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Entry: Of Prophets, Priests, and Pansies Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/of_prophets_priests_and_pansies#4002 Post contents: Mr Richert, you took the words out of my mouth. This confusion of "respect for all religion" with "conservatism" is why, on another thread, I posted the following spoof-lyrics of the old Fundamentalist song, "Gimme That Old Time Religion": "Gimme that old Zarathustra They don't make gods like they used to! I'm a Zarathustra booster! He's good enough for me! Gimme that old...time...religion!" As some of us have been discussing on a few threads here, "old time religion" can be a bit TOO old, like Aztec ritual human sacrifice. (Although, personally I wouldn't refrain from a night contemplating Aphrodite, cf Taki's article "A Greek in the Temple of Venus") And as for this bit: "...he’s quite rightly satirizing a particular type of religious dabbler that we see all too often in America--someone who adopts the foreign just because it is foreign. Such behavior isn’t pious; it’s superficial, silly, and destructive..." ...well I've known more than a few exemplars of that phenomenon. One, who will of course remain unnamed, is a middle class White Englishwoman who was raised mainstream Protestant, became a Communist in the 1970s, then became a Christian again, and then converted to Islam. Throughout that decades-long solipsistic pilgrimage of hers, during which she ingested more illegal hallucinatory drugs than George Bush, the only consistent belief of hers was that America is a destructive and uncivilised "young country" (spoken in those very middle-class English tones dripping with ignorant contempt, misinformed by 40 years of English-socialist-effete-intellectual anti-Americanism), although she did modify this stance a WEE bit after she discovered that she was the adopted child of an American soldier stationed in England during WW II - but then the only reason why that was acceptable to her was because her biological father was partly (marginally) of "Native American" descent. Consequently she became a passionate, romantic admirer of "Native American" culture, while she was simultaneously a Muslim, an almost 100 percent White English Muslim who identified more with American Red Indians than with white Anglo-Americans. Around ten years ago, while I was living in England, I told her an anecdote about how, at one provincial English pub, one local English Brownshirt thug heard my (relatively mild) American accent and then saluted me in a mocking way, saying, stupidly, "America!" while he sang some garbled phrases of the US national anthem in mocking tones. Now, at the time, I regarded that vulgar performance as an expression of English nationalism. But my (former) friend, the White-English-Muslim, corrected me, saying, "No, John, he was satirising FASCISM! American FASCISM! THAT is what he and other English people don't like about your country - it's your FASCISM we don't like!" Sound like you've fallen through the rabbit-hole? If so, then you understand. That English-nationalist thug didn't give a flying f--- about American "fascism"; he just saw a target of opportunity, an American face and voice, and he just wanted to take the piss. Yet my former friend, the White English Muslim, defended that vulgarian English thug. Now if you ask, why? What did she have in common with him? Nothing more than indulging in licentious hatred; nothing more or less. Licentious hatred is its own raison detre; it appears under many guises and so-called "ideologies", but it's all the same in the end. And many, or most, White Western "converts" to perceivedly "exotic" religions, are ultimately motivated not by faith or by ideology, but simply by their own vanity, for which simple licentious hatred is their only authentic purpose. Sent at: 2008 11 21