Mumbling, Stumbling, and Digressing All Over the Place

Long ago, in a universe far away, there was a website that had a political discussion board...but forget all that. What I wanted to tell you is, when anybody cites "The American Thinker" as a source, you should know that their logo is a picture of Uncle Sam sitting and thinking very deeply (or maybe taking a dump in an outhouse).

The results of our uncle's exertions are displayed on the pages within, in articles such as Andrew Walden's "The Unitarian Church and Obama's Religious Upbringing." It reveals that Obama's "choice" for his recently-departed grandmother Madelyn's memorial service was a Unitarian Church, which may seem strange and somewhat subversive until we learn that she was a lifelong Unitarian who once worked at the Unitarian seminary in Berkeley.

So it wasn't so much Barack Obama's "choice" as what she would have wanted.

My mother, whom I assisted, along with my two sisters, in departing this earth on December 7, was also a Unitarian, and a born-again atheist. That was a decision and a choice she made, guaranteed to her by Uncle Sam's very own Constitution. Nonetheless, it indicates that I share with Obama what Walden characterizes as a "leftist religious upbringing," something of which the thoughtful or possibly defecating Uncle Sam apparently disapproves.

Mom made us promise that there would be no prayers at her memorial, and no mention of Jesus, although I did secure her permission to read from the opening lines of chapter three of Ecclesiastes. As an atheist, she had no use for such concepts as "intelligent design," the idea that God deliberately, neatly, and quickly made all things the way they are, including us.

Like mom, I'm a lifelong Unitarian, but unlike her I have no problem with the notion that all life on earth was deliberately engineered by a power greater that us. As the novelist JM Coetzee explains, "I continue to find evolution by random mutation and natural selection not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex organisms come into being. As long as there is not one of us who has the faintest idea of how to go about constructing a housefly from scratch, how can we disparage as intellectually naive the conclusion that a housefly must have been put together by an intelligence of a higher order than our own?

(snip)

"It does not seem to me philosophically retrograde to attribute intelligence to the universe as a whole, rather than just to a subset of mammals on planet Earth. An intelligent universe evolves purposively over time, even if the purpose in question may for ever be beyond the grasp of the human intellect and indeed beyond the range of our idea of what might constitute purpose."

Now that guy is a real writer. I admire real writers, and maybe I'll get to be one when I grow up. Or maybe I'll be a rock star, chased by pretty girls. But I digress...(I knew I would).

The American Thinker is a website for simple and straightforward fascist ideology, which is not necessarily a bad thing. When I use the word "fascist," here or elsewhere, I'm not calling people a nasty name. Fascism is a legitimate philosophy with a rationale and a worldview. Its adherents believe that those in authority know best (some even believe those in authority are divinely sanctioned), that legitimate governments revere and honor a people's traditions, that race and ethnicity are part of a person's identity and not to be taken lightly, that war presents an opportunity for a citizen to "fight gloriously and honorably for one's country" (in the words of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch), and that above all a citizen's first duty is to obey authority. For to oppose authority is to invite anarchy, or possibly even to oppose the will of the authoritarian and paternal God all fascists instinctively believe in.

Barack Obama, as a centrist seeking national reconciliation, is attempting to make peace with the fascist elements of American society, whose strength lies partly in their strong religious convictions. This is what motivated him to invite Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inaugural, but the intellects of The American Thinker are having none of it. As Andrew Walden's above-cited article concludes, "Obama's political needs as President have led him to invite Rick Warren, Pastor of Orange County California's Saddleback mega-church, (and a favorite of Oprah Winfrey) to deliver the inaugural invocation... Many on both left and right wonder who is co-opting whom? Given Obama's life history, there really should be little doubt."