Guy Fawkes Day is Here Again
Remember, remember the fifth of November. Today is of course the anniversary of the day when the Catholic plot to blow up the Protestant controlled Parliament went astray.
This year, I think we need to take this holiday a little more seriously than we normally would. First, it is of course a reminder that Christians can’t even play nice with other Christians, so it really is silly to expect them to play nice with atheists. Don’t believe me, check out this article. This day highlights that fact that religion is dangerous and that at the end of the day religion is just as much about bronze-aged tribalism as it is about ridiculous beliefs.
Second, just as fundamentalist religious loons like Glenn Beck have tried to use the ideas of Thomas Paine to fire up his base against the Obama Administration; we should also expect him and others to attempt to use Guy Fawkes for the same purpose.
Even though Beck is a Mormon and not a Catholic, I still think that he will attempt to Guy Fawkes Day since he has a habit of using things he knows little about. It has annoyed me that Beck had stolen the title of a pamphlet of one of my favorite authors and used it for his craziness. I remember not long ago I was in a secondhand bookstore and someone asked the guy at the counter if they had Glenn Beck’s Common Sense. I told the guy he was better off reading the original Common Sense by Paine and also maybe reading Paine’s other works like The Age of Reason.
Would it really surprise people if Beck told his paranoid band of teabaggers about the 1605 gunpowder plot? I can even imagine him telling his supporters that he doesn’t think they should plot such a thing… but… if they did, he would consider them patriots.
Filed under: Catholics, Current Events, Obama, Politics, Religion
