SJS: Not a Holy Text

Good morning-

As I await Pollster.com's morning update and Politico's playbook of the day, I want to link some old stories that I haven't gotten in because Sarah Palin's non-apology bothered me too much.

• One thing I did not say about Colin Powell was his wonderful and needed shots at Islamophobia. I saw Religulous last night (more on that later) and it was one more reminder of how voices like Powell's are needed. His imagery of a dead young American soldier with a crescent on his grave is a reminder that America is supposed to be a place where different people come together. One day, if we as a nation survive, we will have a Muslim president. Given the past 10 years, that will be a good thing, not a bad one. Also, if you haven't read Roger Simon's excellent story about different moments in Powell's career, do it.
  
• Lost in the ooohing and aahhing over Obama's money totals are the nuances of fundraising. The Times has a story on how, with all the small donors, the continuing rise of BIG donors (more than $25,000, through various backdoor indirect donations) is being overlooked. The Wall Street Journal has a good story on how McCain, who took the public financing, is relying on loopholes for help.
• One of those loopholes is the RNC funding little things, like Sarah Palin's clothes for $150,000. This is just the latest in a McCain campaign that has never gotten rolling without falling over itself. On the back of a new quasi-populist strategy, they go and spend six figures on clothes for their supposedly populist veep. And the best they can do to respond is say "she needed clothes" and that it was always the intent that the clothes be donated to charity. Really? What charity needs dresses that cost 10 grand? It's not even that I mind that much, it's just really poor execution. And that's what the Mac campaign may be remembered for: a continuing inability to handle basic level stuff. It doesn't help when you have a candidate who may be remembered as the least smooth since Walter Mondale. But one of the reasons the GOP is starting the blame game today is that the campaign has demonstrated no ability to string together 7 good days, which they'll need to make this a race. UPDATE: Palin, in an interview in Pittsburgh with the Chicago Tribune, says it's all a lie. Sort of.
  
• Okay, so I recognize McCain's stuck with his running mate, and he can't say much else, but is it really smart to just lay into other Republicans who think Palin's not ready? On an interview with Imus, Politico quotes McCain as saying:

  “She is a governor, the most popular governor in America,” McCain said. “I think she is the most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president.” “I’m amazed. I’m amazed. Which is better? Serve 35 years in the United States Senate and say you’ve got to divide Iraq into three different countries, or be governor of a state and a reformer and give people their tax dollars back and bring about reform in the way that your state does business? Which is better?”

• I don't know what he's defining as "recent," but Mitt Romney and Bill Richardson both ran this year. If you mean was on one of the tickets, then you're saying she's less qualified than George W. Bush was, which is sadly not even true; as bad as he was at it, Bush had run an oil company and a baseball team before spending a few years in Texas politics. Before that, you're talking Clinton, who was the senior governor in the country when he ran. As for the second part... I'm kind of stupefied. It's better to have been in the Senate and recognize that Iraq is really multiple countries than it is to have run a state for a couple years with big oil revenue and convince even your own party in the state legislature there that you're totally oblivious. But the bottom line is, when this is over, McCain will have to look himself in the mirror and come to grips with the fact that, for all sorts of reasons, picking Palin for purely political reasons hurt him more than he ever could have imagined.
  
• Two more old stories from the Politico. This one on how the Dems, accustomed to losing, can't jump to the point where the GOP seems to be on this race, and instead are largely certain something will happen to ruin their dreams. And there's a chance I linked this already but if I didn't, it's a must-read: Racists for Obama?

Okay, Pollster just posted it's morning status update. One very strange thing has been the focus on PA, an expensive state that Obama seems to have locked up. McCain insists they can win here, and have just dumped more and more money and time into the state. From Pollster:

The one exception to the overall trend [in Obama's direction] is Pennsylvania, where we logged five (yes five) new surveys yesterday. The results are remarkably consistent, showing Obama with leads of 10 to 13 percentage points and 51% to 53% of the vote. The new surveys narrow Obama's margin on our trend estimate to 13.4% (52.9% to 39.5%). The margin is just over two points narrower, but still comfortably in the "strong" Obama category.

At that rate (2 pts a week), McCain will catch up to Obama - in Pennsylvania - some time in January. When your good news is that your one target that isn't slipping is now down to 13 points, that's bad.

Okay, movie review/religion section of today's post, on Bill Maher's new movie "Religulous"

First, it's important to remember that Bill Maher is a comedian, and he is funny. The director of the movie, Larry Charles, was also the director of Borat, and it shows. Like Borat, Religulous has moments of laughter that are born mostly of terrifying ignorance from those on the stage. Unlike Borat, Maher is there, as himself, to make jokes and keep things from ever getting too depressing and satirical. So - until the unnecessarily and unexpectedly heavy ending - it's a mostly enjoyable film. Even if you're religious, as long as you have a sense of humor, you'll enjoy a lot of what Maher does.

But the problem is that Maher is trying to do more than make a joke. He's trying to convince us to give up religion. And, on that front, he ranges from offensive and uninformed to hypocritical and myopic. If you've read any of the recent atheism books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens or John Allen Paulos, you're familiar with the argument: Religion makes people do violent, destructive things based on the certainty that they are right, when all of their beliefs are really quite silly. So we should get rid of it. And if you're religious but not fundamentalist, you're just giving cover to those that are. So we need to stop religion, or the terrorists win.

My frustration with this type of argument is quite literally enough for a book, but here are three biggest greivances I have, at least with Maher's movie:

1. Hypocrisy + Uninformed = Annoying. At least Christopher Hitchens knows something about religion. Maher has read the Bible, but it is clear he knows very little about religion in general. As a religious studies major, I think it's pretty important that, if you're going to criticize, say, Islam, you know something about it other than what you see on TV. It would be helpful to understand the difference between the Quran and the Hadith, for example. But that's not Maher's game, which is okay as long as he sticks to comedy. Once he starts telling Muslims on screen what's in their religion, he strays into the exact behavior of which he accuses others: Certainty that they are wrong, despite having no evidence or proof of it, and ridicule of them as buying into the wrong system.
   
2. Blaming every bad thing on religion is remarkably dumb. Religion has lots of forms, and is comorbid with all sorts of societal and cultural things, good and bad. To say that the only reason we kill each other, or want to, is religion, displays a willful ignorance. Pol Pot didn't need religion to kill millions; neither did Stalin. Saddam Hussein killed plenty of people, and he did it because of power and tribal allegiances. A thoughtful critique of religion must embrace nuance, not just more of the all-or-nothing thinking that you say is so awful when religious people do it.
   
3. This is the most unhelpful idea ever. Saying we should give up religion is roughly like saying we should give up alcohol. Is it sometimes bad for us? Is it the cause of escapism? Is it a contributor to many of society's ills? Sure. But we've had it since we stopped being apes, and our odds of giving it up are about as high as our odds of giving up war. If we could stop killing each other, religion wouldn't be so bad, would it? So why not make a movie saying we should stop killing? Because everyone would recognize it as idealistic and silly.
   

I'm not devout, and I don't believe an actual shrub caught fire and talked to Moses. I haven't gone to a service in a long time. I am hardly the poster child for organized religion. I believe my religious texts represent thousands of years of wisdom and stories, some of which is antiquated (I do not believe we should kill someone for homosexual sex, working on the sabbath, or planting the wrong crops next to each other), but some of which is still useful or even insightful. I like Bill Maher's point is that basically everything we attribute to God is the work of men. But as humans we are capable of wanting something more than what we have. That will always involve belief in the unseen, which will always be in some sense a religion. The key, as with alcohol, is not to strive for a prohibition that will never happen, but to move toward a responsible and moderate use that enhances - or at least won't destroy - lives.