Editor:
Steve Skinner’s column on “hold the religion” brings up the interesting question: (Is) such pandering to the willful ignorance of constituents actually representation?
When Obama justifies his beliefs, against the standard Christian hypocrite’s need to know if their earth-bound gods believe the world was created in days even, with an even lazier and spiritual void statement consisting of they were very long days, is he not degrading the office he is running for by not defending context, so as to pander for votes?
Can such a man make any difference, when he distances himself from the exercise of free speech when he is running for an office where he must defend it?
What is always missing from the creationist dodge is the context. The story is essentially about division, and it takes quite a bit of doing for God to come down to the level where men will divide themselves against their better judgment, usually for some position of self-aggrandizing representation of one sect against another, rather than the loving kindness they profess as the guiding principle of their existence.
The seven days thing is actually men bringing the eternal down into the finite world man has already ritualized. Like thunder appears to come into existence after the lightening, the sanction of one’s God appears to originate before the ritual has been formed of some useful habit.
Like the Exodus story legitimizes the abstraction of a calendar unto something larger and more concrete, with the introduction of the long lives of the patriarchs given over to chronicle to make patience and long-suffering as heroic as the men of renown. Those who were the giants of the races surrounding the people who became the People of the Book.
A context which unbeknownst influence may have more to do with the type of people we allow the powers to be to purchase as are electable leaders. To give the religious ritual of voting some justification seemingly more heroic than it possibly can ever really be in the grossly limited democracy of a two-party system.
Labels (religious or otherwise) aren’t divisive in themselves. They become this when they stand in lieu of any real context. When they are like calendars believed to be that what they denote. Representing for some much vaster than can be easily expressed.
So, with our sacred two-party labels, what cookie-cutter leaders do we get when they pander to our so-willful ignorance? A shame that is at least as large a distance from the shame of that first dividing ourselves (from non-biological life) as the first day of creation is from rest?
Eric Olander
Glenwood Springs
