And I thought the attacker was just reacting spontaneously to an anti-Islamic movie. Maybe this coming Sunday Susan Rice can go on the morning talk shows and clear this all up.
Sorry Li'l Bob, but reconciliation is not a "little-known" maneuver. Rather, it was made notorious when Senate Democrats and the Obama Administration used it to pass the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which placed the finishing touches on Obamacare:
If Republicans win back the Senate in 2014 and then use the "tricky maneuver" of reconciliation to "ram through" legislation, they will only be following the precedent established by the Democrats when they used reconciliation to ram through Obamacare in 2010. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, Bob.
In other words, the main point of coming together on Easter is not to reaffirm our belief that Jesus actually rose from the dead and harrowed Hell (a ridiculous proposition, but great material for iconography), but because Easter is an event that allows members of a community to come together at a certain time of year and engage in activities that reinforce the bonds between them and to reflect on certain common human conditions, such as the awareness of one's own sinfulness and need for redemption. This is why atheists like Richard Dawkins, although they correctly point out the absurdities of various religious systems of belief, miss the psychological and societal reasons for religion entirely.
(Aside: One complication is the fact that one of the main activities in the liturgy of any religion is the affirmation of one's beliefs. For example, one of the most important parts of the Roman Catholic Mass is the Credo, a statement of what a person must believe in order to be a Roman Catholic. But, even this act of affirmation I see simply as helping to define the boundaries of the community and to strengthen the bonds between its members and not to be taken literally.)
Although from a purely scientific point of view I am an atheist (or a deist, at best), nevertheless I insist on saying grace before meals. Although I was raised a Roman Catholic, every summer when we go to our cabin in the mountains, I take my sons out in the boat to the middle of the lake, pour lake water over their heads, and invoke the gods and goddesses of the lake, mountains, trees, waters, and sky and the spirits of their grandparents, who built the cabin, to watch over them for another year. I do not engage in these activities because I believe in the Father's ability to bless our food or in polytheism or in a literal afterlife for my parents, but instead out of a desire to share and strengthen the bonds between the members of my family in some kind of symbolic (if literally ridiculous) way.
Embedded in Aslan's article, however, is the following nugget of post-modernist nonsense:
Let's apply this analysis to any arbitrary text; for example, to one of Plato's dialogues. According to what Aslan says, the dialogue "requires a person to confront it in order for it to have any meaning. And the very act of interpreting it necessarily involves bringing to it one's own perspectives and prejudices." In brief: without a person to interpret it, the text does not have any meaning; and the meaning that the person derives from the text when he interprets it is determined by his own prejudices. Thus, it is impossible to recover the meaning that Plato himself had in mind when he was writing down the words of the dialogue.
Why should we bother to read Plato, then, if our interpretation of him is just an echoing back of our own prejudices? In fact, if post-modernism is correct, why would we ever bother saying or writing anything? After all, whatever we say or write will not have the meaning we ourselves intend for it to have, but only the meaning that others impose on it when they interpret it through their own "perspectives and prejudices." In fact, since many different people will impose many different prejudices and perspectives, what we say and write will have many different meanings. A veritable Tower of Babel.
But, of course, this analysis also applies to what the post-Modernists themselves write, so that I am free to interpret their writings as utter nonsense and my interpretation will be just as valid as anyone else's, given my own perspectives and prejudices. So, yes, nonsense.
