The Dish

A reader writes:

In your essay, "Why Not Seeing Is Believing," you articulate one of the core values of my new church – that there is a choice beyond secularism and fundamentalism. And, that this kind of faithful life is neither a lowest common denominator nor something to be apologized for – not a kind of sad halfway house, too weak hearted for the Christian Right or too weak minded for the sneering "brites". 

Rather, our faith is the result of a mature religious search that stretches towards the Eternal but is humbly content to admit where our knowledge ends. When we reach for our Bibles, alongside the Apocalypse there are the Beatitudes, and for every legalism espoused in Torah, there is a line of poetry in the Psalms (or Song of Songs) that shatters the myth of codified religiosity. We also know that wisdom overflows the banks of any one tradition and there are many religious waters that give life.

Thank you for giving strength and voice to our tradition.

A technical snafu with online ads jammed this blog for an hour or so. Time has removed the ads until the problem is fixed. Sorry if you had a hard time getting through.

"If I were one of these sickos, I’d be nervous …" That’s Mark Foley grandstanding with John Walsh on Internet exploitation of kids. Jeez.

(Hat tip: Petrelis.)

Another far-right blogger calls on Hastert to resign. I think we need to take a deep breath, look at all the facts, and see exactly who should be held responsible. Right now, it’s all very murky.

"It’s vile. It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction" – Mark Foley on Bill Clinton’s history of sexual harassment in September 1998.

When you build a party’s base on preternatural fear and loathing of gays, then your party establishment is unwise to cover for a closeted gay congressmen taking advantage of impressionable pages. I just read the first call from the Republican base for Hastert to resign. I have a feeling it won’t be the last.

This week, Time is running an abridgment of part of my book, "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How To Get It Back," out next Tuesday. It’s called "When Not Seeing Is Believing." You can read it here. Money quote:

How can you engage in a rational dialogue with a man like Ahmadinejad, who believes that Armageddon is near and that it is his duty to accelerate it? How can Israel negotiate with people who are certain their instructions come from heaven and so decree that Israel must not exist in Muslim lands? Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who claim that the West Bank is theirs forever by biblical mandate? Or with Fundamentalist Christians who believe that Israel’s expansion is a biblical necessity rather than a strategic judgment?

There is, however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can come from – the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians. The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.

You can pre-order the book itself – with the pages now printed in the right order – here.

"Liberals’ assertion that they ‘knew all along’ that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias. This is not to say that they didn’t always think that the war was a bad idea. It is to say that after it was apparent that the war was going badly, they assert that they would have assigned a higher probability to that outcome than they really would have assigned beforehand," – Hal Arkes, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied "hindsight bias" and how to overcome it.

Iain Murray reports from England:

In general, the mood seems to be that things will improve for the alliance once the current President and Prime Minister leave office.

Now imagine how the rest of the English feel. When an American president has alienated – deeply alienated – the most pro-American British party, you get a glimpse of how deep the damage is elsewhere.

A TPM reader makes an obvious point:

Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That’s what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn’t want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That’s just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.

The parallels between the RNC and the Vatican just got a lot stronger.