Reality vs. Orthodoxy

By Mustang Bobby

At the debate on CNN the other night, Rep. Michele Bachmann went off on Gov. Rick Perry for his executive order to vaccinate pre-teen girls in Texas with the HPV vaccine.  Not only was it a form of "government injection", she later told the Today how that the vaccine caused "mental retardation," telling a story that a woman had told her tearfully about what had happened to her daughter after getting the vaccine.  Despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence to back up her claim, she went unchallenged, and presumably a lot of people believe her because, well, she said it.

This is how things roll in politics, especially during a campaign.  Someone can say something -- usually the more outrageous or untrue the better -- and it gets legs.  We're told that President Obama raised your taxes and that inflation is out of control when in fact he's lowered taxes and inflation is nominal.  But it gets ink and pixels and therefore it becomes the orthodoxy of the GOP, and you cannot disprove dogma with something as simple as reality.

Andrew Sullivan took the article by Michael Lofgren about the Republican Party becoming a cult and tied it into his belief that the party has become a religion, complete with rituals and icon worship (vide St. Ronald Reagan).

[The current GOP] can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

[...]

And the zealous never compromise. They don't even listen. Think of Michele Bachmann's wide-eyed, Stepford stare as she waits for a questioner to finish before providing another pre-cooked doctrinal nugget. My fear... is that once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.

The Democrats and other reasonable, logical people are faced with the challenge of proving dogma wrong.  (Conservatives like to counter that liberalism is a cult, too, with their own orthodoxy of baby-killing, government imposition on everything, and Teh Gayz.  If so, they're doing a comparatively lousy job of evangelism.)  When Gov. Perry mangled his Galileo reference when talking about climate change, he touched on something that actually rings true: Galileo was nearly put to death for challenging the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church for stating that the earth revolved around the sun.  Science and facts have no place in religious discourse if it contradicts the dogma, and the faithful will go to great lengths -- even coming up with their own brand of "science" -- to counter the prevailing non-religious-based theories.  And the heretics -- the proponents of reality -- are in danger in the hands of the believers.

The lure of dogmatic orthodoxy is powerful and comforting.  It fits neatly onto a bumper sticker -- "God Said It.  I Believe It.  That Settles It" -- along with "No Socialism" and "Keep The Change."  You don't have to think about it, and life is uncomplicated.  But thinking about it leads away from the church; you get all sorts of impure thoughts, like raising taxes might actually help the economy and that when we say "equal protection under the law" we really mean it.

Heretics may be shunned and even executed, but they are invariably proven to be right.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

"Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint."

By Capt. Fogg

I don't have to look for evidence that the United States of America isn't united, unless you consider enraged confusion to be a uniting factor. A Pew polling report last year showed that only 34 percent of Americans think Obama is a Christian. I have no idea how many Americans like me, don't give a damn if he's a Zoroastrian as long as he keeps his scriptures under his pillow and not under mine. His religion or lack thereof is no more significant to me than his favorite basketball team and indeed the private beliefs of most of our better presidents have rarely been a factor in their official lives.

Of course those who wish to destabilize and polarize what's left of the informed electorate for reasons of partisan gain are happy to make an issue of it and for them it's indeed a game with few rules and only one strategy: attack, attack, attack. Prominent amongst that breed of snakes is of course, Fox News, who can depend on a base of religious chauvinists and racist bigots who know less about the certainties they profess than their enthusiasm might indicate.

Take the recently manufactured "scandal" about the inaccuracy of Obama's reading of Isaiah 40:31 at the National Prayer Breakfast this week. Fox Followers can't really be expected to know much about the archaeological history of Isaiah, the variations between extant scrolls or that chapters 40 - 66 seem to have been written about two centuries after Isaiah himself, but apparently they have so little regard for the knowledge of America's scholarship that they also don't expect us to remember that there are other and better translations than the King James version, some of which have incorporated what has been found at Qumran and most of all: that the original certainly isn't in English. President Obama was simply quoting the very popular New International Version. Some scandal.

One can hope that these fragments scraped from the bottom of the GOP slime barrel, indicate that the barrel is empty. Sad to say, it's very easy to make a fool of one's self in America, but it's still difficult to get Americans to notice it amidst the sound and fury.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

"Sharia" and American secularism

by Peter Henne

It's not often that academic issues like the relationship between Islamic thought and contemporary politics become relevant. So I was excited to see the Washington Post's story on the nature of sharia. This is connected to the Park51 debate, although the question of whether Muslims must follow sharia like an instruction book--and what this means for American society--periodically arises. The last time was an op-ed by Edward Luttwak claiming President Obama is a Muslim under Islamic law, and that all Muslims will be compelled to oppose him as an apostate.

The story includes blurbs by several experts--including Gallup's Dalia Mogahed--dispelling myths about sharia's totalizing influence over Muslims. And they are right; anyone who has spent even a semester studying Islam will have learned that sharia is not a fixed set of laws, but a set of principles drawn from diverse sources and about which there is much disagreement. Moreover, even if sharia does contain guidelines for Muslims, this does not mean all Muslims will follow it in their daily lives; Muslims are no more likely than Christians to check with their Scriptures before making a decision. This was covered well in the responses to Luttwak's piece.

The renowned Islamic scholar Olivier Roy--in his classic The Failure of Political Islam--describes sharia as characterized by both autonomy and incompleteness. That is, it exists independently of power structures but is constantly contested. The specific application of sharia in any context is based on contingent political, economic and societal factors, not any inherent aspect of Islam. Saying that sharia will lead Muslims in America to literally follow all aspects of their religious writings would be the same as arguing that medieval Catholic Canon Law not only represents all of Christianity, but drives the behavior of contemporary Catholics.

Of course, this does not address the question of what the effects may be of the infusion of Muslim values--whatever form they take--into American politics and civil society. This is a question that is worth pondering; we just need to ponder over the right facts.