Actually, the photo doesn't do this justice. You've written a really amazing piece and it is just awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A very observant and incisive piece, sir ... :)
The always quaintly snarling Christopher Hitchins,
Richard Dawkins, and a handful of brave souls dare
to challenge us as humans to not mistake our metaphors
(theistic, or otherwise) as objective truths in themselves.

The Greek root "meta" means "behind", after all.
Accordingly, the term "metaphor" represents not
the subject(s) of our perceptions, but, instead,
the archetypes that our minds (conscious as well
as unconscious, unitary as well as collective)
behold while peering so dimly through a glass
darkly upon vast seas of mysteries beyond the
grasp of focal thought, and immersed within
the metral folds of Nature, vast and indifferent
to our imaginings of the shape of the sky ...

The much famed "uncertainty principle" of the
20th Century (for nuclear physicists as well
as layfolks alike) was described more generally,
and transcending (mere) reductionistic endeavor
by Heisenberg's statement, "We have to remember
that what we observe is not nature in itself but
nature exposed to our method of questioning".

Existence itself is the ultimate humbler, and
there exists deep mystery(s) that, I assure you,
relegate the dual (and oft all too similarly
myopic and arrogant) cathedrals of science,
as well as of theism, to the status each of
little bubbles of thought forms from within
which our minds experience via perception -
where (it seems) we gaze upon horizons of
ambiguity formed by the outer membranes of
these finite bubbles and (both by means of
focal reasoning and metral consciousness),
imagine archetypical gods and metaphysical
string theories and the like that can never
comport with concreteness, and describe only
the reaches of our own ignorance of that which
may exist beyond our canonical thought bubbles
that, whether by reason or by intangibles,
demarcate our smallness and frailness amidst
Nature's silent indifference to our musings.

The native americans who lived upon this very ground
we live and work on 100 times longer than we the
conquerors have (roughly 600 generations to our 6),
had we not hastily extincted them without more than
a trifling interest of their own cosmology/sociology,
might teach us more of their own form of separation
of "church and state". Whereas their Shamans attended
to the intangible worlds of immortal spirits and the
protection and rescue of their *souls*, it was their
Priests who attended to the more tangible bureaucratic
matters of the forming and implememtation of their
social morals, laws, rules, etc., as they applied
to how humankind treats humankind (as well as other
creatures, the earth, the water). While such matters
of societal jurisprudence were open matters, the more
intangible worlds of their cosmology was absolutely
and entirely personal and secret (even between the
closest of kin). They essentially made their own
peace with the universe (analogue - church) and
did not inject them as matters of guidance within
the more tangible matters of fairness and justice
(analogue - state). Those worlds remained separate.

Of the many thousands of belief systems that the
peoples of the world have had, and do hold today,
indigenous cultures (in the Americas, Africa, and
quite likely other locales), in foregoing the dogma-
driven calls to war that (major) religions have for
millenia employed in order to drive men to kill,
demonstrate a wisdom as profound as that which
Jefferson and Adams - though clearly not Robertson
and Bush - originally intended, for the purpose of
erecting a constitutional republic free from the
tyranny of any and all majorities upon the citizen.

The brilliant James P Carse (in "Finite and Infinite
Games") so aptly stated:

"All three of the West's major religions consider themselves children of Abraham, though each has often understood to be itself the only and final family of the patriarch, an understanding always threatened by the resounding phrase: numbered as the stars of the heavens. This is a myth of the future that always has a future; there is no closure in it. It is a myth of horizon.

Those Christians who deafened themselves to the resonance of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history, but they did not kill the myth. The emptied divinity whom they have made into an Instrument of Vengeance continues to return as the Man of Sorrows bringing with him his unfinished story, and restoring the voices of the silenced."

I happened to have the boob-tube on when Obama
originally gave the speech that you address.
Old enough myself to rember the candicacy of
Eugene Mccarthy in 1968, and having seen an
absolute dearth of substance come forth in
the years since (excepting the amazing Nader),
my mouth dropped open as I listened to Obama's
words. I recall thnking, "this is quite possibly
political suicide" (to even speak substantively
of the many and varied wounds behind the masks),
as well as thinking, "this guy's got my vote..."

Your point about the "sausage factory" (comprised
of money, power, hubris, and our own "hearts of
darkness") that will inevitably more and more
twist and masticate substance into a pop-culture
wasteland where favored dieties, sports fetishes,
moronic nimrod twits, and matters of state all
fuse into an Orwellian network/cable video feed
is quite well taken. The nation of which Lincoln
said, "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the
last best hope of earth" (to Congress, Dec, 1862)
has degenerated into a nationalistic and jingoistic
"consumer state" spoiled by fortune and excess,
stooping to speaking for the gods themselves in
order to rationalize up to one million deaths that
could (and very rightly should) have been avoided
by simply constitutionally ceding War Powers to a
Congress of moral lepers too vapid to seize them
back from the most toxic and deranged administration
since Nixon. I believe that a deep collective societal
guilt resides in our "hearts of darkness", to which
fools call out to their dieties to take responsibility
for. Where the very same generation that embattled
Nixon against the Vietnam War, and who lived the
chilling lessons of Watergate, et al, has now allowed
all of those lessons to be ignored and lost, and
treaded foolishly forged their own fetters of hatred,
greed, and malice against a world population the
vast majority of which are the silenced losers,
perhaps the shame could (and rightly should) run
deep in the silences imposed by our pathology of
dominance; our assumptions that our exceptional
fortunes arise out of virtue (whether by divine
caveat, or by top-heavy dominance and exploitation).

We can ascribe "-isms" and label individuals "-ists"
all we like (to make "the other" out of human beings).
But it is not really our *beliefs* that ultimately
matter - it is what we are "able to make to be true"
(which is beyond scripting and dogma, and about soul).

There is no doubt that the Europeans perfected the art
of large scale conquest, exploitation, and genocide
in multiple continents in order to achieve their aims
(under the rubric of divine providence), and our "great
experiment" has honed these skills to incredible levels
of toxicity and hostility, paranoia, and hubritic rage.
That this has and will generate a cornucopia of blowback
from the silenced losers is the ineluctable flux of human
history. When we choose the sword, we cannot banish the
responsibilities of such chosen paths with mere dogma
(either statist or theist). That I (or my daddy) did
not do it has never sufficed as a moral disconnector.

(Perhaps) our last, best hope as a species is to rise
to the moral occaision of our now wired world to heed
Marshall MacLuhan's warning:

"The price of eternal vigilance is indifference."

and recognize that indifference to the well being
of others has never built more than transitory empires
(all of which expected to reign for 1000 years, and,
in their own rhetorical formulations, have all seen
themselves as the banishers of evil, and the knowers
and executors of a perceived/believed "end of history").

"Wickedness runs quicker than death ... "
- Socrates

None of this (mortal, or immortal) makes humankind evil,
we freely choose to make ourselves evil in our certainties ...

"The utmost abstractions are the true weapons
with which to control our thought of concrete fact."
- Alfred North Whitehead


Verbosely yours,

Lightning Empiricist