Tuesday, March 07, 2006
It's Deja-Vu All Over Again
I ment to write this up as a post on my blog, but instead I was inspired to place it as a comment on Digby's blog. So yet again, I am just linking to a comment rather than blogging.
Just an addition -- the poster who complains about the "unserious" nature of those who wish to legislate their morality makes an important point. Part of the issue is that a lot of quasi-dominionist crowd who wants to legislate "Biblical law" fundamentally doesn't believe in the effectiveness of that law (i.e. they believe that everybody is gonna end up breaking that law anyway, so there is no need to make it "work"). Indeed, their Bible says that even attempting to obey the law is futile and is not the path to salvation since each person will always manage to fall short of full compliance with it. They have not seriously thought about how to apply the law when confronted with life's complexities, etc., but rather they throw their hands in the air and say "well, everyone's bound to break the law at sometime ... that's what the concept of original sin is all about".
The interesting thing is that, pro-life Jews (who largely don't understand what the anti-choice movement, even the serious moral thinkers in that movement who are not to be confused with the people with whom I am particularly concerned in this post and the comment it references, really stands for -- they are not merely against "abortion being used as birth control" but rather all abortions -- maybe the SD law will finally wake up those Jews who think they have a lot in common with Christian fundamentalists, of the sort they never knew growing up or really know now, simply because they both are "pro-Israel" and believe in "traditional values"?) excepted, the Jewish tradition, being first and formost a legal tradition, has thought seriously about how to put the laws of the Bible into practice. And this tradition is, by today's standards (although not the standards in much of history) rather pro-choice.
In general, it is amazing how much those who would like to have Biblical law be law in this country ignore a tradition in which Biblical law is implimented as law. You'd think that if you wanted a project to succeed, you would want to learn from the successes and failures of others who've tried it before. But then, do a bunch of pre-millenialists really want any project to succeed.
We Jews should consider that whenever we are tempted to accept the "support" of Israel by these people: the anti-Midas touch so displayed by GW Bush is part and parcel of their ideology.
Just an addition -- the poster who complains about the "unserious" nature of those who wish to legislate their morality makes an important point. Part of the issue is that a lot of quasi-dominionist crowd who wants to legislate "Biblical law" fundamentally doesn't believe in the effectiveness of that law (i.e. they believe that everybody is gonna end up breaking that law anyway, so there is no need to make it "work"). Indeed, their Bible says that even attempting to obey the law is futile and is not the path to salvation since each person will always manage to fall short of full compliance with it. They have not seriously thought about how to apply the law when confronted with life's complexities, etc., but rather they throw their hands in the air and say "well, everyone's bound to break the law at sometime ... that's what the concept of original sin is all about".
The interesting thing is that, pro-life Jews (who largely don't understand what the anti-choice movement, even the serious moral thinkers in that movement who are not to be confused with the people with whom I am particularly concerned in this post and the comment it references, really stands for -- they are not merely against "abortion being used as birth control" but rather all abortions -- maybe the SD law will finally wake up those Jews who think they have a lot in common with Christian fundamentalists, of the sort they never knew growing up or really know now, simply because they both are "pro-Israel" and believe in "traditional values"?) excepted, the Jewish tradition, being first and formost a legal tradition, has thought seriously about how to put the laws of the Bible into practice. And this tradition is, by today's standards (although not the standards in much of history) rather pro-choice.
In general, it is amazing how much those who would like to have Biblical law be law in this country ignore a tradition in which Biblical law is implimented as law. You'd think that if you wanted a project to succeed, you would want to learn from the successes and failures of others who've tried it before. But then, do a bunch of pre-millenialists really want any project to succeed.
We Jews should consider that whenever we are tempted to accept the "support" of Israel by these people: the anti-Midas touch so displayed by GW Bush is part and parcel of their ideology.
# posted by alberich @ 8:40 PM 
