After five years of weblogging, you’d think I’d know better than to bring up religion. Oh well. Robert Scoble said something that resonated with this godless bastard:
“But, then, you’ve gotta be arrogant to stand up to the people who see religion as a team sport and that if their religious symbol isn’t in the classroom that then they are losing.”
That’s over-simplifying. And if you’re religious, I hope that your love for your conception of the divine is hopefully more nuanced than your love for the Packers or your hatred of the Yankees (I hope we can all agree here that the Yankees are bad.)
But Robert’s point does do a good job of describing some modern religious phenomena: Christian rock, Christian genre fiction, and the combination of weight loss and Bible study. I’d call it an impulse to brand. Slap a cross on it and it’s better. Hey, I’ve seen adherents of another religion do that, slap Open Source, Microsoft Certified, or a Happy Mac logo on something and it’s goodness and light.
I think it’s an American thing. We were raised liking bunting and banners as a way to express our identity, so our religious expression follows suit. Even our irreligious expression has been branded. C.f. the Darwin Fish.
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