Kelley wrote:
>
> But, this literal interpretation of The Word
> nonsense is too much!
>
>
There has been no political activity in the United States for about 30 years. During the same 30 years a large proportion of the population never quite recovered from the Slump of 1974 or the subsequent "stagflation." What that meant is that everyone had to make up their mind about the world from the privacy of their own homes or in non-political conversation with friends and relatives.
The material they had to process in the course of making up their minds consisted of the crime crisis, the drug crisis, the sexual-abuse-of-children crisis, the gang-crisis, -- all crises that could only be dealt with by an abstract machinery of state in which they had no direct involvement whatever.
During the same 30 years hours of work steadily increased, and this is even ignoring the deadly difficulties of getting to and from work.
Schools became more crowded. In the grade school our son (born 1970) went to, they eliminated physical education, music, & art teachers while he was attending, turning those functions over to the classroom teacher, who in addition to those extra duties now had no breaks to speak of during the day.
Now these objective conditions are not going to get better; they may get worse for many. (Illinois State U got a retroactive budget cut of 10%, they are laying off, no raises for faculty or staff to speak of for years, class-sizes are increasing, proportion of adjuncts and other non-tenure is increasing.
What I'm trying to capture here is the extreme isolation in which everyone has to form their opinion of a very complex world.
How many of these "literal interpretation of The Word" people do you regularly associate with. I've associate with quite a number of them through the local depressive & manic depressive support group. Their beliefs are extremely shallow and deep at the same time. I pray all the time one says, a very deeply depressed woman whose "husband" and teenage daughter both treat her with contempt. She doesn't understand why god is doing it to her but she also says that she couldn't survive without god. Scare quotes because she and her husband of nearly 20 years aren't officially married. He's a jerk, the daughter is scared that _she_ will become mentally ill too and blames her mother for it. Another woman who, crazy as it seems to me, just loves to work, had been a cook at ISU for a number of years, injured her back and had to go on disability, fell into deep depression from the trauma of not working, her husband divorced her and got custody of the kids (I think she was lucky, but she just can't stand it) -- and not only that, but has taught the kids to call their mother crazy. She too can only survive, she says, through her faith in god. She too prays all the time.
Both know that it isn't their fault that they are mentally ill (except in so far as blaming oneself is one of the symptoms). The second one could not get up nerve to speak to the disability affairs officer over at ISU without someone (me) making the appointment for her and going with her. She doesn't really understand what the hell is going on in Iraq, but was cool with my description of it. It bothered her when she found out I was an atheist -- because she was worried about me! I've had that experience with several other fundamentalist xtians that I've known (including several students) -- the cognitive dissonance of liking (even depending on) someone who, according to one's beliefs, is going to hell.
Gallup polls simply don't tell you anything about people.
Those figures could change tremendously in a year or less. They could also stay nominally the same while the concrete content changed. If a mass socialist movement does develop in this country you will have millions of fundamentalists on Sunday and at prayer meetings who the rest of the week are enthusiastic supporters of various atheistic activists.
Carrol