Okay, yes, that's worrying...

[avevale_intelligencer]

Apparently the Republican front-runner wants to amend the Constitution so that it's more in line with what he sees as God's will. Presumably he will go on to recommend that the text in all published books and periodicals be replaced with the text of the Bible, since, after all, why would you ever want to read another book?

That is (I think) a crank. That is (I think) a loony. And if that has a hope in hell of becoming President, especially after the last one, then maybe the Constitution does need amending, if only to introduce some sort of screening.

The interesting thing from an outsider's standpoint is the depth of feeling a threat to the Constitution seems to arouse. After all, it's just a set of rules written down hundreds of years ago by a bunch of old guys who didn't even know about the Internet. But I can well imagine from what I've read on the subject that some Americans, reading that last sentence, might have felt the same kind of stab of anger--how dare I!--that a Christian might feel if I were to suggest on the same grounds that the Bible could do with some creative editing to bring it into line with modern thought.

Maybe America itself--the idea of America--is even more like a religion than I thought. Maybe it's more deserving of that status than some actual forms of religion.

Comments

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Well, I did read that on the internet, to be fair - but it didn't *seem* like a wack-job site. That means it must be true, right? ;-) (You should certainly be able to confirm or deny it if you choose to research, anyway).

Nice quote, but I'm not sure the distinction is that simple. I think I'm fairly literate and completely urban (if not urbane), but I'm much more comfortable with the idea of worshipping a personal deity (even if I haven't, you know, picked one yet) than an abstraction. I liked lil_shepherd's point that gods were someone to talk to; I can't imagine having a conversation with the Rights of Man. Well, I can, but they tend to develop a face and a hand to wave, and the rest follows automatically.

Well, yes; that's a lot like me, too. It's where quite a few characters in my fiction come from, I think. And as I said in my own LJ there are points on which I personally depart from Buddhism; this is one of 'em. And in fact Buddhism isn't quite that rational itself either, it has all sorts of little not-deities-honest kicking about that are very much faces put on concepts. Go read Wikipedia on the topic of Dakini :)

I do find it interesting to think about neo-Paganism as a reaction to exactly that depersonalisation of the world; it is *determinedly* polytheistic in almost all its forms. But I think the point the Buddhist text might be making is that you can't expect gods to be taken seriously at the government level any more - imagine someone standing up before the democratic leadership of the country and saying we needed to save the whales or put up parking meters because Vishnu wanted us to. Bush might be trying to start a crusade for "the Christian way of life", but if he actually outright said it was God's will that America attack Iraq, he'd be impeached on the spot. The will of a god isn't *justification* any more. We have to back it up with facts about why losing the whales or allowing free parking would be bad.

I think it's more than possible that gods started their life as exactly what you describe happening to the Rights of Man - they became a shorthand for a given set of justifications and reasoning that you got explained to you when you learnt about them. But I suspect given human nature that they became independent entities shortly afterwards, and that crusading in their names and so on ultimately had little to do with their original roots in the mind of the average Joe.