Anti-Climacus

FISK I: The Nation writing about religion is a little like, well, someone writing about something they don't know anything about. Read it for yourself.

They assert three areas in which Bush is allegedly betraying his faith. The first is that he's supposedly a Manichean, because "This ancient heresy divides all of reality in two: Absolute Good and Absolute Evil," and Bush divides the world into Good and Evil, and since they use the same words, they must mean the same thing, right? Hardly. Every Christian (except for Unitarians, who aren't Christians) asserts that there exists in every person both the image of God, which is the soul, which is, for the most part good, and another aspect to themselves (subject to much theological dispute) which makes it somewhat inevitable that people will fall short of even basic moral standards time and time again. Get rid of either part, and you're committing heresy. Manicheans believed something much more specific: that a person was, literally, divided into Good and Evil, spirit and body, and that the only way to happiness was to practice self-denial to the body.

As The Nation says: "In other words, they are so evil that they abhor the good because it is good." Actually, saying evil as something which abhors the good is pretty much a definition, and one that even logical positivists could approve of.

Second, there's the charge of messianism because he believes he was called to be President. I don't believe that it's an accident that I'm at Michigan, majoring in Political Science, and going for a PhD, and I believe part of the intention there lies beyond me. Does this mean my desire to be a professor is messianic, or does it just mean that I think I've been called to do it?

Thirdly, there's the issue of prayer. To wit:

'True prayer does not pretend to tell God what we want Him to do but rather asks that God tell us what He wishes us to do."

Actually, we generally pray that God does what he wants and that what he wants and what we want end up being the same thing.

"Great publicity was given to the fact that during a prime-time news conference shortly before his speech giving the ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, Bush asked his advisers to leave him alone for ten minutes. In evangelical symbolism, that meant that a man of prayer was going to commune with God, somewhat like Moses on Mount Sinai."

Or, possibly, that he took his moral responsibilities as a leader seriously, and wanted a chance to reflect on the seriousness of the situation before him, and, you know, ask not to make the wrong decision.