Saturday, February 6, 2010

Tea Parties and The Holy Land Experience

The sociologist in me is fascinated by the emergence of rival tea party factions in the midst of what pundits are calling a grassroots reform movement in the US. I'd love to believe that but I despair when I hear that the "rival" groups are actually being managed by an organization paid to consult for the Republican party and the two supposed factions are managed by offices next door to one another.

The cynic in me is really my own personal bullshit meter but now and then it is capable of becoming un-cynical (for want of a better word) until it finds evidence yet again of the inconsistency, corruption, and moral vacuity of a large part of the world. I'd love to believe that tea party people are really thinking for themselves, but I think it more likely that a bunch of people operating on enthusiams and unexamined assumptions about how the world should be are being manipulated yet again for somebody's profit.

Let me state here that I have nothing against the founding principles of the Reublican party. What I object to is how this party allows itself to be bought by corporations who have no interest in anything other than themselves and to be directed by a bunch of religious nuts. I could probably live with the corporations. They at least are not hyprocritical--they've made it clear from the start that all they're interested in is profit, which at least creates jobs. I cannot live with the religious mentality that goes to the Holy Land Adventure exhibit in Orlando and weeps at the reenactment of the crucifixion, complete with rock singers dressed in Arab clothing. "Come thrill to the Crucifixion, real blood!, talk to the Virgin Mary."

Yes, you must be saying, she watched Bill Maher's Reliculous. I did. It's slanted, it's no respector of unexamined belief, and it hits on the the most bizarre nonsense associated with all the world's major religions. I laughed. I looked on in horror. And I realized that we need to do more of what I call choosing to believe, with emphasis on the choosing rather falling down in awe before so-called authority. We don't need graven images these days when we have televised evangelicalism.

Those of you who have heard me hold forth on the subject of religion know I am not anti-religious if you define religion as spirituality. I am anti organized-religion where hypocritical hucksters create laws and ideas not in any Bible (as if a bunch of nomads living in the desert long before technology are really that authoritative), and use these phoney ideas to leech money from their followers. If humans are made in the image of their creator, surely they have enough sense to judge for themselves what they believe in. Are we so poverty stricken that we cannot accept our own spirituality unless someone is giving us the latest made-up laws to get into whatever we define as heaven.

America, Reublicans, Religionists, let's for heaven's sake get over this absolutism that has taken us by the necks and look at ourselves in the mirror. Your unexamined belief and willingness to wallow in a bath of emotion is paying off for someone or it would be promoted and enforced.

There are no answers. No one can give you the laws for living except in the most day to day forms. No one can promise you a heaven of your preference. You aren't going to get raptured up to heaven--no one is that lucky. If this world is destroyed it is not the creator who does it--it will be us.

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