...out of the ballpark at Cut on the Bias.
One favorite method to weaken Christianity (because of it's foundational and continuing role in American history) is to teach people that religion is dangerous. This is intended to scare people away from a serious consideration of its claims, and how it interacts with its followers and the culture within which it resides. Any study of this interaction is consequently either shallow or nonexistent, and for good reason: Like America's, the track record of Christianity is both good and bad, with academia ALSO focussing on the bad more than the good in order to further their agenda. Without any tools or any practice in analyzing religion/follower/culture interactions, the intelligensia are rendered incapable of correctly analyzing ANY religion.
Thus, when confronted with genocidal bombers in Israel, the possiblity that their motivations are religious is just not considered, since that screw is not amenable to being manipulated by their intellectual hammer. Instead, they look at them, and consider them the same kind of people as the Buddhist Monks who burned themselves in protest of the Vietnam War: "These people", they reason, "couldn't possibly be killing themselves unless the Israeli occupation is more horrible than we can imagine!" The possibility that these murderers have a basis, within the structure of their religion, to believe that they'll be given a ticket straight to heaven if they indulge in "martyr operations" doesn't come to mind, since the intelligensia are unfamiliar with the power of religious thought. If presented to them, they deny that religion would have such power: "There's GOT to be a more rational reason!" they'll say. Yet that very power, supposedly in the form of Christianity operating in people in North America, is what terrifies the "good" people at the ACLU and the People for the American Way. So much so, that they spend tons of money convincing others that they're supposed to be terrified of it also, and putting legal chains on its public practice.
In their more lucid moments however, I tend to believe that they are vaguely aware of this power, and covet it. All the work psychologists did in the 60's and 70's to nullify the power of "guilt" that religion purportedly wielded over the people never really was intended to free anyone from guilt itself. Rather, as we now see in the 80's and after, the goal of the Left was to wrest the power of "guilt" away from religion so it could be used as THEIR tool to manipulate their followers and enemies. Their use of the language of morality is not intended to convince, but to condemn. Not to provoke to improvement, but to coerce.
Again, I reiterate: A serious study of a religion and how it interacts with its followers is the only way we'll be able to REALLY understand what motivates those followers. This is especially true with any religion purporting to have a divinely inspired text: followers that are not following the text are following something else. That "something else" can be attacked, discredited, waylaid, or influenced. Followers serious about following the text are NOT amenable to any other influences short of a massive, deceptive, and successful alteration of the text itself. For instance, the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia appear to be jolly good fellows, with an elegant architectual and cultural heritage, highly tolerant, and a bit given to the fruit of the vine. The Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia take their Koran straight, and thus consequently hate their guts. There are Islamic sects that treat the Koran as creatively as some liberal Christian denominations treat the Bible, and essentially wind up being no physical threat to anyone if left alone. Liberals, being influenced by anything and anyone, are all over the map and damn unpredictable. Fundamentalists, being defined as those operating logically from a fixed text, are comparatively predictable. One does not have to BELIEVE the text in order to parse it, figure out what buttons it pushes in its followers, figure out why the followers believe the text, and then work on means to break the followers based on the text.
Go read her post. Good stuff.
Posted by ptah at August 13, 2003 09:08 PM