A local dumb fuck wrote this in today’s Lexington Herald Leader. He essentially says that all Americans are born Christians, and we have no more control over this than we have over our race, left-handedness, etc…
The Herald Leader is a notoriusly liberal paper - I’m guessing they were snickering as they ran this column. Or they were in complete despair of the wanton ignorance that surrounds this place.
Wow. That was really, really stupid.
I see the author’s email address at the bottom of the editorial. Oh, the temptation…
It’s an idiotic column, but at least it has this at the end:
Sounds like he’s taking his cue from South Park.
I don’t know-do you really think the author was serious?
It reads pretty sarcastic to me.
I thought this was pretty funny.
Bwahahahaha.
I also read it as sarcasm.
The H-L should know better than to mess around with ambiguous sarcasm. (I’m not sure if that’s what this is.)
Several years back, they printed a great letter in response to another letter in which someone who was complaining about teachers asking for raises. The original letter said that the teachers were nothing more than “glorified babysitters”. The person who responded said that he agreed, and that they should be paid as such; he then calculated what his daughter was paid per kid per hour to babysit and extrapolated it out to the average class size and the average day length–and it was a six-figure sum.
The teachers at my mother’s school were furious. “How can he agree that we’re nothing more than glorified babysitters?” My mom spent all day trying to explain “sarcasm” to these folks, who just didn’t get it. (They weren’t making a great case for themselves, Mom told me.) There were several angry letters in response. It was bizarre.
I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic…entirely. He makes two fairly defensible points.
Firstly that an American will be percieved as Christian regardless of what they consider themselves.
And secondly, that as a Western nation we partake of the Western Tradition of politics, philosophy, art etc. and that tradition is (primarily) Judeo-Christian. ( I recall the first day in Art History at NYU when the professor told us “I know you’re from a lot of different backgrounds but if you want to understand this class go out and get yourself a copy of the four gospels”.)
Of course to say that tradition exists (along with a few others we’ve picked up in the past 200 years) and that as Americians we are born into that tradition is still a far cry from saying and given person is Christian. Maybe there he’s being sarcastic…or at least hyperbolic.
As for the"Christian magic" part I’m torn betwen “weridly sacastic” and "loony
I emailed him out of curiosity. He’s being sarcastic.
I thought it was great; I’m hoping I can memorize it.
Over here you really are classed by religion - so if you were white and western, they’d automatically think of you as Christian - even if you were agnostic or atheist. I expect they’d class mormons as Christians too. If you were Jewish you’d probably have to pretend to be Christian anyway. If you were by some strange chance Buddhist or Hindu, then you could put that down, but the general presumption otherwise would be Brit/Yank/Euro=Jesus-basher.
Mormons are Christians. They believe in Jesus, and everything.
Thanks, lavenderlemon. I feel pretty dumb for not getting it now.
Yep, it was satire. I can only hope it’s understood properly by the target audience.
Think of it as saying: If the Fundies keep insisting this is a Christian Nation and OccCiv was built upon Christianity, then let’s just say yes it is a Christian nation, but guess what, then the majority of us Christians will be believers in freedom of thought, so that must be God’s will.
Me too, to a point. It was pretty oblique. I think I’m suffering from “fundamentalist exhaustion” :rolleyes: and was pretty quick to classify this as more idiocy from the Left Behind bunch. I’m sorry I called the writer a dumb fuck. His points were better than his writing.