Our friendly lintball, Rush Limbaugh, has been musing on spiritual matters recently:
Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh expanded on his recent claim that "[t]he left is scared to death of God," telling his listeners on the October 21 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show: "Liberals consider themselves more powerful than God" because they believe they "have all the answers."
As Media Matters for America has noted, Limbaugh opined on October 20 that liberals consider a "personal relationship with God" to be "trouble."
This is fascinating. I have always wanted to know what wingnuts think, how they can possibly justify the positions they take, and here Rush comes and gives me some answers! Now I know the wingnut take on religion and liberals: 1. liberals are scared of divinity, 2. liberals think they're gods and goddesses themselves and 3. liberals are too lazy to have an intimate relationship with divinity.
It doesn't occur to Rush to ask some liberals instead of providing all the answers, so I'm going to help him to do just that. The person I'm going to interview is me, which has the added advantage that I'm both a liberal and a goddess, but the disadvantage that I have a personal relationship to divinity by fiat, whether it's too much trouble or not. Nevertheless, this should be more enlightening than Rush's idle speculations if you can call them speculations at all.
So here we go:
Q: Echidne are you scared of god?
A: That depends on which of them you're talking about. Old Zeus was a real asshat and I was quivering in my boots when he was around, but he's all evaporated by now, and the other gods that are still around are not bad. Some are real hotties, actually.
If you want me to answer this within your framework of ideas, the answer is still pretty much no. Most liberals who are religious believe that god is a benign force in their lives. It's wingnuts who believe in a fierce war god who's always looking for some more sacrifices of blood and suffering. Now, that's scary.
Q: Echidne, do you believe that you're a goddess yourself?
A: That's a loaded question, you dimwit. How could I not believe in myself? But I'm not my own divinity, so how could I possibly believe that?
But in general liberals are not divinities, nor believe that they know more than gods and goddesses. They just prefer to use their possibly god-given minds for the purpose that they were made for: pondering and thinking and analyzing evidence. The wingnuts, on the other hand, find all this far too much like hard work, and prefer to look up all the answers in a book. Except that even the book gives too many complicated answers and that makes the wingnuts pick and choose which is against their literalist religion which they then redefine as consisting of only those commands that they liked and bothered to absorb before they gave up.
The big difference between liberals and wingnuts is that liberals know that they don't know all the answers, whereas the wingnuts don't know that they don't know all the answers. If you get my drift.
Q: Is an intimate relationship with god trouble to you, Echidne?
A: You bet! Haven't you read my blog about how Aphrodite treats me? How I have to run after her and fix all the earthquakes and kidnappings and general mayhem she causes? And how Athena sneers at my minor goddess status and worships the memory of the thankfully dead Zeus? One day I might also write about Ares and the little fling we had and how he never left me alone for centuries after that. Trouble, nothing but trouble! If you can stay nonintimate, you're a lot better off. Take my advice. You don't want to mate with swans or get pregnant from stardust or take a ride on the back of the bull or any other metaphors Zeus used to disguise his sexual harassment and rape activities. And it's no better for the human males. Remind me to tell you some stories about what 'Dite got up to in the old days.
But more seriously, liberals are unlikely to tell Rush Limbaugh what their personal relationship to god might look like. He's not a receptive audience for such confidences. I think it's insulting to make guesses about other people's private religious practises, but Rush doesn't agree, obviously. If that's ok, then, I'd suggest that the wingnuts think of a personal relationship with god consisting of them grabbing god by the lapels and telling him how to run this world. If I was that god, I would not be pleased. I'd rather have my creatures listen to me in a respectful and humble way and not to interrupt all the time with their stupid interpretations of what I meant.