Here Comes Easter again. Easter and the media puff pieces about how
it's really all true enough in one sense or another and how it's wrong
to say that it's a borrowed holiday, re-badged from pre-Christian
European fertility cults, egg laying rabbits and all. The Easter
holiday (is it OK to call this one a holiday?) carries a large basket
of baggage without my needing to illustrate its long history and I'm
quite as content to let people celebrate it as they will as I am to let
anyone celebrate anything at any time including life itself. It's a
wonderful life after all, and not just at Christmas.
In
the true spirit of American small mindedness however, others are not so
happy with your freedom when it comes to protecting their hermetically
sealed belief bubble from questions or against having to be aware of
other ways of seeing and appreciating life in our shared world. But I'm
OK with that too if only for the humor. Seeing an image of a year around "Prayer Station" set up in the Warren Michigan city hall looking
for all the world like something from the Peanuts comic strip, put a
smile on my face in a way that only irony-blind religious fervor can.
Reason isn't funny and I do like to laugh.
Not so funny though when Warren resident Douglas Marshall proposed a "Reason Station" for the same venue and the
Mayor, Jim Fouts not only rejected it,
but banned any such display for a year because after all, Marshall is
an advocate for separation of Church and State. Using a government
facility as a church and to promote Christianity ( assuming it isn't
praying to Vishnu or the Chinese Kitchen God being solicited) is simply
no problem in this Detroit suburb. Atheism is not a religion wrote
Fouts to Marshal and his
Freedom From Religion Foundation,
unwittingly asserting that only a religion can have access to public
space and non-Christian interests need not apply. Besides it might
disturb the faithful, which is, in his words, a Constitutional
violation!
What about equal protection, freedom of speech and all that Godless, Commy nonsense? Don't make me laugh.
This is Michigan after all and in Michigan reason can fend for itself
and you can take your Jeffersonian Humanism straight back to Moscow
where it belongs.
Long ago, this religion fought the 'prayer stations' of the Roman Empire. They were a stubborn minority, refusing the mandated public worship of some emperor god. Times change, through the years of history and theological legerdemain, this group has reversed the situation, become a majority, seeking to own government:
ReplyDeletebut still feeling persecuted. 'Prayer Station' brings to mind the old childhood song...'Down by the station, early
in the morning..' where stations were for trains...not prayers.
In the beginning, or shortly thereafter, Christianity became the roman religion, complete with statues, a hierarchy between you and God and dire consequences for other gods. The romans became the good guys. The people it came from became the enemies of Rome and of God.
DeleteThey've been the government for centuries and apparently are seeking to regain the control they lost to secular humanism, little by little and all the while appealing to the idea of freedom they opposed since Constantine.
Our country is well supplied with "prayer stations" which here in the south outnumber gas stations -- from store front, to stadium, to tent, to cathedral. We don't need them in city hall. You can pray anywhere, silently or publicly thanks to the notion that we don't have state approved religion, or an official faith or faiths -- and apparently that fact is lost on people like the miserable, misbegotten, antiAmerican occupying the mayor's office in Warren, Michigan may his gonads rot and drop off.
Any religious group that attained power over others has through the ages acted ever thus. It's never about their devotion to their gods, but always about punishing those who do not accept their theology. See every religion that has ever existed.
ReplyDeleteI've yet to hear of a Democratic religion. I'm not sure it's possible.
DeleteIndeed, on the one hand we have the mystics of Faith and on the other we have the mystics of Muscle.
ReplyDeleteThe common denominator, power and control. Worship of power over others.
It is good to be getting older...
Don't forget the mystics of Muscle Cars - at your local drag strip Sunday - SUNDAY!
ReplyDeleteOh yeah Captain, loved my Sundays at the race track, later years on TV.
ReplyDelete