Marginalisation

[poliphilo]

Religion is in danger of being marginalised, said the Pope- and so it is. But it's not something that's being done to it by a mean cruel world. He and his fellow theocrats are nobody's victims.  There's an audience out there for good news, bad news, any kind of news you happen to have and if the churches aren't getting their story across it's either because it's not a very good story in the first place or because they're not telling it right. 

The Pope delivered  his complaint in Westminster Hall in front of an audience including four prime ministers. Such marginalisation couldn't have happened in a godlier age. Back then- say a hundred and fifty years ago, when people really cared about religious matters-  he'd have been sitting not in person in Westminster Hall-  but in effigy on a bonfire outside.

Comments

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

The Pope is just playing to his current audience, albeit poorly. A highly secularized state with a long history of dissent and conflict with Catholicism? Not going to find too much sympathy for the Church there even in the best of times, let alone these days. But he'll make appeals for a return to religion nevertheless, for the sake of buttressing a sagging edifice (nothing specifically Catholic, mind you - again, he knows his audience).

By contrast, here in the States a potential politician will not get very far without professing at least a nominal belief in God. In the state of Delaware, voters recently chose an individual in the Republican primary who believes that morality can legislated, and in the past has equated masturbation with adultery. Her chances of winning in the general election are considered slim, but she did take the primary, in spite of (or perhaps in part because of) her spiritual beliefs. Her sort of thinking might get critiqued as religious nuttery in Europe, where caution/suspicion of religion after centuries of destruction linked to faith is your heritage, but here? America's religious past is such that there will always be a significant percentage of the population that clamors for some degree of theocracy, provided it's the sort they'd prefer.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've been reading about her. I understand she and others from the teabagging fringe may split the Republican vote and give the Democrats more of a chance at the next round of elections than they would otherwise have had.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

It's a definite possibility, and there's already some evidence of fractioning among the conservatives. Americans have learned, however, never to underestimate the Democratic Party's ability to take a golden opportunity and render it utterly FUBAR.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've been reading articles that suggest the USA is getting to be ungovernable. I used to think you were onto a good thing with all the checks and balances that are built into your political system; now I'm not so sure.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

In point of fact, our system of checks and balances has not functioned for some time, arguably since the days of President Andrew Jackson.

Also bear in mind that "the country is ungovernable" is a teabagger -- ie, Republican -- meme. They are pushing this narrative as 'proof' that Obama and the Democrats are bad for the country, since the country was still governable under Bush.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

I'm hearing mixed messages about Obama. One says he's achieved an enormous amount given the difficulties and the other says he's incompetent. I'm not close enough to the action to know which to believe.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Obama is a centrist -- leaning somewhat more to the right than left, really -- and a committed pragmatist. The left in this country chose to overlook his centrism during the election and then developed hysteric fainting spells as soon as the man began to do in office exactly what he said he would do while still on the campaign trail. So, as a consequence, Obama is being attacked continuously from both the left and the right, no matter what he does or does not do.

I feel Obama has indeed accomplished a lot:

-- The economic stimulous package -- too little, but it was something.
-- Health insurance reform -- again, less than we had hoped, but still allowing 30 million people access to afforadable healthcare that did not have it before.
-- The withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq -- impressive, really, given the opposition and deeply entrenched militarism.

And there is doubtless more than I'm neglecting -- aside from the obvious, that the nation has not completely collapsed in the aftermath of the Cheney-Bush madness. I am not happy, but I am not nearly as unhappy as I was under the previous management and am not quite so ashamed of my country, these days.

As for the man being incompetent, do you mean in absolute terms or merely relative to former President Bush? Obviously, such a comparison immediately reveals this claim to be the utter nonsense that it is. The trial and successful conviction of Obama in the court of public opinion depends upon supressing the plain facts of US history from 2001 until the national election of 2008.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know what I mean by incompetent, because it's not me who is saying it. I'm just reporting what I read in the press. My knowledge of what's going on in US politics is too superficial for me to form an opinion. I've seen Obama do things I liked and things I didn't like. And I've never been clear how much of a free hand he has to do anything.

With Bush, of course, I was never in any doubt that he was a disaster.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Forgive me, I did not intend to take quite such an accusatory tone and realize that you were reporting what you read and hear and not advancing a personal opinion.

Obama puts me in an uncomfortable position. When my parents, for instance, start railing about him being a "communist" -- and they do, in just those words -- I can only laugh, since I think the man is far too staid and conservative for my political taste. When someone on the left is trashing Obama, saying he is worse than Bush -- and they do say that -- I am equally at a loss. I am as disappointed by the current state of things as the next man, without question, yet I think Obama has done better than I should have expected.

Perhaps the real problem here is trying to play the adult, intellectually and politically speaking, in a profoundly infantile age.