Re: [Marxism] Bobby Jindal's Secret Past

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

That is why I said believing in god is one thing but imagining you 
personal fight with gods adversary is several levels removed from this.
How exploitable remains to be seen but I believe you are mistaken if you 
imagine more than a small percentage of Americans would approve of the 
US President claiming he physically grappled with satan or his minions.
Maybe I'm wrong but Catholic school background tells me people are 
hostile to most claims like this.



Fred comments: 
I have come to the conclusion that religious baiting in US elections serves
reactionary interests, and undermines democratic rights.

Of course it is possible to construct scare situations involving human
sacrifice and so on, but all such of course have to be evaluated
skeptically. We should keep in mind that there was once a wide popular
belief that Jews killed Christian children to drink their blood at the
Passover Seder. 

I think Muslims, practitioners of Santeria and Voodoo and  so on should have
a perfect right to run for office in this country, and if there were more of
them in office, the tone of politics would be no worse and probably better.

I don't see anything positive that has come from baiting Protestant
fundamentalists on religious grounds. I think the only legit political issue
is the desire of politicians to implement specific beliefs and outlaw others
through the state power. 

As far as I can see, all the yelling about so and so's "strange" beliefs and
practices and there is nothing so "foreign" to this country about exorcism,
which is part of Catholic Church ideology under certain fairly rare
circumstances. (I suspect that Jindal's case was not authorized as he makes
no mention of sanction or the involvement of a priest. He may be affiliated
with the charismatics Erik mentioned.)

The Catholic Church tendency to be highly skeptical about miracles, direct
contact with Christ or God, and so forth arises not our of science or
materialism but primarily because such claims can (and in the later middle
ages, eventually did on a large scale) lead to challenging the authority of
the hierarchy as the only intermediary between humanity and the trinity.
("Justification by faith" or the "personal relationship with Christ" favored
by many protestant denominations as opposed to salvation by "good works" as
directed by the Church.)

I don't think either of these positions is more legitimate or scientific
than the other, but, if we are going to see a historical progression, the
protestant one may have represented an advance in the development of the
concept of rights and autonomy of the individual.

At any rate, if the worst thing in Jindal's past is participating in an
exorcism, then he is an unusually clean capitalist politician and we have
nothing on him.  Keep looking. I think something more useful will turn up.
Fred Feldman






________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu