Yeah, only morons like Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, William of Occam, Duns Scotus, Dante, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Kant, and Hegel are Christians... jks
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I agree, but let's move in a different direction. I am going on a riff here...
Our whole conceptual frame of what it means to be Christian, Muslim or Jew has been utterly changed by history, culture (and these guys) into something that none of the above would recognize, any more than they would recognize our science as science, or our history as history.
It is precisely this historical and cultural transformation (its relativity or vacuum) that the fundamentalists of the `Book' (Christian, Muslim, and Jew) want to change, erase, negate, and deny.
I realize this is not really the topic of the thread, but I want to go in this direction because I think it reveals more than trading insults.
For example, what made Leo S so fascinating to me, was that I could watch his mind through his work, struggle with this issue. The issue was mainly the loss of a traditional mind. Not just a belief system, but a sensibility and mind, and therefore a people and a world. He saw the secular modernization of religion, philosophy, science, history, and political thinking as a loss. (Perhaps best symbolized by the Bauhaus?) It is this strange reaction, which I did finally feel some sympathy for, that propelled Leo backward in time, and was the basis of his profound rejection of the Enlightenment.
If I try to think about the more informed level of the Christian, Jewish, and Islam reaction to modernity in the 20thC, then the arrival of post-modernity must have felt like a rocket blast to the stars---far and away from the very world sensibility these traditions were trying to resuscitate. Both the return to a traditional mind and the some of the post-modern movements were a reaction to the profound void of modernity.
I suspect just about everybody who began with a strong sense of an historical ethnicity, has had to confront a very similar problem in their own minds. You simply can not rationally confront modernity in its fullest sense, and retain very much of your own historical identity. Education, professionalism, the work you do, the way you must think, the kinds of things that fill your mind everyday, the people you have to relate to, all destroy that historical-identity and whatever remains of its traditional mind.
Anyway this process is happening in other countries and to people all over the world as some class of them are moved into the ranks of an international culture---certainly of technology, science, history, and politics. The modernity-postmodernity complex is this international culture, and it is precisely what a very large number of Americans have rejected. Ultimately it is what the fire-breathing hate mongery of the US right mean by the world Liberal--- whether they know it or not. It's why they hate the UN, as both a symbol and expression for that international culture.
Anyway, back to Barack Obama. His Christianity is likely part of that link to a lost historical-identity, or at least I assume that. I don't know much about him. (Just read J Wanzala's posted AP article, which seems to confirm this thought.)
Back in the Eighties I was part of a writing group where one of the members was a black woman writer and most of her work dealt with this dilemma. We used to meet at her house because it was larger---an old Victorian place in west Oakland that she and her husband renovated. Many of our conversations over her work and mine (polar opposites) turned on these points---and as they are threaded through many African American writers.
In contrast, my efforts in fiction were terrible. Beyond various writing technicalities, part of the problem came down to a deep inability to grasp the nature of this kind of struggle over identity. It's a topic that fascinates me, but I don't experience it, and I think it turns out to be something you must know first hand in order to write about it with enough dramatic conviction to make it compelling.
So in my conversations with Angela (not Davis) I tried to make the case that the reason I had no experience of it, was only partially explained by being from the white majority. The more important reason was that I was almost entirely raise within an already internationalized technocratic modernity. I had no `roots' as such or rather these non-roots were my roots. By accident of time and place (metro LA, 40s-50s), all of my early neighborhoods, schools, and friends were a mix of not just races, but nationalities, ethnicities, and languages---and my multiple parents were from all over. Even religion was a mix of Protestant and Catholic. There was no there, there.
In its deepest mythopoetic sense, talking with Angela helped me see I was a modern technocratic void. White? But that void is very difficult to reproduce or represent in writing. You have to work along the traces of Beckette or Robbe-Grillet, some parts of Camus, Octavio Paz, clips and pieces of Antonioni and Godard. In other words it's no longer American and no longer a story. And because of its narrative abstraction, which is one way to represent this kind of interior, it wasn't very readable either. In fact, I decided that it might not really belong to the narrative realm at all. I was probably better suited to working in the visual world, where it was more natural to encounter empty places comprehended only by their architectural embrace--as the two or three dimensional support. But even there, there is a profound rejection going on. Nobody likes this kind of stuff, period. Modern art, literature, film, and music (including jazz) disappeared in precise relation to the un-intelligibility of their trajectories. In fact, it seems to me the very signature of the international modernity-postmodernity cultural complex has become its illegibility---symbolized by the textual complexities of Jacques Derrida.
I can not come to a conclusion on any of this. But in relation to the modernity-postmodernity international culture or mind set that I consider myself a part of, Bush and OBL represent a clash of lost civilizations---but only in their fictional aspect as if in movies, since there is no longer either a Christian nor an Islamic civilization. These are imaginary or fabricated worlds resuscitated out of a reaction to the unintelligibility and presumed to be uninhabitable nature of a modernist-postmodernist project.
Since I am at home in this project, guys like Bush and OBL (or pick better representations if you wish) seem completely out of their minds. On the other hand, because of reading Leo and thinking about his recognition of Paul de Lagarde and Carl Schmitt, the entire realm of the politics of identity worries me. If I consider all of the above in relation to the election of GWB, then what I see is a distinct political movement of the US polity into this very dangerous realm of identity wars.
Doug and DP posted this:
Col. Gary Brandl voiced his troops' determination: "The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in Fallujah and we're going to destroy him."
To the US, Satan is hiding in Falluja. To the insurgents, The Infidel is about to lay waste to Falluja. Welcome to another stirring episode of "When Monotheisms Collide"!! DP
Satan and the Infidels.
CG