Ysengrin Blackpaw's Journal

Maha has up the latest installment of The Wisdom of Doubt (the whole series can be read here, and it's well worth reading).

You may remember the Georgia congressman who sponsored a bill providing that the Ten Commandments would be displayed in Congress and in federal courthouses. Then when he was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, he could name only four of the Commandments, barely. I assume this wasn’t just an act. [...]

The statistics [only 40% of Americans can do better than Congressman Westmoreland] suggest that more people "believe in" the Ten Commandments than actually know what the Ten Commandments say. And I don’t care what religious tradition you call your own; just "believing in" something that you don't practice or understand or follow is crap. [...]

I think many Americans regard the Ten Commandments as something like a tribal totem. They want it placed in institutions of power, like schools and courthouses, as a symbol of their tribal dominance. Think of it as territorial marking. And this is just as true of the hard core fundamentalist as it is for the "cultural" Christian who has read most of the Left Behind books but doesn't know the Beatitudes from spinach.

... though we're getting it on a time delay. Maybe that's better :) This time it's about a recently elected congressman who happens to be Muslim, and a voter registration program by some mosques.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you've got it," Robertson said on his 700 Club today [20 March]. "It's interesting, isn't it? You know, the Protestant churches, there’s no doctrine of faith that I know in any Protestant denomination that calls for the takeover of the government and making other people second-class citizens. I don't know of one denomination, Protestant or Catholic, that has that agenda. But yet, Islam has just that agenda, that they want to take over the government and that everybody else is a second-class citizen. That is the primary doctrine of Islam."

I don't know about the "doctrine of faith" angle, but the take over the government and make everyone else a second-class citizen part just happens to be exactly what ol' Pat was calling for in a 1997 speech to the Christian Coalition.

I guess Pat squeaks by on a technicality, since the Christian Coalition isn't a denomination.