Monday, April 9, 2007

* Whence the Anger, Tom?

I have been asked in a comment (and asked for much of my adult life) where all this anger against organized religion comes from. I ask these people, in response, to attend a Catholic Indian boarding school and to suffer the mental and physical cruelty that I did, and then ask, where did this anger come from? I ask these same folks to read the century-old biographies of Natives like Luther Standing Bear and Zitkala-S[h]a, and to witness the Euro-American-Christian conscious erasure of other cultures and languages and worldviews that occurs there—and then ask, where did this anger come from? (In passing, I might ask these folks to read some of the more brilliant thinkers of their own Western Civilization—e.g., Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Derrida—and then ask, where did this anger come from?) I finally ask these people to examine our U.S. foreign policy (itself largely determined by an implicit Christian theocracy), with its assumption that it's "our way or the highway," and then ask, where did this anger come from? In conclusion, I'd LIKE to quote John Astin's nutsy old character on Night Court and say that "I'm feeling MUCH better now": but I can't; I'm not.

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