Time Warp Politics, and Sanity

We live jun a time warp! Sometimes it looks just like the 21st century and, at other times, it is the tenth century B.C.!

One of our presidential candidates belongs to a religion that says, right out loud, although they would prefer that not too many people are listening, that an angel came down to the ground in Palmyra, New York, and dictated holy books in Reformed Egyptian. Another skips up and down the eastern half of the country explaining that God sent an earthquake to Virginia as a message about sin and degradation and our budget deficit. The President regularly asks, publicly, for God to bless America, presumably a little more than he blesses Albania and Iran, and certainly more than France. Candidates, by the bushel, scold anyone who does not think that this is, first and foremost, a Christian nation, and not a secular nor perhaps vaguely deistic one, as our Founding Fathers thought.

It is like having to speak Latin in Rome, and English during the Mass. It is like boarding an airplane that intends to fly up through heaven, brushing angels aside, and come down in Cathay, on the way to Mandalay where the flying Asian carp play.

I don't want to know what Moses would do! I don't care what Muhammed did! Jesus did not have an opinion about abortion or sushi or derivatives.

I do care that Michele Bachmann went to law school because Marcus said she should, and that she should because Marcus is the head of the household, just as St. Paul said, although I do not think the blessed saint was married. Michele is, and I don't want her to defer to Marcus for decisions about tax law and Palestine.

I do not care whether Mitt Romney wears special, religious underwear, but I do not want anyone who is president to believe that angels have such a sense of humor that they would land in Palmyra and speak Reformed Egyptian.

I don't want anyone who is president to consult the Book of Leviticus, or the Book of Revelations, about foreign or domestic policy, or about DNA research. I don't want a Republican presidential candidate poll about whether the whole universe has evolved, or whether pumping all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere might have consequences. And especially not if they think the earth is 6,000 years old, or that Noah saved two mosquitoes for the divine benefit of us all.

I want the moderator of every presidential debate to ask for a vote about which century the candidates think we are living in. I want then to raise their hands, high!

Comments

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