Tom G and Jeff S Discuss Politics and Religion - The Monday Morning Memo

JEFF EISENBERG: “Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’
It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”
– Frank Herbert, DUNE

TOM GRIMES: A number of years ago, the Catholic Church forbade the clergy to run for political office… I think that was a wise decision.

Politics + Religion is a formula for Might makes Right.

Politics without Religion … becomes its own Religion.

Religion & Politics are better when Church and State are separate.

JEFF SEXTON: One cannot rule coherently and justly without relation to metaphysics. So in that sense, there can be no politics fully separated from religion. It is only a question of whose religion is dominant.

In that sense, every government is a theocracy whether it goes by that label or not.

For either a government acknowledges a god — i.e., a spiritual and vertical authority higher than itself, and to which it must remain aligned — or it sees itself as God, the highest possible authority.

History shows that the latter is orders of magnitude more murderous and tyrannical than the former.

TOM GRIMES: Sometimes it’s just about filling in potholes and keeping trains running on time.

(a text thread on June 9, 2024 at 9:08AM.
The wizard and I were witnesses. – Indy Beagle)

“People have always worked, he explains, but they have only held jobs – with wages and employers and vacations and pink slips – for a very short time. And now, with the proliferation of cybernetics and robotics and automation of all types and degrees, jobs are on the way out again. In the context of history, jobs have been but a passing fancy. Nowadays, he would have you believe, the state uses jobs, or rather the illusion of jobs, as a mechanism for control. When there is a public outcry about some particularly vile instance of deforestation, wreckage, or pollution, the ‘pufftoads’ hasten to justify the environmental assault by trumpeting the jobs it allegedly will save or create – and then the protests fade like the rustle of a worn dollar bill. Foreign policy decisions, including illegal and immoral act of armed intervention, likewise are made acceptable, even popular, on the grounds that such actions are necessary to protect American jobs. Virtually every candidate for public office in the past 70 years has campaigned with the rubber worm of ‘more jobs’ dangling from his or her rusty hook, and the angler with the most lifelike worm snags the vote, even though all voters except the cerebrally paralyzed must recognize that there are going to be fewer and fewer jobs as time – and technology – progresses.”

- Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, p. 195-196 (1994)