Dear visionaries,
It goes without saying that people who do not understand their own worldview, or, in some cases, don’t even know that they have one, or they assume it to be a straw man invented by others, and all this in a university town, are ill-equipped to understand the worldviews of others. But this did not even slow Linda down as she went hunting through back issues of Credenda to find sentiments sure to appall our local illuminati. As the editor of the reprobate magazine, let me assure you that you cannot hope to understand the play Hamlet by reading every tenth word of it.
But I cannot really persuade you of this. So consequently, let me assume for the sake of a fun discussion that Linda’s summaries are accurate, and that we actually do want to make the U.S. more like Saudi Arabia, we think that mammy had it good, and that we encourage the browbeating of wives.
Given your professed commitments to pluralism and multiculturalism, what could possibly be wrong with any of this? Is it bad to be like Saudi Arabia? Bad to be Muslim? Bad to be a Saudi Muslim? Shouldn’t modern anthropologists who can defend the Aztec practice of mass human sacrifice find a cozy little place in their latitudinarian world for ante bellum Alabama? And whatever could be wrong with browbeating a wife? Whoever said we couldn’t? Isn’t that the way some cultures are? Shouldn’t we respect other cultures? No? Why not? Yes? Then what’s your problem?
So if you can accommodate such diversity, then now would be a good time to start. But if your pluralism cannot stretch that far, and actually is a defined worldview, one that stands for definite cultural values and rejects others, then quit pretending that it is not. By what standard do you judge anything? We have a standard and everyone knows what it is — Genesis through Revelation. You make quite as many value judgments as we do, even if it is only about us, but when pressed for details on exactly when and how your secular moses came down off your secular sinai, everything goes blurry.
Incidentally, it is too funny that Fred Phelps is thinking about coming here. I would want to say that gay-baiters like Fred Phelps and the homosexual cartel both share a fundamental faith commitment: they are both in bed with Descartes (henceforth BIBWD, pronounced bibwhid). And I bet you didn’t even know Descartes was gay.
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.