Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Trump And Hillary, The Fruits Of Spiritual, But Not Religious

So we're down to two candidates now. We either vote for instant death from a meteor strike or insanity and human sacrifice from one of the elder gods.

Oh, wait, that's probably just my ballot. I'm having an internal debate between SMOD (Sweet Meteor of Death) and Cthulhu.

Actually, we're down to a woman who betrayed her country for grubby financial gain by selling favors as Secretary of State and a man who is best described as a complete swine. Inconceivable in America even a few decades ago, this choice reflects the America of 2016. Politics, after all, is downstream of culture.

Religion has rules, objective rules. It's got hard edges and judgments and demands. Spirituality has none. It's soft and squishy and demands nothing of you. We don't go to church any more, at least not weekly. However, we embrace all manner of causes which make us feel virtuous, but have all the substance of a cloud. We don't fast on Fridays in Lent, but we talk about global warming climate change as if we can actually do something about it.

The recent spat over the North Carolina bathroom law is a perfect example. We're all for inclusion which means nothing more than abandoning definitional terms while we refuse to face the existence of predatory men. We would rather risk trapping young girls in small, windowless rooms with middle-aged perverts than impose any rules at all on people who are objectively insane*.

Rules make us queasy. Religion is spirituality with rules. We've rejected it.

And now here we are with two candidates for whom rules don't exist. It's tyranny to force little girls into bathrooms with strange men. Well, we're about to impose such a tyranny on ourselves and for exactly the same reason. We can't abide rules, so we've ended up with a pair of amoral, egomaniac politicians who could only rise to power under such conditions.

Were we an objective society, these two would be in jail or confined to petty graft. Instead, we opened the presidency to them when we discarded objective judgment.

Good for us.

Right now, I'm leaning towards Cthulhu.
* - Cut off your hangers, squeeze silicone into your chest, pump yourself up with hormones and call yourself a woman and it means you're courageous. Cut off your leg, replace it with a wooden peg, wear funny clothes, pump yourself full of rum and call yourself a pirate and we'd all realize you were mad. Sorry, they're the same thing, guys.

4 comments:

Foxfier said...

The easy-right-now route.
*sigh*

Mostly Nothing said...

We get the government we deserve.
As awful as the Iba administration has been at destroying thw constitution, I believe it is only goung r ok get worse.

IlĂ­on said...

I also believe that it's only going to get worse. And that's because most of us don't really want to turn around.

tim eisele said...

"We can't abide rules, so we've ended up with a pair of amoral, egomaniac politicians who could only rise to power under such conditions"

Actually, I think one could argue that we have the opposite problem: we are stuck with these people due to blindly following a bunch of poorly-thought-out rules (specifically, the party nomination rules). Because of the byzantine, legalistic way that both parties have structured their primaries and caucuses, Trump and Clinton have both managed to rules-laywer their ways into the nominations based on the input of a minute fraction of the population (the number I saw recently was that only 10 million actual people have cast votes for Trump so far, for example. That's less than 5% of the voting-age population).

So now, after a bunch of legalistic minds have bolluxed up the nominations, they expect us to go ahead and follow "the rules" and pick one of their two appalling choices. Even though the whole primary system is completely non-constitutional and entirely a creation of the parties, and therefore completely non-binding on anyone outside of those parties.

We could, right now, have anyone step up as a candidate and run for President on their own, and the only thing that would stop them is the fact that we've been brainwashed into thinking that we've "got to follow the rules" and elect either a Democrat or a Republican.

I think George Washington was right. Partisanship is the Country\'s \"Worst Enemy\" | John Woodall, MD