Perhaps I need one of those link logs for these: I have nothing to add to this.
I’m aware of the situation in the US – mainly because it’s a terrifying cop out on the part of a whole superpower – never mind union laws, never mind the environment, never mind life, let’s get on to the End Times and get raptured up. The identification of wealth with virtue is disturbing, too – although less new. It’s a kind of huge suicide cult, rather than a religion, and certainly has nothing I would identify as Christian about it. Plus, you know you have this position where people are living within the fictions they create, or have been given – “I know you’re telling me facts, but I know my congressman is a Christian and therefore cannot lie.
It takes facts and accuracy out of the loop and makes everything a proof of faith – the loonier the assertion, the bigger the proof of faith. It’s proof of the power of fiction – especially if you tailor it to flatter people’s spiritual pride and fear, but it’s the black side of the art. I deal in imagination and I am always interested in questions where that imagination brings faith, alters character – or leads to awful acts. Someone, for example, must have imagined sodomising prisoners in Abu Grahib before it happened –you imagine a poem, you get a poem, you imagine rape, you get rape – it’s all coming from the human brain. I don’t like to forget that we have these two sides and I really don’t like the cop out where “God told me to”, or “the devil told me to” – no, YOU told you to. So you’re responsible.
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