacts in the public square, I don’t want creationism taught in public schools, and I don’t want any religion privileged in any way by government. I am, in most every way that matters, a natural ally of atheism.

But atheism has expelled me. It has expelled me because it has in its heart contempt and loathing and fear of the other. So I reject it. I don’t reject all atheists; many atheist are uninterested in ridiculing the religious– they simply want to be left in peace, and not have religion forced on them or on the law. That, to me, is a principled atheism, and one I am happy to coexist with. But this new atheism, this anti-theism, has only contempt at its heart, and I reject it as thoroughly as it has rejected me.

Very well put. I would express the point this way: Principled atheism is, in itself, noble. It is merely a rejection of all that is religious that is worth rejecting, not merely to negate, but to affirm the positive role of science, rationality, skepticism, secularism, and tolerance. I think you can tell more principled atheists from their less mature cousins by their degree of willingness to “coexist” with religionists without ridicule, contempt, or hatred. [...]

I don’t have a particular beef with Howard Fineman. At least I didn’t, until today. But a sentence in his Newsweek op-ed “Gaffe Alert!” just makes my skin crawl.

His piece opens with a few lines detailing what a wonderful week it was shaping out to be for John McCain: a “nicely staged” campaign event in Denver, a “tightly focused message” on the economy, the fresh energy of a “re-launched campaign”, and a renewed McCain “back in the game”. Then, oops! Phil Gramm makes a gaffe.

Okay… Big Bad Gramm put his foot in his mouth. Asinine. He should keep his mouth shut. Fine.

Fortunately, Fineman says, John McCain is above all that, untouchable even in a moment of distress. Fineman writes:

Senator McCain, cringing, immediately distanced himself from Gramm and his comments.

There’s just one little problem with this sentence. It’s a bald face lie. [...]

New York Times columnist Gail Collins pours cold water over the left’s disappointment with Barack Obama:

Think back. Why, exactly, did you prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton in the first place? Their policies were almost identical — except his health care proposal was more conservative. You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right? He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Of course, not all of us who preferred Obama to Clinton did so under the delusion that he was some sort of left-wing Reagan, an ideologically pure politician who would fight for every pet cause of the left. We did so perfectly well knowing that he was pretty non-ideological, supporting policies that are mainstream Democratic priorities (ending the Bush tax cuts, ending the Iraq war, achieving universal healthcare, appointing non-wingnut judges to the Supreme Court, etc.) We regarded his ability to appeal to independents and non-ideological Republicans as a strong asset.

But I think talk of the “Obama’s move to the center” narrative is probably necessary, a positive development in the campaign. Thanks to the National Journal’s rating of Obama as the Senate’s most liberal (a claim that always seemed overblown to those of us who have read his books and followed his career), and a relentless effort by every Republican to paint Obama as an extremist, Obama was fast getting pigeonholed very unfairly. His recent reminders of his basically moderate-left, compromising, practical attitude are needed to undo some of the damage that has been done.

“You have AIDS.”

“No. Like all labels, they tell you one thing, and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain. In the pecking order. Not ideology. Not sexual taste. But something much simpler. Clout.” — from “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner

I’m not surprised by the results of an Internet quiz telling me that Buddhism is the right religion for me. Sigh.

Which is the right religion for you? (new version)
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as BuddhismYou scored as Buddhism. Your beliefs most closely resemble those of Buddhism. Do more research on Buddhism and possibly consider becoming Buddhist, [...]

“You mess with us, and you wake up with a condom on your house.”

Andrew Sullivan sums up his argument with the Social Gospel variety of Christianity — which he equates with a cooptation of Christianity by socialism and redistributionism, a position he says Obama leans towards — in this way:

[I]t isn’t about encouraging charity; it is about the enforcement of “charity” by the strong hand of the state. And in so far as it forcibly takes people’s property from them, it also diminishes their capacity for real charity.

Now, saints are very rare.

And the kind of voluntary communism of which Merton speaks likely only in monasteries and religious orders. In the world as it is, there should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick and the indigent. But it should be a safety-net to avoid specific social evils, not a system of redistribution to construct some notion of “social justice” (see Chapter 6 in “The Conservative Soul”). In the end, the social Gospel can make Christianity less, rather than more, likely. The state cannot experience faith; and it cannot express charity. Only individuals can. One by one. (emphasis mine)

Is it really so self-evident that only individuals, and not collective entities, are capable of “experiencing faith” or “expressing charity”? And that Christianity is essentially a religion concerned only with the individual soul, the I-Thou relationship between One Supreme God and The Individual Soul? Andrew Sullivan, like many Christians, thinks so. But this assumption has been fundamentally questioned by many Christian theologians at least since the late 19th century (including the early but not the later Reinhold Niebuhr), and is explicitly disavowed by liberation theology, arguably the most significant paradigm shift in theology in the past 40 years. Today, many Christians believe that groups as well as individuals embody the Spirit and have a role in salvation (Matthew 18: “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”) [...]

Reading from Joe Perez’s Soulfully Gay:

Wednesday, Dec. 31