Apathy Sketchpad

An American politician on The Daily Show today (he was actually on another news show but I get all my American politics knowledge from Jon Stewart so I saw it on More 4) repeated an assertion I’ve heard thousands of times: that America was founded on Christian principles.

No, it wasn’t. It may shock you, if you are an American, to know that I understand your country’s declaration of independence and constitution better than you, but hey, I understand Catholicism better than most Catholics I’ve met and by definition I understand homeopathy better than homeopaths because if they understood it as well as me they’d not be homeopaths any more. America is, in theory at least, a secular state. It is. Get over it. Granted in practice it’s become probably the least secular state that doesn’t actually operate under Sharia law, but that’s the theory. It wasn’t founded on any religious principles, it was founded by a group of men of questionable faith according to wholly secular principles, and that’s exactly how things should be. But for some reason everyone in America seems to think it was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, which is just bullshit. I’ve even heard someone arguing, apparently in earnest, that the “freedom of religion” guaranteed to all American citizens was there to grant them the right to worship the Christian god in any way they please! There’s just no talking to some people.

It’s strange that I can sit here in a country with an Established church, where bishops are granted automatic place in the ultimate house of lawmaking, where animal cruelty is legal as long as it’s in the name of religion, where the state pays people to indoctrinate children and where secular education is illegal, and complain about the overblown religiosity of an entirely secular state, but that’s America for you. It’s strange in so many ways, of which this is just one. To be fair, it’s probably the cause of most of the others.

The other good thing on The Daily Show today was Jon Stewart interviewing Chris Matthews. Matthews had written a book about how you should treat your life as an election campaign, and Stewart described this as “a recipe for sadness”. Which is fair enough. Matthews just laughed, I think he thought Jon was just teasing him and only very slowly realised he was serious. Watch the video; it’s fantastic. It’s nice to see someone write a book, then go on TV to plug it, and have it so thoroughly ripped apart.

This is why I get my US politics from The Daily Show. It’s about the only glimmer of hope I can find in the whole damn country.