This cartoon is so ludicrous I laughed when I saw it. (hat tip The Corner)
(The cartoon bears the caption: "The Christian Right conducts a philosophical discussion about judicial nominee qualifications with brother Arlen Specter... ."
An animated graphic shows a scrum of vicious Christian monsters pummeling the daylights out of an obscured Arlen Specter. One of the fanatics is even using a Bible as a bludgeon against his hapless victim [Bible-thumper, get it? How cute!]. Another, hammering his fist down over and over, bears a eerie resemblance to Howard Dean, livid grimmace and all. Funny, I never took Howard Dean as a member of the Christian Right. :-O)
The Left thinks that the Christian Right are goose-stepping religious Nazis that get their marching orders from Jerry Falwell via metal plates in their heads … dangerous brutes always on the verge of going ape-[poop].
Cartoons such as the one linked above show how superstitious, ignorant, and bigoted the Left is, all while believing (and portraying) Christians to be superstitious, ignorant, and bigoted.
Oh, absolutely! There's a great deal of stereotyping about the "Christian Right" in left wing circles. Part of this is the fact that it is difficult for anyone who hasn't had a spiritual experience to understand what it's like to have one, or to sympathize with spiritual motivations. (That was definitely the case for me when I was a militant atheist, before I "got" religion).
But that's not all of it. I grew up in a culture in which it was not acceptable for people to not be Christian; people who weren't Christians were simply not OK. I remember people trying to convince me, as a pre-teen, that I should be spending all of my time and energy pressuring my mother to go to church - because if she didn't go to church, she was a bad mother and a bad human.
But more than that, there's a general revulsion on the left for the way Christianity manifests in politics. When people running for Senate will declare that single mothers should not be allowed to teach (because it might influence students into a life of sin), for example - or when angry "Christian" activists show up at the funeral of a gay man to protest it - what we see is not the admirable side of Christianity, the side in which the followers of Christ hold out a vision of universal love; we see instead a movement of intolerance and hatred that seeks to make us *conform*. And if that's the only exposure to Christianity that someone has, it's going to make it damned hard for them to see anything good in it.
I'm a taoist, as devout as you would expect a taoist to be, and I have a great affinity for those who have felt the presence of God (even if I disagree with them about what it means). I understand the idea that, for a devout person, one's devotion to God must inform the entirety of one's life. And yet at the same time, I see things like insisting on the presence of a copy of the ten commandments in courtrooms, or official prayers in schools, as being fundamentaly intolerant: proponents of Christianity asking the state not to be neutral among religions, but to endorse their religion, to force me and my family to interact with the symbolism of their religion every time we interact with the state. I'm more sympathetic to Christianity than the average non-Christian activist, and I'm irritated by stuff like this; how do you think people who have had no spiritual conversion react to it?
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