Too Much To Dream

As a non-religious person, I am increasingly astounded at the blinkered closed-mindedness and ignorance about religion that so many of the cultural elite show.

But you see, I respect most religions, and they don't.

What a strange article. Were they asleep during all the Clinto prayer breakfasts? He was every so much more publicly religious, though more determined to have other people on their knees.

Refresh my memory on the differences between Britain and America, because I'm getting very confused.

Which one has a state religion?

Which one has been torn by open warfare between Catholics and Protestants?

Which one has fundamental guarantees of religious freedom?

Which one specifically forbids religious tests for national office?

Americans believe that there is a difference between good and evil and right and wrong. According to this article, that’s proof that we’re ignorant and irrational??

This writer is ignorant of ethics, religion and history. He's just a close-minded zealot, as extreme as any snake-handling swamp dweller or rabid fundamentalist mullah.

Dang it, Andrea, I like your post better, and it only took up one paragraph!

There is no March 17 post now, but a March 18 post at 7:27 am. Blogger broke last night, and put two versions of the post up, even though clearly only one was posted. So I had to delete the post and repost it. Yes, yes, if I am ever employed again, I'll get off Blogger.

Yes, we left Europe because we were religious.

And we were being persecuted by Europeans who belonged to state-recognized religions.

What was the point of this article? It basically says, "I don't believe in God, and George Bush does." Are we supposed to infer something from that? It's the typical atheist position. "All intelligent people believe there is no God. Person X believes in God, so he's stupid."

I read some hack-up in the Guardian last week, where one of the commentators suggested that prayer breakfasts were an invention of George Bush and that people were forced to attend and pray to the God of the Evil Bush. What a moron.

Besides, why does the BBC want to take on American perspectives on religion? Look in your own back yard, poof-pie. The self-righteous were up in arms in Belfast a while back because a touring play production had nudity in it. "Nudity! We can't look at that! We'll go to HELL!"

Yeah, all those silly, naive, oddball religious types. Mercifully the BBC stands ready to protect us from them.

1. I thought we were all supposed to be so damned tolerant of other cultures and religions. Can you imagine a mainstream American publication putting out something like this about Jordanian Muslims.
2. I'd bet money that some of those surveyed who believe in heaven and hell are not Christians. I'd bet some of them are Muslims, in fact.
3. Is the man not paying attention to the religious expression in this country? Most of it is not really religious, from what I can tell. "Thank God" and "our prayers have been answered," not to mention prayers at graduations and the like, often have no religious sentiment behind them, but are just expressions of generalized feelings of good fortune, sympathy or seriousness.

I posted about this over on NZPundit as well. The tasty irony is that the BBC has a Head of Religion, and has a charter requirement to "reflect the diversity of religious belief in Britian". But Justin was patronising white male conservative Christians, so that's OK I suppose.

No, he was patronizing white male conservative American Christians -- and that makes all the difference. Respect for the diversity of religious belief in the UK doesn't have to extend across the Pond, don't you see?

Thanks, Kevin. They're so tacky with all this prayer stuff and taking Bibles to work. You'd never catch the Archbishop of Canterbury being so inexpressably vulgar. :)

His Grace the Archbishop must be a modernist. As explained in "Yes Prime Minister" that's what Anglican priests are called when they cease to believe in G-d.

Durnit Andrea, I read it and was planning to write something about it too. You beat me too it...and I agree.

PS: The Puritans were not the most tolerant minded people either. They were driven out of England because they were a bunch of fanatic bastards, not unlike some of Islam's loons. Cromwell left a bloody trail across England against all those he considered heretical. He trashed churches, burned books, executed heretics et al.

They weren't exactly too tolerant here either. However, fortunately the US had enough different religions in the founding 13 to make one being dominant impossible.

The first amendment was specifically written at the behest of fundamentalist baptists of the same exact school as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to guarantee that they would be free from persecution by state religions. FYI.

I didn't know that Robertson and Falwell were that old. They look so well-preserved.

(I couldn't resist.)

Dean, I don't know where you got that from. Fundamentalism didn't start until the late 19th century. If you mean fundamentalism as in "the bible is literally true and the world was created in six days", that was characteristic of nearly all Christian denominations when the Constitution was written.

The "establishment" clause was pushed by politicians mindful of the continual religious wars and persecutions common in Europe.

For another entertainingly surreal British take on U.S. culture, check out Crazy Matt Engel's latest, which attempts to prove that the U.S. is more or less the same as Iraq. Gotta love 'im. But then, I would like to be able to expect better from the Beeb than from the Grauniad.

The confusion may stem from the fact Jefferson's notorious "wall of separation" term came from a post-Bill of Rights letter he wrote to a group of Baptist pastors. Jefferson was merely explaining to them how the religious freedom portions of the First Amendment benefited them directly.

Then as now, real Baptists were more concerned about government intrusion into their church than about how they could intrude on the government.