Two nice, small-budget flicks from last night: Tape & Sidewalks of New York. Also recently watched Easy Rider (I’d never seen it).
Debate (not that it really rises to that level) has been pretty rampant in my home town (as in the country at large) over the whole pledge of allegience church/state issue. I’d like to remind (if they ever knew it) the debaters (if they merit that title) that the ‘founding fathers’ were deists, not southern baptists. As such they, in general, didn’t believe in miracles or divine intervention of any sort (Jefferson didn’t belive in the divinity of Jesus, though he admired Jesus greatly. And he didn’t believe in prayer, either. He considered it akin to begging). So, while it is true that they were all christians, it is also true that they were christians of a sort that rarely exists today and has nothing in common with the fundamentalist sects who continually try to co-opt them as champions of a theistic state. They thought combining religion with government was a bad idea (and that they occasionally invoke the creator only shows that they believed in the existence of one, not that they wanted to create a christian taliban).