Category: The Dish

"Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.

I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some, however, still extant, collected by Fabricius, which I will endeavor to get and send you," – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.

Can you imagine what the religious right would say about him if he lived today?

Ken Blackwell gets his comeuppance from a conservative newspaper.

The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman asks that question about my book. He says he is "mildly encouraged". Money quote:

Sullivan makes a persuasive case for his sort of conservatism. But, by the end of the book, I was coming to the conclusion that he is not a conservative but a classical liberal. Or rather that in the new fundamentalist world described in "The Conservative Soul", what unites Sullivan-style conservatives and liberals is now far more important than what divides them.

A reader writes:

Thank you for the Bronowski clip.

I have had the Bronowski quote "This is what men do when they believe they have absolute knowledge" on my board at work since 9/11. It sorrows me greatly to have to see it used about my own country less than 5 years later. But there it is.

Jim Sleeper tells me something I didn’t know.

Spokane, Washington, 11 am.

"Need to be going to sleep but just finished doing a small segment on Real Time with Bill Maher. Like most of these interviews I was piped into via satellite so I wasn’t actually in the studio but I was struck by this:

At some point I said in response to a question that yes, Jesus actually does love everyone and that includes Democrats and liberals and homosexuals and the audience just erupted in applause. Here is the simple takeaway – people love Jesus they just disapprove of his self-appointed PR people who portray him as political and narrow and angry.

Maybe Jesus came to set us free so that sometimes we could turn around and set him free of the narrow portraits people paint of him, " David Kuo on this blog this morning.

David and I are planning on doing an online dialogue/interview soon about our respective books. Stay tuned.

A reader writes:

Your comments about the necessity to recognize doubt reminded me of the most profound moment I ever witnessed on television, namely, the final episode of a series called "The Ascent of Man", which aired in the early 70’s. You may of course be well versed in this already, and forgive me if you do, but briefly, the narrator (Dr. Jacob Bronowski) contrasted the certainty of Nazism with the contemporaneous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Standing in a swamp behind one of the Nazi death camps, Dr. Bronowski bent forward, and ran his hands through the muck of this swamp that contained the bodily remains of some of his family, while trying to explain the consequences of ideological certainty. I cannot think or tell of this without tears, and yet we seem never to learn these lessons.

By the miracle of YouTube, I found the moment my reader mentioned. He’s right. When will we learn? Here it is:

The Derb issues a fatwa:

The only thing we can usefully do then is to assert our existence as a voting bloc in the one way that’s available to us: by not voting.  That lays down a warning to any future GOP administration that might be tempted to go as badly wrong on important conservative issues as this one has.

This nation survived Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; it will survive Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel.  Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, when our kids are voters, some GOP administration and Congress might be tempted to violate core conservative principles as egregiously as this one has.  But they will hear key voices, the voices of party elders and wise commentators, warning: "Remember the Great Congressional Massacre of ’06!  Let’s not risk  that happening again!"  And Congress and the admin. will then turn the wheel to the right.

Amen, sister.

The Catholic hierarchy is still protecting child rapists. In the name of God. Meanwhile, the Pope condemns "weak and deviant" gay relationships. I recall something Jesus said about motes and beams.