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Meanwhile, as Kentucky and Oregon voters cast their ballots, Barack Obama is rolling out a new campaign to make it absolutely clear that he is Christian. His Kentucky campaign fliers show him in a pulpit, and his camp has launched a series of ads touting the senator’s faith. Are conversations about faith an opening for diverse people to come together — or a dangerous detour for politicians? Is there a place for God in politics?
We dig in to these issues with Susan Jacoby, author of five books, including the bestselling Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason; and Chris Hedges, Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and author of the bestselling book American Fascists and more recently, I Don’t Believe in Atheists.
We also take a look at the new film Battle For Haditha, and sit down with filmmaker Nick Broomfield and actor Elliot Ruiz to talk the film’s engagement with issues of responsibility in Iraq.
All that plus contributions from Reverend Billy and Randy Credico. Right here on firedoglake.
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Great show, Laura.
As I prematurely religiosted about earlier, its the focus
of morality and what it intends that concerns me most.
In Vanishing Voices the authors say in a splendid chapter, The
Biological Wave (the entire book is worth a third read):
__As long as the Paleolithic world system persisted, local autonomy an ddiversity would be high and the chances of anyone language attaining dominanat status in its region low. The duration of this half-forgotten period was immense. If the history of our species were compressed into a single day, then agriculture only appeared around ten in the evening. The walls of Jericho came up around the same time. Writing appeared nearer eleven o’clock, and the fall of the Roman Empire, which we call ancient history, was at twenty minutes to midnight. Most of the history of human languages, and the societies that spoke them, therefore took place on the localized, decentralized, oral, egalitarian state of the Paleolithic. In some places, this system persisted into historical times. It began to be disrupted, however, as soon as agriculture appeared.__
With the Neolithic period and the spread of farming the smaller, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies lost the diversity of language.
Attached to language, of course, is all sorts of knowledge that falls silent under forced expression of dominant language. The few dominant languages we use globally, those that “reign” (there were no empires prior to farming; no hoarding, either) only came to do so in the past 500 years. Minutes ago.
In that light its been only seconds since the hunter-gatherers of the Upper Plains were herded into the dominant language, the dominant religion and bound by fences of capital. The state of MN celebrates its 150th year of statehood in 2008. Remaining bands of Dakota, Nakota and Ojibwe haven’t recovered from those few historical seconds. Abraham Lincoln was not moral to approve the largest mass execution on US soil when 38 Dakota were hung simultaneously on one platform in Mankato within years of MN declaring statehood. The Missouri and Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers have varying degrees of pollution. Though some of the Mdewankonton and Santee Dakota were exiled and resettled along the Missouri in Crow Creek, South Dakota, they don’t have clean water either out of the river or their own taps and are spending money needed for food on bottled water. In Dakota my friends can tell me of the many medicines across eastern SD and MN before they and the land were colonized. Its difficult to say the same things in English. With their language torn from them, their relations with the Earth, the celestial and each other were nearly obliterated.
How much of what we need to do into the future need rely on language and species we’ve killed off and what morality informs our will to stop?
YAY! Laura or timmeh & tweety????? hmmmmmmm
real friggin hard choice NOT!
Eli is upstairs..
laura – is there a transcript? some great bits that i would transcribe, but would prefer not to if there is already a transcipt available. thanks!
Most excellent, Laura.
Would that the candidates could find the courage to speak to the issues which both Jacoby and Hedges raised. And again, Laura, your method and manner of questioning is delightfully effective in prompting thoughful and nuanced conversation …
Appreciate your presence here, very much.
Thank you.
“They plan to endorse this fall, and argue that the IRS prohibition unconstitutionally limits their rights.”
Well, they’ve got us there. They absolutely have the right to endorse candidates from the pulpit. What they don’t have a right to is tax-exempt status at the same time.
Welcome to our world, reverends.
Great show, Laura. I’m going to redirect some of my other atheist friends to watch this show.
Hi – show producer here. We don’t have a xscript of the studio segments I’m afraid. Although I do have a copy of the commentary from yesterday, if you’re interested. That’s Laura minute at the bottom of the show.