Pretending To Ask Is Not Asking
Reading Kottke this morning got me to this article by ABC columnist John Allen Paulos. As an irreligious citizen myself, I think it's great to see some attention given (finally) to the most under-represented minority group in this country: atheists.
ABC deserves congratulations for courting the godless reader, but there's one giant, glaring thing wrong with this article. The questions posed to candidates are fictional. The article only imagines asking these questions instead of actually asking them. If only there were a news outlet with correspondents covering the presidential race, correspondents who could ask these questions of the candidates... a news outlet like ABC perhaps?
(Their) god only knows why they haven't thought to stop pretending and start asking. Well, their god and their Mickey.
ABC deserves congratulations for courting the godless reader, but there's one giant, glaring thing wrong with this article. The questions posed to candidates are fictional. The article only imagines asking these questions instead of actually asking them. If only there were a news outlet with correspondents covering the presidential race, correspondents who could ask these questions of the candidates... a news outlet like ABC perhaps?
(Their) god only knows why they haven't thought to stop pretending and start asking. Well, their god and their Mickey.
3 comments:
Mr. EdP just blogged an entry on this and I left my 2 cents in the comment field.
I think that the more interesting question is the issue of theology in modern-day America.
I consider myself to be an Ignostic - to debate any aspect of religion is akin to debating the existence of a Multiverse.
It is extraordinarily unlikely that humankind will ever get a definitive answer to either of these questions, so to take a definitive position on the quantifiable existence of gods or parallel universes seems equally absurd.
I've read (and own) the Bible, the Theravada, the Qur'an, the Tanakh, the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the SubGenius, the Satanic Bible, the Poetic Edda, the Principia Discordia, and the God Delusion -In my book, they're all equally plausible just as they are unprovable.
To devote your life to the teaching of any of the aforementioned tomes just seems pointless to me.
I was unfamiliar with ignosticism. Useful term.
While my post was more about a news agency only pretending to ask interesting questions, I'm sensing that I might have come off a bit preachy about atheism. Truth be told, it's the least offensive "belief" to me, but I'm probably more in the "Not Applicable" category.
I see a bigger, sadder issue in a country that, despite its own 1st Ammendment, has never really and truly been able to keep the church out of the state. Mythology and superstition (religion) always play a role in our legislative process. That sucks. I don't want some imaginary god decreeing the law of the land. I certainly don't want a president who believes he has direct commerce with deities. You and I would be locked up and medicated if we made such claims.
Maybe I should just run for office already.
Yeah, sorry about that. Whenever I hit the blogs after the bars I tend to go off on verbose off-topic tangents.
Post a Comment