Overheated Fundamentalist Rhetoric



Have you ever seen videotape footage of when Pentecostal churchgoers dance with venomous snakes? It calls to mind the meaning of "Lunacy," which suggests that the victim is a servant of the voices of the moon. Or, worse, have you ever observed the religiously over-emotional victim -- because that's how The Corsair views them -- when they "speaketh in tongues" (Averted Gaze)? Cannot we find a credible linguist to for-once-and-for-all prove that the gibberish that they speak(eth) is not "The Ancient Language Jesus spoke." It can only be properly construed as mush-mouth.



What is it with supposedly religious preachers that veers almost violently into the boiling whirlpool of overheated rhetoric? Isn't the religious realm -- the sphere of the sacred -- supposed to elevate one's consciousness into the ethers, beyond the mundane, and not descending downward into the lambent flames of fiery lust? Or, worse, they guide one into a literal and not symbolic understanding of the meaning of sacred texts. Are they -- those religious fundamentalists -- wholly incapable of understanding the spiritual irony of parables (The Corsair sips a chilled Chateaux D'Yquem)? Religious texts -- composed in the realm of the sacred -- cannot by their very nature yield their secrets except through higher irony. But try telling that to a nimrod like Pat Robertson (Yale Law '55).



There is nothing about the poisonous diatribes of Farrakhan, or of the Fundamentalist Imams, or of Christian Evangelical hucksters that elevates the spirit of the listener. Rather, the experience of the rhetoric of the fundamentalist mind incites the red-ripe passions, overheating the listener even as the speaker emits a hot message festooned, unintentionally, with a frothy and rich saliva (Exaggerated cough suggesting feinged detachment). It is, to be sure, an entirely messy affair; such are emotions. Religion ought to control emotions, not be held captive to their riots.

And we criticize more than just the Reverent Wright, whom, we cannot fail to note, the right-wing radio rabble-rousers play incessantly, pandering to their second generation of white-flight listeners. But we also criticize, in a cool and measured tone, the preachers of the Evangelical Right as well as their "intellectual cousins," the Islamic fundamentalist clerics preaching the destruction of Israel as well as the destruction of civilian targets en route to acts of terrorism.

How positively Godly, no?