CH: Another thing that's very important to me about this war is that it is in effect a war for secularism. President Bush may believe that God saved him from booze and so on. He's quite entitled to that belief as far as I can see, but he must know, and certainly the people in this administration do understand, that our only real allies are secular--that, in Afghanistan, we must hope for even more secularism. It's interesting to me to argue with my leftist comrades. They neither know nor care, really, that the Iraqi left and the Afghan left are thoroughly enthusiastic about the regime change. They know it saved their lives, apart from anything else. They're on our side. This is an irony that's sort of at everybody's expense. I know, exactly, that I'm on the right side about this. I'm for secularism and separation of church and state. Everywhere. I want more of it here, not less, and much more of it there. And it's a perfectly consistent thing. Even if John Ashcroft doesn't realize it, it's objectively--as we used to say in Marxist discussion--true. It's objectively true.RTWT! Pronto!
AS: Chris is a militant atheist. I'm actual a Roman Catholic. But I couldn't agree with him more. I really don't believe that people of faith should be leery of secularism. I think the separation between church and state is the best thing for religion ever. And I feel no qualms at all, as a believing person, in supporting secularism.
"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." --Jesus
"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious" --George Orwell
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." --F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
The Inconvenient Interview
Liberal Dems would actually sooner you burn in hell than read this interview with Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. And no, I not exaggerating by much at all: