Santorum Eats Jesus Toast
Post by Jim Newman
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It’s getting harder to be excited about election politics. Maybe it’s the time of year. That cold spell before winter ends. Occasional warm temperatures give a glimpse of spring but you know there’s more to come. Just hunker down and wait for March. Even climate politics are grinding to a halt where a few deniers are sputtering that it’s not whether man has changed the climate but how much, and blubbering science isn’t a popularity race. Krugman is still rampaging against class inequities.
Tempting to work on Reagan who was recently elevated to Best President in a Harris poll at 25% versus the runner up Franklin Roosevelt at 19%–polar opposites in the conservative-liberal spectrum. So nice to live in a country that thinks of balance as a pendulum. No wonder the public has whip lash.
Really, if it weren’t for Santorum there’d be little to talk about. He’s so much like the court jester. It’s hard to get excited when he prances into the room. But I will try. He’s finally eaten the toast and gone evangelical.
Santorum is backing away from his claim that Obama has “phony theology.” That he isn’t a good Christian. Just when Obama was stating he had made money from Christian organizations and was a Christian when he tried to mollify Catholic bishops. I love holier-than-thou Christian food fights.
I am really glad to see there’s no religious judging going around. As an atheist I would see god in his righteousness smashing the entire political front to the ground. It was always a false cry not to judge. It always meant of the poor and not other religions or people. Christians have been judging each other since Jesus decided not to go to temple. He did again when he said not to cast pearls before swine. He consistently goes back and forth like some bipolar lover.
So do our politicians. It’s a tactic. Say some nasty bullshit and then retract it. Hopefully, it goes viral anyway and the damage is good.
Now, Santorum is saying not that Obama has phony theology but rather he’s condemning his world view—as if theology didn’t inform Obama of his world view.
“I accept the fact that the president is a Christian,” Santorum said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “But when you have a world view that elevates the earth above man and says we can’t take those resources because its going to harm the Earth, it’s just all an attempt to centralize power and give more power to the government.”
Santorum is supporting the bible which says man has dominion over the earth. As such man has the right to rape, pillage, and destroy anything he, she, it sees fit. Clearly, Santorum doesn’t believe in the Lorax, or speaking for the trees. Fuck the trees, they’re mine to do with as I please!
Santorum sounds positively predatorily patriarchal. Humans aren’t just stewards but the world is ours. The environment has no rights whatsoever. Neither do animals or anything else in the environment. It’s all ours to trash as we’d like. I am the man, the dad, and it’s my pad; my way or the highway.
Luckily for believers, sadly for the rest of us, by rights of conquest, humans have been able to physically support this biblical admonition. We now in the last 100 years have dominated the earth.
Santorum said that while Obama believes “man is here to serve the Earth,” he believes
“Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective.”
I am familiar with the right-to-destroy-the-planet mantra. I have heard it over and over again usually when it refers to endangered species. Recently, concerning Manatee speed zones in Florida with crackerjacks (Florida natives, usually quite religious) and libertarians wanting to drive over them at will.
Either type thinks they should be able to shit in the water. If it’s bad, neighbors will join together and stop them (libertarians), or they are fundamentalists and know they have the right to use anything to extinction.
What both sides miss is shitting at a distance. People way far away don’t know or can’t communicate powerfully enough to halt the shitting. Or that removing a species may create other deep problems wrecking havoc on human survival or well being. I got crap in my Economics of the Environment class because I would not play by the ground rule that the environment has no worth of its own. It’s always about us, even for a lot of liberals.
Human hubris about environmental knowledge exacerbates tinkering with it. We bring foreign plants and animals from other countries and then have to deal with their invasion—sounds like immigration. Florida itself is losing all of its mammals due to idiot pet owners releasing boas and pythons into the wild, along with everything else. Some of which can eat crocodiles and alligators and have no balancing predator. This python blew up with indigestion. Is this where earth-beaters are headed?
I suppose when there are no wild animals left it will be easier to raise chickens and sheep? There is a blind faith that technology will save the situation. Maybe they will release another even more parasitic animal? I had a hydrology professor tell me Asphalt was the perfect watershed—humans could control it totally.
Religious arrogance that we know enough to steward the entire planet on all levels is awe inspiringly arrogant. It’s hard not to become misanthropic and cheer for mother nature when earth quakes and tsunamis hit—especially when vast construction is placed on geohazard zones; with laws supporting that right. Not because of dislike of humans but because humans don’t bother to try to get along with nature. They assume they can live and shit anywhere they like and god and technology will make it OK. They are like chimpanzees with machine guns. No idea what it is but it’s sure fun to fire around.
It’s not surprising ancient tribal leaders thought themselves gods. Humans still do. Now we democratize it. We still think we know the world perfectly well enough to irrevocably alter it without dire consequence or that human god-like abilities will let them save it if they wish.
Every Schmo thinks he can argue an expert, equally, without even bothering to do their homework. This kind of short sightedness is taking us off the deep end. Our own extinction is racing to meet us. Santorum is riding these baboons.
Yet, we are also on the verge of Abundance as Sam Harris points out in a recent interview with Peter Diamandis and Stephen Koller. I don’t want to whip lash you here though. But we do know so much and yet still act so poorly. Bias control is great but usually the people who use it aren’t the ones that need it.
An August 2010 Pew poll found 18% of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, up from 12% before he was elected.
To understand the sliminess of Santorum one need only go back a month to Florida when a woman at a Town Hall meeting for Santorum called Obama an “avowed Muslim”.
He told reporters afterwards it wasn’t his “responsibility” to correct the voter. “There are lots of people who get up and say stuff in a town hall meeting and say things that I don’t agree with, but I don’t think it’s my obligation, nor should it be your feeling that it’s my obligation to correct somebody who says something that I don’t agree with,” Santorum said.
If an audience member had said Obama was a faithful and true Christian, Santorum would have corrected that.
ABCNews has a twist on this: when during a Town Hall meeting Obama was called an Arab, John McCain immediately corrected her:
“No, no ma’am, he’s a decent, family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is about.”
Wow, that was refreshing. He’s still weird politically, but that was decent.
Now, Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast spouted some end of world golden rule optimism, mainlining Protestant postmillennial crap. In short:
“help bring His kingdom to Earth.”
In case you have forgotten, postmillennialism means the second coming.
In Christian end-times theology, (eschatology), postmillennialism is an interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation which sees Christ‘s second coming as occurring after (Latin post-) the “Millennium“, a Golden Age in which Christian ethics prosper.
Postmillennialism also teaches that the forces of Satan will gradually be defeated by the expansion of the Kingdom of God throughout history up until the second coming of Christ. This belief that good will gradually triumph over evil has led proponents of postmillennialism to label themselves “optimillennialists” in contrast to “pessimillennial” premillennialists and amillennialists.
Obama thinks if we all follow the golden rule there will be a period of prosperity followed by a messiah. Geez, this is just as weird as thinking the world is on the back of a turtle or the sky is covered in a cloth of darkness where birds pecked holes, appearing as stars to us. What if you’re sadistic-masochistic?
Oddly enough, if you are American Christian, whether you believe in the golden rule helps define your religiosity. According to a survey “Orientations to Christian Life by Congregation,” Protestants tend to believe in the golden rule, 88%, and only 12% are evangelical. Catholics are similar at 75% and 10% respectively. Evangelicals are the exact opposite: 11% of them embrace the golden rule while 81% embrace evangelism.
The key to this difference is whether you are a biblical literalist. Evangelicals tend to be literalists and golden rule types see the bible as “powerful motivation as we work towards God’s reign in the world.”
Evangelicals see blood and doom in the second coming. Wow, Obama seems so cheerful, now!
What this means is that Santorum is a lying son of a bitch. He claims to be Catholic but the theology he is promoting is evangelical. It’s not surprising but pathetic. He’s eaten the Jesus toast.
When Catholics go to culture war, they portray the other side as Enlightenment secularists, not Christians with a false view of the Bible.
In a new poll of Michiagan Republicans, PPP finds Santorum with over 50 percent of evangelicals, as compared to 24 percent for Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, Santorum has 31 percent of Catholics; Romney, 43 percent. When it comes to Republican politics today, Santorum’s the evangelical, Romney’s the Catholic.
Damn, I thought religion defined you. Religion is like a sweater. If it’s a summer party you wear white, if it’s formal you wear black. If it’s the holidays…
That’s why we won’t see Romney giving a Kennedy-Catholic, me-too-but-Mormon, yet, church-state-separation speech. There just aren’t enough Mormons and they are too suspect for Evangelicals. Romney can pass as a Catholic. Hell he could pass as a Wall Street Cocaine master with a boyfriend on the side and still do his wife!
Why can’t we get religion out of politics! If we refuse that, let’s get down to brass tacks and start some serious religious debate, and resolve this metaphysical bullshit once and for all. Tax churches, encourage blasphemy, piss on graves, encourage critical thinking, and examine all metaphysical claims as having legal consequences.
Jim Newman, bright and well
www.brightpride.com and www.frontiersofreason.com
JIM: “Reagan who was recently elevated to Best President in a Harris poll at 25% versus the runner up Franklin Roosevelt at 19%”>>
Rightwingers are falling all over themselves passing this one around but the Harris Interactive poll is not considered scientific by professional pollsters. That is to say, it is only slightly better than an online poll, which is entirely worthless as a measurement of public opinion. If anything this just shows the ability of the rightwing media to rewrite history with a couple decades of Reagan toe sucking.
A better measure of public popularity would be a scientific poll of approval rating at departure. Judged by this, Clinton comes in first place (66%), Reagan a close second. Contrast this with Bush:
“President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent. Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years. Mr. Bush’s final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/16/opinion/polls/main4728399.shtml
Another measure would be people who actually know WTF they are talking about: professional historians. These again loathe Bush:
“HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst”
http://hnn.us/articles/48916.html
These responses are self-selected and thus not scientific, but at least they know some history.
An objective measurement of president success, judged by normal categories of success, finds Reagan coming in 4th:
http://www.forbes.com/2004/07/20/cx_da_0720presidents.html
JIM: “Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast spouted some end of world golden rule optimism, mainlining Protestant postmillennial crap. In short:
“help bring His kingdom to Earth.”
In case you have forgotten, postmillennialism means the second coming.”>>
I would cut him some slack here. No need to read his comment through the strict lens of a literalist fundie, which Obama certainly is not. It’s quite appropriate and common to use this language in a secular (or enlightened Christian) sense (no gods required), meaning, regardless of what a God is or isn’t going to do, we can work to make “heaven on earth,” “God’s kingdom on earth” “earth a paradise” or whatever. One can read his comment in this humanist light.
D.
Yes, I was responding to the Harris poll and not others; I was not writing a survey of poll results–also why it was an indicator of my–yawn–interest in it. Reagan does come up as a great president often. Liberals even will harken back to him; I begin reminding them of what Reagan did and it’s like Oh, I forgot that. Reagan has become a conversation piece between liberals and conservatives reaching for some president they can agree on. Clinton did well by the economy but you have to give Reich much credit just as I would assign fault to Rove and not just his puppet Bush–but often for different reasons than lib-cons think. Exit surveys are also more like fan mail. Sometime it does take awhile to evaluate the effects of a presidency, as you note. Forbes is not my quality calibration but it is more specific.
No, I won’t cut Obama slack here though I am sympathetic to him. The National Prayer Day was established in 1953 and it is a pandering to the Family and other radical religious types. It is a rah rah meeting for religiosity in politics. It upsets me just like the religious oath in the allegiance, our changed motto, and god love on money. While Obama does paint a more rosy picture of his faith, rather than evangelical hell fire and brimstone, it scares the crap out of me when a president feels he has to prove he’s a good Christian, and why.
Why not kill a chicken and check its entrails to decide on war. Let’s do a seance and see what dead popup thinks. Let’s look at some tea leaves or check the aura of the opposing general to get a feel for him. Sounds different if we don’t use mainstream American Christian practice–but it’s not far off to many missionized Christians with hybrid, syncretic faiths. It’s just Christian promotion. Bringing in other world leaders into this religious dog and pony show debases the very real problems with faith informing politics. Why not bring in the African Christians that kill witches–we used to kill witches. I know let’s send Christians to Rwanda, they can slow the Muslim takeover. To make it just a bit edgey, what if Obama, as Mitt will do, spoke in tongues and writhed on the ground before deciding on a budget? Being possessed by the spirit is fun when it’s the Blues Brothers but I really don’t want a president to do it to make a decision. Even if he does, it’s just TMI for me.
Leadership in a republic must rely on representatives using their expertise of good government and not personal faith fulfillment.
Obama does not have The Charisma of a Reagan or a Kennedy sadly. Reagan came into office and changed everything his way period. Obama was elected and unless they impeached him it couldn’t have been stalemated worse. He could have created a lot more change in spite of stalemating but since he’s a more introverted intellectual he didn’t. Oh, well. Too bad. I still like Obama but he could have made a stronger case for keeping faith out of politics at The Breakfast.
I won’t even begin to write about Santorum, at The Breakfast, who personifies the religious test. Hell, even the conservative Maureen Dowd is mad at him.
Jim