LOL oh noes!
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.
I see similar anti-Santorum talking points from some of his critics on FR.
why does this guy’s news story resemble many of the Anti-Santorum comments made here on FR?
Rick Santorum has come to take away your freedom... Project we much!
Step away from the crack-pipe...
Like this whopper?
who wants the stick of government to enforce a particular faith
Rick Santorum: Energizing the left’s base since 1990.
Paulbots?
Sadly, I agree with both or your comments.
Yeah, I found some FR anti-Santorum fanboys too but they make their case against him interesting enough.
Lefties just grab lies out of their assses and that’s the difference..
We don't want to piss off the devil and his minions, do we? Let's just pretend God and faith and values don't matter and we can go the way of Rome about 400 AD.
Whenever some libtard goes apoplectic over my candidate, I have to feel like I’m on to something.
The Left, which is the ideology of bans and mandates, always seems to project that propensity onto the Right, which is the ideology of choice, freedom, and voluntarism.
It’s both instructive and hilarious that they do this time and time again and never learn why and how we are different than them.
This gross misunderstanding of conservatism is also at the heart of the whole “contraception debate.” When George Stephanopolous asked the question at the debate whether or not states had the right to ban contraception, everyone said “of course they do, they can ban anything they’d like” the Left automatically assumed that meant the candidates WOULD ban contraception because with that much power, that’s what the Left would do.
The Left bans and mandates everything they don’t like and they assume everyone would do the same thing if given the power to do so. We prefer freedom.
The point I was making is that everytime Rick opens his mouth more of the people that were dissatisfied with Obama, and not likely to get out to vote for him in the fall become re energized. They will crawl to the polls in the fall to vote against Rick. A very valid point.
This article will not dissuade one Santorum supporter. In fact, he has just steeled their resolve to vote for him no matter what.
I don’t especially like Rick Santorum. I hope that when the primaries reach my state I will be able to vote for Newt. But articles like this, so over-the-top, are just ridiculous. I didn’t like it when Newt was painted as a wild-eyed lunatic lurching from one crazy idea to the next. And I hate it that a candidate, even one I dislike, is compared to a slaveholder or doctor juggling smallpox.
What is this guy going to do if Santorum snuffs out his access to underage girls having sex on the internet? Commit suicide?
Yeah, the contraception issue did wonders for Obama's approval numbers.
Actually we should start a mantra and cry out “the left wants to murder your baby”. At least we would be telling the truth.
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