America: A Secular Nation?

By -
No way. Watch the beginning of a World Series game, and look at the reverential look all of the players feel obliged to adopt when the national anthem is played. Imagine the reaction if one of them refused to stand for this hymn.

America is a religious nation, whose religion is worshipping itself and its own exceptionalism.

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell8:33 PM

    Well, it depends on what you mean by "secular nation". If you mean secular government, then sure. If you mean something else, then I don't know.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah8:35 PM

      "If you mean secular government, then sure."

      Then sure what?

      Delete
    2. Samson Corwell1:47 AM

      Sure the government is secular.

      Delete
    3. gcallah7:07 AM

      No, it is devoted to the religion of America.

      This was common everywhere with the creation of the nation – state: The mystical body of the state was put in place of the mystical body of the church as the object of the citizens' worship. But America has one of the worst cases of this phenomenon.

      Delete
    4. Samson Corwell1:40 PM

      That's an interesting and perhaps insightful way of putting it. I've known for a while that American exceptionalism is overstated and can border on arrogant nationalism if diligence isn't exercised, but I've never encountered an interpretation of it as a religion. Viewed in that light I agree with you that it is probably one of the worst examples of such (I qualify my statement with "probably" since I haven't paid particular attention to the same phenomenon in other countries in the same light). If I fully understand what you mean in, then would I be correct in saying that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, contemporary China, and contemprary North Korea are possibly the only nations that are greater manifestations of this occurrence?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more