After I got tired of watching yet another special year-end wrapup on "Countdown", I flicked the dial to Fox where Billy-O was once again carrying on about how Christmas is under siege and what the devil can be done about it.
Lordamercy. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I'm hoping that this past election not only put paid to Bush's wet (with blood) dream of spreading democracy through the Middle East but has given pause to the Christian fundamentalists who thought they were going ride on Karl Rove's coat-tails all the way to a hundred year scolding of America's mores or lack thereof. Christmas is a lightening rod for their project and it seems that this year, in comparison to last, the tempest really is in a teapot.
I keep reading stories that many people, including students, are becoming more religious but they are less interested in questioning their religion. Erich Fromm noted that man finds all kinds of escapes from freedom and as the world reveals itself to be more and more maddeningly complex and absurd, sanctuary is hard to find. I'm sure more than a few of the leaders of the Christian right wished the judge in the Dover "Intelligence Design" trial had merely issued a quick and dirty yea or nay rather than a 100+ page document that puts the wood to Intelligent Design and Creationism. Those are their hole cards and they can't afford any more public ridicule. And, if a recent NYTimes story is to believed, a whopping 90% of teenagers who grow up in fundamentalist Christian homes turn away from the religion.
At the same time, I can hardly say that I am enthusiastic about evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and, (of course with us mired in a savage civil war that is eating our soldiers alive), Mr. Amputee.
The most exciting news of the past year is that students in Tehran are once again rebelling, this time against the mullahs. Indeed, was the original Iranian Revolution really for a theocratic state (and a cult of personality) or against a corrupt secular one? Tehran 2006 is awash in junkies and whores and grifters and various other kinds of malcontents who are testament to the elemental fact that theocracy and the human animal are incompatible. People need room to think, to doubt, to live, to get it on and to have a job where they can nurse their hangover.
What do I care though? I'm an existentialist who drifted into Hinduism, perhaps the least doctrinaire of all the major religions. But I am also a father and I wonder how I will convey my cosmology to my son without closing his mind and his heart to other paths. People are closing down at the very moment history demands we open up.
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