Simple Answers to Simple Questions

Kevin Drum asks;

Well, I'm not religious myself, so I don't really care. But I do care about winning elections, and if liberals can win more of them by toning down the sarcasm and taking the religious community a little more seriously, is that too much to ask?

Yes, it is.

Drum adds;

Democrats aren't hostile to religion, is the usual rejoinder — often offered right before a series of cavalier references to believers in bearded guys in the sky or the flying spaghetti monster. Nope, no hostility here!

Drum advocates pandering, but I understand why. We're not completely out of the Dark Ages yet, and there's still a sizable crowd worshiping the daddy figure on the cloud. These people vote, and I understand why some people, like Drum, think it might be a good idea to pander a bit and get some of those votes.. but it would be like getting a lobotomy in order to appeal to the NASCAR crowd.

No thank you.

One thing Drum gets wrong is that mocking religion is not the same as being hostile to it. "Mocking" is more condescension than actually being hostile. But why not be hostile? It's that aforementioned voting block.

If a person believes that organized religion is the cause of the most evils in the world today.. and in the past.. wouldn't being hostile to it be a principled position? Would liberals lose elections by being more obviously hostile to religion - and not just indifferent mocking, but outright arguing against it's core evil? Maybe.. maybe not.. but maybe the idea is to just erode organized religion in a quiet war, and a persuasive case could be made that that's the easier method. I think that's what's going on right now, and I don't mind.. and I also don't mind being a foot soldier in the "religion is evil" brigade.

The thing we need to be careful about.. is making sure that people understand that individual spirituality is not what we're mocking.. nor what we're "hostile" to.. it's the organizations that are uniformly corrupt, violent, and destructive. Dissolve that, and eventually you'll dissolve that "evangelical voting block".. and religion will not be an issue in American politics.

/update

Adding this bit from Andrew Sullivan;

In fact, it is possible. During the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, the primary purpose of torture was to get the victim to convert to Catholicism. Those doing the torturing believed that the conversion would save the victim's soul. So they did, in fact, consider torture to be an act of compassion (the ultimate act of compassion, actually). And often the victim would be killed after the torture, but that was okay because the soul had already been saved. How compassionate. - Andrew Sullivan

Odd that Sullivan still calls himself a Catholic.. when, in fact, the church is as morally absolutist today as they were during the Inquisition.

It is true of all religion. This is why religion is evil at it's core. Expecting organized religion today to be different than organized religion in the past is.. well.. insane.