Clay Burell's Library tagged fundamentalism →  View Popular

Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,… and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.¹

It's important to realize
that the Pentateuch contains three versions of the Decalogue. And there
are differences among them. The Decalogue is going to be repeated in
Deuteronomy, chapter five. And there are some minor variations.
Specifically you'll see that the rationale for observing the Sabbath is
different. God's name in Deuteronomy 5 is not to be used in a vain oath
as opposed to a false oath. There are differences in the meaning. And
there are some more differences too in language. So what are we to make
of this?

One scholar, Marc Brettler, whose name I've mentioned before, he
says that what we learn from this, these variations, is something about
the way ancient Israel preserved and transmitted sacred texts. They
didn't strive for verbatim preservation when they transmitted biblical
texts. And they didn't employ cut and paste methods that might be
important to us in the transmission of something. Texts were modified
in the course of their transmission. Verbatim repetition was not valued
in the way that it might be for us. So that even a text like the
Decalogue, which is represented as being the unmediated word of God,
can appear in more than one version.

There's a more surprising variation that occurs, however, in Exodus
34. After smashing the first set of tablets that were inscribed with
the Decalogue--the tablets in Exodus 20, those are smashed after the
golden calf incident--Moses is then given a second set of tablets. And
the biblical writer emphasizes in the story at that point that God
writes on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets that
were broken. The same words. So we expect now a verbatim repetition of
Exodus 20. And yet we don't have it. The Decalogue that follows in fact
has very little overlap with the earlier Decalogue. There's really only
two statements that even have the same content.

while in fundamentalist America only a deranged few carry out what the many would like to do, among the Taliban the many carry out what the deranged few order them to do.

Of all the values shared by the two groups, for example, the most profound is their loathing for education. Yet here's where the difference between them manifests itself most clearly. The Taliban deal with their hatred in a straightforward, primitive manner: they blow up schools, and murder young girls who attend them. The Republican base is subtler, more complex. They starve the educational system by refusing to pay taxes. They ban books from libraries that might get children thinking. They get on school boards to ensure that children learn only obedience and are never exposed to anything that might engender creativity, imagination or original thought. They pressure textbook publishers not to print facts they don't like. In some parts of the U.S. they've been as successful as the Taliban in fostering ignorance and blind conformity with much less expenditure of energy.

That being said, forcing treatment on a child who doesn't want it is its own kind of ethical dilemma. "There are some kids for whom it becomes in their mind a vicious assault every time they're treated," says Diekema. "At a certain age and height and weight, it starts to seem inappropriate to hold them down on a regular basis to do what needs to be done." Daniel Hauser has reportedly vowed to punch, kick or scratch anyone who attempts to treat him. Even if medical support staff members are successful at physically restraining Hauser so that they can administer the chemotherapy, the psychological toll may impede his progress. With longer-term treatments—fighting cancer can take years—it's harder to successfully apply aggressive therapies if the patient is unwilling, especially because a certain mental toughness is required.

At 13, Daniel is far from the age where he could be making his own medical decisions, though judges are likely to weigh the value of a child's input on a case-by-case basis, rather than using an arbitrary age cutoff. It's remarkable how quickly terminal cancer can mature a 12-year-old. (Legal adulthood is 18, and certain decision-making authority can be granted at 16, but the line is blurry when it comes to children's medical care.) 

The genius of the economic right and the neo-conservatives has been their ability to ignore this fact and work instead to fill in the blanks in the vast empty spaces within the worldview of the religious right with militarist and pro-corporate ideas.

The tasks of progressives is to tear apart the conservative consensus of the past thirty years by advocating agendas that will consistently split the constituencies of the religious right from its corporate right partners.

If progressives are serious about winning victories that can realign our politics, they must find a way to marry the legitimate criticism of the decadence of popular culture with criticism of the decadence of an economic system that create the savage inequalities we see in America today. Once that is done, the entire project of the right collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

The mastery of the political right over the past thirty years has been primarily to better understand the irrational factors in politics. Conservatives have always understood that when it comes to politics, people rarely act in their rational self-interest but instead on emotion, fears and the perception of their interests.

The first principle of organizing any successful new political movement is not new ideas but the identification of new enemies.