A discussion was going on Yesterday over at Shakespeare's Sister yesterday as to whether the non-religious left is too intolerant of religion. To which I wonder, what non-religious left is that? Seems to me that the real religion of America, and we all take communion there the way we all think in English without being able to get around it unless we go to a lotta trouble to learn another language reallyreally well, is like a recurring small but not still and certainly insistent voice of absolute should-be-ism, at least I hear it speaking in my soul, with an obverse of schadenfreude "well you oughta've known, asshole, and you deserve it".
Ifn you go someplace else (nuther culture, we say, approvingly, widening ourselves) and eventually it dawns on you that these other people (Paraguayans,in my case of nuther culture) don't personally give a shit whether I think this way or live that way, but watch out they say, helpfully, don't let the government think you're a commie or they'll grab you and push you out of an airplane.
We're not like that. I say this of course with a vision in my head of what should be. The furthest we ever got from our old time religion, in my lifetime, whether atheist or Baptist or some other flavor of puritanism, was I think the sixties counterculture flower child revolution which inspired paroxysms of fear and parody and of course it soon went away, and hey, anyone who really believed "if it feels good do it" deserves what they got, well maybe not AIDS but...hey. Strange to say we are still haunted by the ghost of this departed heresy. What else could account for both Doktor Dobson and David Horowitz?
Still, personally I loved it, and wish it was yet here. The lost religion of my youth.
No comments:
Post a Comment