The elections
I think the way to understand yesterday’s election results is to look to St. Petersburg, Florida. There, the voters disgraced themselves by electing as mayor a frank Creationist, Bill Foster.
“We won,” Foster said as he stood on two chairs before a throng of supporters at Ferg’s, a popular eatery and bar across the street from the city police station.
“This is something I felt really called to do,” said Foster, who is a Baptist and believes in creationism. “I never shied away from my faith because it is who I am, but I will govern under the Constitution.”
Creationism is the belief that the earth was created and populated in 6-days, as variably described in Genesis, and belief in it is, if not dispositive evidence of inferior intelligence, then dispositive evidence of a whore whose specialty is accommodating morons. A Creationist ought, ipso facto, to be held incompetent for public responsibility.
Notice this, though:
In Tuesday’s election, Foster beat opponent Kathleen Ford by fewer than 3,000 votes, in an election where roughly only 30 percent of registered voters turned out.
In short, the Pious got out and voted because one of their own was running, and everybody else stayed home.
So, too, Maine, where the churches mobilized the inexhaustible malice of the Virtuous and overturned legislatively-enacted gay marriage.
Opponents repeatedly warned voters that if gays were allowed to marry, it would be taught in the public schools, a tactic that proved effective in California last year.
The Catholic Church was a leading supporter of the repeal campaign, even asking parishes to pass a second collection plate at Sunday mass to help the cause. The National Organization for Marriage also contributed heavily to the repeal campaign; it is under investigation by Maine’s ethics commission for possibly flouting state campaign finance laws by refusing to reveal its donors.
But why should I, or you, or the churches, or anybody else, be concerned with the domestic arrangements of the folk down the street? It is their Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, no?
It is as simple and cynical as this: The churches understand that marriage, especially if it is non-negotiably eternal, is an instrument that can be used to hobble and control the recalcitrant — and gays are, by definition, not under their control. It is not about morality or any such thing; it is about control, and they control just enough simpletons to burden everybody else.
In Virginia the new governor is a Pat Robertson acolyte, a graduate of Regent University who explicitly takes his public policy direction from the more garish passages of the Inerrant Bible.
In New York, though, where the loonies of the Republican base succeeded in undoing their own party’s candidate, Dede Scozzafava, in favor of their benighted idea of a conservative, Doug Hoffman — they lost.
We are living in an epochal time, something akin to the destruction of Hellenism by Christianity during the first few centuries anno domini. Now, it is Christianity’s turn; its allegories, peddled as truth, cannot sustain themselves before educated consideration.
Yet the weak point of all religions remains that they can never dare to confess to being allegorical, so that they have to present their doctrines in all seriousness as true sensu proprio; which, because of the absurdities essential to allegory, leads to perpetual deception and a great disadvantage for religion. What is even worse, indeed, is that in time it come to light that they are not true sensu proprio, and then they perish.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Precisely so. But those who have swallowed the allegories whole, as the great fish swallowed Jonah, have no ability to understand the world without their myths and are hopelessly at sea, paddling furiously to get back to the past, and will continue until they exhaust themselves.
