Tuesday Toon Roundup 1- 4 more years

[Hekate]

31. No, and Ghandi probably didn't "need" his Hindu scriptures to "tell" him what to do, either

But inasmuch as these formed the ground of his being and framework of his life and the culture he was born in.... and then a young African American minister learned from the Hindu Mahatma, and inasmuch as the Christian Bible formed the ground of his being and framework of his life and the culture he was born in.... These two men changed the world for the better.

Skittles, I am so sorry to be having these arguments here. I started out wanting to educate and explain, and ended up feeling like I was wading in a toxic swamp, and I don't mean with you. It has made me angry and despairing. Some vocal few of our people, and those who pretend to be our people, are capable of being as irrational, mean-spirited, and intolerant as any fire-breathing fundy ever to thump an unread Bible.

I am not ignorant of Western history: the long centuries of ignorance, intolerance, witch burnings, anti-Semitism, Crusades. The framers of our country's founding documents were steeped in the Enlightenment, the reaction to those bloody centuries. -- I railed here against Dubya's deliberate intrusions of fundamentalist Christianity into our government, seeing it then as I do now: a dangerous backsliding from our founding principles.

But the authors of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution knew very well what they meant by separation of church and state, and they never once said it meant exclusion of all religious expression from our public life.

We once had in our civic rituals ways to mention "God" as "Divine providence" and "the Father" and so on that were allusions to the most commonly held beliefs of the vast majority of the American people, Christian and Jewish. Allusions without specific reference to Jesus or the Bible, is what I'm saying. This wording works well for all the Abrahamic traditions (by which I mean our rising population of Muslims), vague references to Divinity used to work well for everyone in the original 13 States including those who thought God was a clockmaker who left the universe to tick along without direct interference, and worked well until the mid-20th Century resurgence of ignorant fundamentalism.

I quit. I'm kind of sorry I even tried, because no one whose mind is already made up is listening.