From the Buchananite side that still manages to see the truth of the matter there’s this old tune:
My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can’t deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil warsAnd
I don’t need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
You’re power hungry sellin’ soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain’t that fresh
I don’t need your civil war
But if straw-chewing, reckneck rockstars don’t do it for you, Andrew Sullivan will, maybe:
I hope society rejects the neologism Christianist. Despite Sullivan’s protestations, I agree with William Safire:
Adding ist or ism to a word usually colors it negatively, as can be seen in secularist. … As Christianist, with its evocation of Islamist, gains wider usage as an attack word on what used to be called the religious right, another suffix is being used in counterattack to derogate those who denounce church influence in politics. … Let the listener or reader beware: -ist and -phobe, more often than not these days, are suffixes tacked on to words to turn them into fierce derogations.
To be sure, Sullivan claims that “the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all.” Fair enough. But Sullivan lost mastery of Christianist once it entered the public domain. The meaning of words is socially constructed. Words mean not just what the speaker intends, even if the speaker was also the neologist, but also what the listeners understand them to mean. (The technical term is intersubjectivity.)
Whether Sullivan intended Christianist to evoke Islamist, with the connotation of terrorist, or not, that is how I suspect most people take it. And that’s whay I suspect many people are not merely provoked, but deeply offended.
Unlike Perfesser Bainbridge who is plainly aghast at the equasion of ‘ist-y’ whackjobs here who are, in context, the perfect parallel of ‘ist-y’ whackjobs there, I hope that was precisely Sullivan’s intent because it would demonstrate Sully’s final acquisition of the point of all this shit: The War on Terra is a Civil War between fundamentalist maniacs whose devotion to a vengeful Bronze Age deity imperils us all.
The problem isn’t belief as such — there are sophisticated forms of theism which are, if not quite rational, fairly harmless — but fundamentalist, batshit belief. Or as Professor Terry Eagleton puts it:
The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and [Richard] Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about.
Jebus, Allah, Yahweh — save us from your fundie followers who are all more or less equally insane!
