I found Peggy Noonan's dour assessment of the inaugural speech deflating, but I'm not likely to doubt her judgement. I have to admit that I flinched when Bush referenced our national identity being built on "the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, and the words of the Koran (italics mine)."
I think David Gelerntner already covered this ground somewhere out there in the aether, but I'm having a little trouble with that third part simply as a matter of history. I'd love to see someone produce a believable explanation of how the words of the Koran affected our constitutional development or helped promote self-government.
Yes, yes, Bush was playing down the confrontation between Christianity and Judaism on one side and Islam on the other. That's smart. He should do that. He has a responsibility to America's Muslims to do so, but let's not falsify the record.
By the way, none of this goes to say that I think Muslims are incapable of democracy or any of that business. If you had intercepted Christian civilization at various points, you would have likely said the same about Christians. Certainly, the twentieth century was full of Protestants heavy-handedly making that accusation about Catholics.
2 comments:
You're out of your depth here, Tlaloc. Reading last month's issue of Skeptic magazine doesn't qualify an opinion about the founding. And by the way, just where do you think the Magna Carta got its inspiration? If you'd like to read a good author on this score, check out Brian Tierney, who broke new ground by showing seeds of democracy even during the medieval period.
Maybe one of these days I'll put together a very long post about the Bible and how it helped lead to U.S. style constitutionalism. Concepts like original sin, the fallen state of mankind, and the image of God in man all play an important part in the evolution of western thinking about government.
Okay, forgive the unpleasant opening to the last comment, but you're so obviously embracing a species of intellectual philistinism I can't help but be annoyed. I can easily imagine you might know more about something like intelligent design or biology than I do, but this is my territory and you're just dead wrong. Not much more to it than that. You're reading from "Barry Lynn's Guide to American History" and it just ain't that compelling or true. Christians often misguidedly believe America was once a very orthodox Christian nation and that all the founders had similar ideas about theology. You're making the opposite mistake in your analysis.
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