Posted on 03/16/2012 10:23:47 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Religion is very good at telling you what to do and how to live. Your leisure time, if you so choose, can be completely absorbed in matters of ritual, practice and belief. Nobody stops you.
I’m biased, but I believe the Jewish faith has a particular genius for this. There are morning prayers and evening prayers, complex dietary laws, 613 commandments direct from God covering every aspect of life, plus an ancient language to master, enormous books of commentary to study and debate.
You do get to sleep, however.
Don’t get me wrong; other faiths will keep you busy, too. Muslims pray five times a day, have their own dietary restrictions, plus other duties, such as pilgrimages to Mecca. Christians have services and confessions, summer camps and vespers, candles to light, shrines to tend, hymns to sing.
Whichever faith you practice, there are real, undeniable benefits: Following a religion gives you not just lots of stuff to do, but structure, community and meaning. I’d never be hostile to faith — life’s a tough, long road. You need something to pass the time and find comfort during adversity. Religion is as good as anything else, if not better.
That said, not everybody wants to embrace ritual and arcane belief, and so religious practice is voluntary. Children can be forced to go to Sunday school — I forced mine — but adults are on their own, so most shrug and ignore big swaths of their faiths. Most Jews do not keep Kosher, most Christians don’t regularly attend church, most Muslims never make that trip to Mecca.
We take it for granted, but this freedom to pick and choose what we believe and do is a privilege not found in all corners of the world and a fairly recent development, historically, one that countless heroic individuals over centuries fought and died for. They struggled to pry the hands of powerful religious leaders away from the tools of legal compulsion, which is what government does.
Government fills your time too, with its own expectations and requirements. But these are not exhortations. They’re laws. The IRS doesn’t have pastors hectoring the public about the importance of paying taxes. It doesn’t need them; it can put you in jail. Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn’t bother with advocates standing at street corners, handing out tracts urging you to drive the speed limit. He’s installing cameras. Who needs the threat of hell when you’ve got the cops?
Thus anyone — such as Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who blows into town Friday — who suggests we get church and state back together, who wants the stick of government to enforce a particular faith, is guilty of the worst kind of historical ignorance. He’s a doctor juggling vials of smallpox, a drug company urging pregnant women to calm their nerves with Thalidomide, a Southerner suggesting that black folk might be happier as slaves. His big issues — fighting birth control and gay marriage, condemning sex for pleasure — are not good social policy. They’re not important for the effective running of our country. They’re aspects of his extreme brand of Catholic doctrine, and he’s pretending that people aren’t completely free to embrace or reject them on their own, and they need to be helped by the government using its coercive authority, and that the reluctance of the law to enforce his religion, say through health care policy, is oppression. It’s not.
Americans are a polite people — to a fault, really — and used to the clamor of various religions. We usually don’t argue about the trappings of faith, out of respect, so can overlook it when, for instance, a certain group is screaming “abortion is murder” and changing laws to yank non-believers into line, when abortion is not murder; it is a legal medical procedure that most women in the world have access to and most women in America expect to have available.
Many Americans who value their freedoms, who do not want an American Taliban to begin enforcing one religion, are terrified by Santorum. That seems premature. To me, his popularity is a trick of the eye. Santorum won the Mississippi Republican primary this week, receiving 94,000 votes in a state of 2.9 million. Since most people are not focused on faith but busy with their secular lives, they can initially overlook that a social extremist and religious fanatic is striding toward the White House, his only goal — judging from his rhetoric — to corrupt our government and use it to enforce his own faith’s strident moral predilections. But I have my own strong faith; faith that the American people will eventually wake up, notice what’s happening and send this guy back to church, where he belongs.
Drones are drones and they will come out to vote for their King no matter what because they will have fellow drones knocking on their doors and driving to the polls so your point if vapid. Fighting requires fighting not non-fighting.
Are we going to fight for our country or just "hope" we don't rouse the enemies suspicion?
Obama’s poll numbers are down because of the economy.
Installing portable defibrillators for libs and Rhinos on the streets of America should be Santorum’s first plan as POTUS.
Funny that he was wading in the difference between conservatives and liberals the whole time when describing how religious people exhort others to behave a certain way,
whilst the left, secularists, prefer to use the threat of deadly force through the use of government to force others to behave a certain way.
Where's the evidence for that? Obama tried to claim there was a war on contraception and it blew up in this his face. His approval numbers have been going down ever since.
So, Obama is going to unsuccessful if he tries to run on social issues if the economy continues to struggle?
“Drones are drones and they will come out to vote for their King no matter what..”
There are many voters that were fooled by Obama’s “hope and change” baloney, and are very dissatisfied with him. They were not going to turn out to vote for Obama. There are many on the left that are dissatisfied with his leadership. They were not going to turn out to vote for him.
Obama would love to turn the discussion from a collapsing economy to social issues.
Liberals worrying about our freedom are like hookers worrying about their virginity.
A typical liberal screed.
Now Rick is going off on “internet porn.” Please, spare me. First it’s that, next it’s foul language on cable TV, then we’re back to ratings on music cds...etc, ad nausium.
“Where’s the evidence for that? Obama tried to claim there was a war on contraception and it blew up in this his face. His approval numbers have been going down ever since.”
First, how can I provide proof of something that has not occurred yet? My speculation is based on what many Republican strategists are saying. Rick is re energizing people that voted for Obama in 2008, are dissatisfied by his leadership, and are unlikely to vote for him again.
Second, correlation is not causation. Just because Obama’s numbers went down around the same time as the “war on woman” thing does not mean said war caused his numbers to go down.
Beautiful, cripplecreek! Well said!
The same establishment types that keep telling us Romney in inevitable and the only candidate that can beat Obama?
Nope, Obama is a loser on both issues. Anyway, Obama isn't interested in "discussing" anything.
Sigh. Deflect. Deflect. Deflect.
The majority of people are concerned about putting food on the table, feeding their family, and putting a roof over their families’ heads (real family values). This is what Obama does not want the election to be about. His stewardship of the economy. Unemployment. Debt. Gas prices. The growth of government.
Gas prices blew up Obama’s numbers. His and the left’s attack on the comments by Rush were raising his numbers. The comments of Rush and others turned a conflict where Tim Dolan and the Bishopa were going to thrash Obama into one where they were accused of approving Rush’s rhetoric. Mr. Santorum’s rhetoric has the same effect. He doesn’t think before he speaks and his words raise concern that he will use the power of govt to enforce his vision of morality.
Gas prices blew up Obama’s numbers. His and the left’s attack on the comments by Rush were raising his numbers. The comments of Rush and others turned a conflict where Tim Dolan and the Bishopa were going to thrash Obama into one where they were accused of approving Rush’s rhetoric. Mr. Santorum’s rhetoric has the same effect. He doesn’t think before he speaks and his words raise concern that he will use the power of govt to enforce his vision of morality.
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