October 28, 2004
Bush, God and Certainty
filed under: Hey, What's The Big IdeaI have long believed Robert Wright to be one of the Smartest M*****f***ers on the Planet (trademark pending). Via Obsidian Wings (which, if you're not reading, you should be - excellent, multi-partisan debate from bloggers and an active readership who are no slouches in the brain department themselves, whichever side of the aisle they tend towards) comes an excellent analysis of Wright's excellent NYTimes analysis (are you with me?) of the role that faith may play in Bush's decisions.
Key grafs from Wright:
People unfamiliar with a certain strain in evangelical tradition may have trouble seeing the point of Chambers's emphasis on utter surrender. But in the Baptist churches of my youth, it went without saying (though it was often said) that surrender was in no small part about self-control. Because human nature is subtly corrupt, with every temptation concealing a slippery slope, complete commitment was the only path to virtue. Chambers stresses this binary nature of devotion more than some contemporary evangelicals, and that may explain his appeal for Mr. Bush, who became a born-again Christian when he quit drinking and has stayed off the bottle ever since.Some people who find moderation easy can't understand why for others abstinence is necessary - and still less why it would demand a spiritual framework. I don't find moderation easy, and, even leaving that issue aside, I find being human so deeply challenging that I can't imagine it without an anchoring spirituality in some sense of the word. So I respect Mr. Bush's religious impulse, and I even find Chambers's Scottish austerity true and appealing in a generic way.
Still, it's another question whether Chambers's worldview, as mediated by Mr. Bush, should help shape the world's future. People who take drastic action based on divine-feeling feelings, and view ensuing death and destruction with equanimity, have in recent years tended to be the problem, not the solution. [Emphasis mine]
The ObsWi piece also quotes one of my lifelong favorite jokes, about the man in the flood. My version:
A devoutly religious man lives in a flood zone and the river is rising. The water comes up to his front porch, where he sits. A National Guard truck drives by and they tell him to jump on. "No," he says, "I have faith. God will save me."Posted by rjt at October 28, 2004 01:18 PMThe water rises, driving the man inside and up to his second floor. He's sitting in the window when some firemen come by in a boat and tell him to climb aboard. "No," he says, "God will save me."
The water rises yet further, driving the man up onto his roof. A rescue helicopter comes by and they beg the man to climb up the ladder. "I have faith," he replies, "and I know that God will save me."
The water rises higher, and the man drowns.
In heaven, the man barges to the front of the line to confront St. Peter. "This is outrageous!" he cries. "I've been a good faithful man all my life and in my need, when I trusted in God to save me, he did NOTHING!"
"Hm..." says St. Peter, looking in his book. "By our records, we sent a truck, a boat and a helicopter..."