I don't like writing social commentary. I end up
sounding like a raving lunatic. Also, I usually see two sides of an
issue and can't support either fully. That said, I still have an
opinion. The events surrounding Haiti, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh
are an example.
The earthquake that struck Haiti created a
disaster. Pat Robertson's comments created an uproar. Rush Limbaugh's
comments seem headed in the same direction.
Many, many people
have commented on the social networks about these events.
w.c. browne - vaughanT - Um, are you an idiot??? We're talking
about
people who just got nailed by an earthquake that measured 7.0 on the
Richter scale. And you're bytching about the government helping out
people who need it right now??? Your dumb a/s/s better pray to your God
that something catastrophic like this doesn't happen to your family
members.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/01/15/2010-01-15_rush_limbaugh_haiti_earthquake_comments_are_really_stupid_says_white_house_press.html
Now, I get it. Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Robertson, politically speaking, are considered far right. Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Robertson are expressing their more
faith-based views. The liberals,
through offense-is-the-best-defense strategy, are attacking them in
defending their more equalitarian views. What I don't understand, here
comes the hard part, is the outright dismissal of the possibility of
divine judgement.
I'll admit it sounds crazy and I don't
know how to make it sound sane. In this day and age, with so many
interpretations, questions, and doubts surrounding religion, plus the
continued scientific explanations for many things, religion has, philosophically, taken a back seat to modernism. Yet, for thousands of years
mankind believed in the power of dieties to cause natural events.
Eclipses, the moon, the sun, and more were regarded as divinely
controlled. Why should anyone believe that scientific and moral
progress have made divine intervention obsurd? Why would anyone want to
stifle religious faith? Yet, that is exactly the effect of these
attacks. Religion becomes so much nonsense. The only "real" view of
things is the majority's.
The liberal attacks are sounding prejudiced. As if those
crazy, wacko religious zealots couldn't possible be correct about divine
judgement. Has our modernism been setting The Bible on the back shelf?
I'm not sayin' He did and I'm not sayin' He didn't, but I am saying
disregarding faith as harebrained is dogmatic.
The advances of the liberal equalitarianism are apparently not
void of prejudice.
There are
many people whose faith doesn't need me or anyone else to validate it.
There are probably just as many, maybe more, whose philosophy only
develops through the social mores of the time. Admitting to being a
dunce regarding facts in the matter, I don't think it is unfair to say
that much of the wrong in mankinds' history has been a result of
majority inspired social mores.
Fortunately, in modern
political governing, there are "stops" on majority inspired oppression.
But apparently, we still require a
doormat for our own subtle
bias; a victim to our stoning; a counter-example to our expertism. And this doormat or counter-example is religion. We are still
willing to dismiss rather
than consider. Still willing to casticate first, understand later.
Maybe my own liberal tendencies are deteriorating.
Maybe that's the problem of my perspective; becoming conservative
without a proper conservative foundation.
Maybe with time I'll understand that differences are just that; differences. That they cannot be unified into a single viewpoint without automatically creating an absolutism leading to chauvanism.
Maybe instead of a
topical, relevant title; Haiti, Pat Robertson, and Rush Limbaugh,
I should have entitled it; How Can People Be So Sure of Things.