Teaching Religion and Politics in Real Time Isn’t “Either-Or”

Via “Fast Times @Homeschool High” blogger mom Denise re: “Teaching Religion and Politics” — updated from post-2004, electoral analysis from Beliefnet.com that divides us all into twelves “tribes” instead of just right and left polar opposites. Full report and data here.

The best part to me probably was the famous names given as an example of each type. 🙂

Although surely there’s plenty of fodder for debate — Mel Martinez for example is the new Florida Senator listed in the Latino religious tribe, but he is very conservative and I wouldn’t have considered his racial background nearly as important as his flavor of hardball politics, to this analysis anyway.

Here in the South, isn’t it disproportionately odd that we’ve had so many Catholics in prominent government roles recently?

Jeb Bush is Catholic with a Latina wife, but projected ideologically white fundamentalist-evangelical dominionism instead at many moments during his governorship, like practically kidnapping Terri Schiavo with government agents to keep her alive — maybe socially enforced paternalism is what these tribes have in common then? Her folks were Catholic too as I remember, some strange sect with a brown-robed radical monk giving speeches in the parking lot for the TV cameras, not Kerry-like or Kennedy-like or even Schwartzenegger-like at all (he’s Catholic too?? well, yeah he married a Kennedy, duh, but this connection actually never once occurred to me!)

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Creating a Giant Ball of Life-Sustaining Power of Story

UPDATE – Visit and bookmark Pharyngula’s mother of all “creation science” posts, fully linked. A cheerful cock of the snook to COD — I was out in nature watching stuff die without water all week, and I’m still playing catch-up inside. COD says it could take you 40 days and 40 nights to get through this, which just puts me back fretting about the rain we need so badly here . . .)

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“THE GREAT FIBROID MASS” still influencing families with its powerful creation story. Good news?

(Pun warning to literalists and those easily confused)

Daryl blogged the new creationist museum about the world being created as home to dinosaurs and humans in coexistent peace a mere 6,000 years ago, some say, and homeschoolers chimed in to help the story along. In the process I think we found its ancestor in American gospel. 🙂
Read about its “genesis” and how the myth is kept alive by the whole community here, using very mystic-political Discovery Institute-like language such as, “the sides are accumulating a material imbalance.” Apparently this community and perhaps life as they know it would end if their creation story (despite being rotten to its core, literally, and starting to stink in indisputable fact) cannot dominate us all, as THE story instead of just A story.

And wait, there’s more, NOW how much would you pay??