Gail Brock wrote:
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> The Conservative Bible(http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project) certainly uses that principle. This, incidentally, indicates to me that for at least a segment of the right wing, religion justifies politics rather than being an inspiration for them.
That seems to me to be highly probable. Of course, one thing religion does (regardless of whether it is a cause or an effect of politics) is to bring people physically together on the same day at the same time week after week, and to organize the rest of their week around that and related facts. This material reality gives to the 'majority' opinion in the group a stronger impact on the opinions and attitudes of the remainder of the group. I suspec this was an important factor in the evolution of the social perspective of fundamentalism and evangelicalism over the las6 50 years.
Consider a standard sort of assertion in literary history: "Poet A was influenced by Poet B (from an earlier period). Does that explain A? I would say _no_; One rather must look at the _immediate_ conditions under whiich A developed her style, and in those conditions seek an explanation of why A responded to B, and the form that response took. The present, then, is a clue to the meaning of the past, and it is that meaning of the past (generated by the present) that then becomes the 'influence' on A's performance. Or to put it another way, the "B" that influences did so only after A first influenced B. -- which, incidentally, is precisely what T.S. Eliot claimed in his (in)famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The French symbolists who influenced Eliot doing so after they had, as it were, first been rewritten by Eliot as he read them within them in his head, the head of a St. Louis boy plunged into the atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Harvard, Paris, & London.
But more. How do we go aboaut answering Chris's question on the 'real meaning' of a passage (I take it from Scripture: I missed this post by Chris). _Obviously_, our starting point must be the social conditions within which modern fundamentalism developed and currently flourishes. And since Chris knows nothing of those social conditions he obviously is not in any position to answer his own question.
Carrol