by gg3 » Mon 16 Oct 2006, 07:31:04
But as you describe it, Omar, the Islamic creation story also reflects a fundamental truth: "a flash of light and then everything was created" sounds the way someone 1500 years ago, who looked up into the night sky and suddenly had a deep insight into the nature of things, would describe the Big Bang.
Consider the Native American terms, "silver bird," and "iron horse," for airplane and locomotive respectively. The latter even became adopted into English. These terms reflect fundamental insights into the nature of each of these technologies. And lest we be tempted to dismiss them as the words of "primitives," let's not forget that Western languages do exactly the same thing: a common German word for telephone transliterates to "far-speaker," and a common Spanish word for computer transliterates to "counting machine." General intelligence follows the same normal curve irrespective of time and technology.
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As for Rove, for once he's right. Robertson and Falwell, live on television as the World Trade towers burned and then fell, on the monitors directly behind them in their studio, said that God brought this upon us as punishment for tolerating gays and abortions: a sentiment no less treasonous than to suggest that Pearl Harbor was God's retaliation for the repeal of Prohibition.
Dobson is so obsessed with gays that he prescribes, as a preventive, for fathers to shower naked with their early-teenage sons and show them what's what: the very idea of which is downright gross, the workings of a warped mind.
So yes, those particular "Christian" leaders are nutters, nutjobs, nutcases, however you want to put it. And they do a huge disservice to people of good faith.
Kuo came in as an idealist who believed that compassionate conservatism would enable churches to take care of the poor, "the least among us." He got wrapped up in the politicization of religion for a while. Now he has concluded, in language surprisingly similar to my own about such things, that it has been an unholy "merger of the sacred and the profane." So he's blowing the whistle on cynicism in high places, and good for him doing so.
But the fact remains, Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson, and their ilk in general, are truly sick, sick puppies.