I think drag queens sometimes (often? I don’t know enough about that sub-culture to say for sure) deliberately exaggerate in an extreme way. I doubt they would describe it as distasteful and kitschy. But it is certainly sometimes deliberately over-the-top, they aren’t just trying to pass.
As to the flamboyant gay, that has been a stereotype for over a century and I don’t know where it came from, but I’m quite certain that some of the more extreme cases are being deliberately affected.
I think the original question is miswritten.
The USA was not then and is not now (continuous aspect) constituted as a “Secular Republic”.
The First Amendment declared independence from the Church of England and the Vatican in Rome because those are foreign powers. Furthermore it had purpose of prohibiting any specific sect of religion from gaining tyrannical control over the Federal Government’s Legislative, Judicial, and Executive powers. That is the meaning of “separation of church and state” but it is not synonymous with Secular Republic
Will the USA: interrogative and optative future, the subject clause
constituted as a secular republic: appositive clause, and adverbial clause
There is the nuance and respective relationship of The Grammar of Dionysios Thrax between the Aoristic and Future.
constituted: aoristic, past simple tense
will: future tense substantive verb (to be)
What is the Aspect then? Complete or Incomplete, Finished or Continuous? The Aorist and Future cannot disagree on the Aspect and the past as being non-secular is already known to be a continuous aspect.
If written as a Conditional and Subjunctive the sentence should contain the word “if”. The sentence is however disguising itself as a Indicative both declarative and interrogative.
If the USA was constituted as a secular republic the constitution would contain writs that prohibited and disqualified members of any Church from running for political office based solely on their religious affiliation. No such writ exists that I remember, and the founding legal documents of the USA do not contain within itself the word secular. Those are my two reasons why the USA was not constituted as a secular republic and if, in the future it was a secular republic that would be a unconstitutional amendment.
@ Stephen in post 7 you said this:
The God of Evolution, a god who would use evolution as his method of creation, is not the loving Abba of the gospels but an Unspeakable Monster.
I haven’t read Origin of Species, and I thought I kinda understood evolution, but there must be a gap in my understanding, because I don’t quite follow how you arrived at your statement.
Would you fill in the blanks for me? How does evolutionary theism make God an unspeakable monster?
The USA was not then and is not now (continuous aspect) constituted as a “Secular Republic”.
No, Colin, you’re wrong. The First Amendment encapsulates just this idea. It combines religious toleration with the idea that the state cannot privilege one form of religion over another. Colin your problem is that you seem to equate the idea of secularity with anti-religion. Secularity means “non-religious”, not “anti-religious”.
The First Amendment recognizes the concept of a neutral field of action in which all actors may function without being able to use the powers of the state to dominate each other. The Founders had the example of the religious wars, the Hundred Years War and the even more bloody Thirty Years War, to guide them.
Of course the fundamentalist mind cannot fathom this neutral field. One is either pro-religion or anti-religion. One either actively supports religion or actively opposes it. The concept of separation of church and state is simply beyond their comprehension.
This is why the Founders were, and still are, Radicals. (And they weren’t shy about discussing their intentions.)
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Micah wrote
@ Stephen in post 7 you said this:
The God of Evolution, a god who would use evolution as his method of creation, is not the loving Abba of the gospels but an Unspeakable Monster.
I haven’t read Origin of Species, and I thought I kinda understood evolution, but there must be a gap in my understanding, because I don’t quite follow how you arrived at your statement.
Would you fill in the blanks for me? How does evolutionary theism make God an unspeakable monster?
Micah, any form of creationism, whether of the Young Earth variety or versions that see Evolution as God’s process assume intentionality. Purpose. God deliberately used the process of Evolution to create.
But look at the physical processes of Evolution. You’ve probably heard these stats. Fully 99.9% of all species that have ever been are extinct. Over the course of the development of life on earth there have been five mass extinctions. (Some think we are in the midst of another.)
Sixty six million years ago an object, now known as The Chicxulub impactor, probably an asteroid, hit earth and famously wiped out most of the dinosaurs. It also cleared an ecological field that allowed our ancestors, a small rodent that lived in the roots of trees, to flourish and ultimately result in…us.
We know that as recently as three hundred thousand years ago there were nine human species on the earth: the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo erectus, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo naledi, Homo luzonensis, Homo floresiensis and…us. At the rate we discover new species it’s practically certain that there are more. By their remains we know some of these other humans had culture and art. “Souls”, if you will.
By ten thousand years ago, they were all gone but us.
My point is simply that while the universe is full of abundant order and beauty, it came at a considerable cost. Consider the extravagant wastefulness of nature, in both space and resources. Death comes, not as the result of a primordial disaster in a mythic garden, but as an essential part of the evolutionary process. A feature not a bug.
In all that suffering and death where is the loving god who looks down on his creatures with mercy? God did all this on purpose? Perhaps, but not a god who loves.
@Stephen: Thank you for breaking this down. I’m going to save this explanation for future reference in my personal studies. Admittedly my knowledge about the arguments for and against creationism and evolution are still profoundly superficial. I have no response for you at this point except for gratitude that you’ve allowed me to glean from you what you’ve learned.
Fully 99.9% of all species that have ever been are extinct. Over the course of the development of life on earth there have been five mass extinctions. . . . My point is simply that while the universe is full of abundant order and beauty, it came at a considerable cost. Consider the extravagant wastefulness of nature, in both space and resources. Death comes, not as the result of a primordial disaster in a mythic garden, but as an essential part of the evolutionary process. A feature not a bug.
It seems to me the objection is not the number of extinctions, but simply the fact of death. Once you reconcile yourself to the fact that all living things die, extinctions aren’t that problematic: everything dies so it doesn’t make much matter when the individuals die.
I think the fact of death is the real root of the objection. You might also consider the amount of “designed” suffering; Darwin captured the sentiment: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”
Micah, science presents us with an appalling vision of reality. (We love the toys it provides us with of course but shrink back from its implications.) Evolutionary theism in my opinion is an attempt to graft the head of a rhinoceros onto the body of a chicken. I do hasten to note that the reality of evolution does not eliminate all concepts of god. I am focused on Christianity here.
It seems to me the objection is not the number of extinctions, but simply the fact of death. Once you reconcile yourself to the fact that all living things die, extinctions aren’t that problematic: everything dies so it doesn’t make much matter when the individuals die.
I think the fact of death is the real root of the objection.
The presence and number of mass extinctions testifies to the obviously non-designed aspect of “creation”. (Unless the designer is a psychopath.) Chicxulub testifies to the randomness of our hegemony over this planet. (We owe our success not to a special creation but to the celestial version of a traffic accident.)
It is possible to conceive of death as being part of a benevolent, divinely ordered universe. At the end of a life one dies the way one goes to sleep at night after an active day. The Kingdom of God described in the Hebrew bible seems to consist of the normal round of living and dying. It’s just that one lives a long fulfilled fruitful life and at the end of one’s days lies down to an honored rest.
Because death is inherent in the process of evolution, the problem for Christianity is that Paul’s entire argument in Romans concerning the first and second Adam simply collapses. There was no first Adam and no need for a second.
The presence and number of mass extinctions testifies to the obviously non-designed aspect of “creation”. (Unless the designer is a psychopath.) Chicxulub testifies to the randomness of our hegemony over this planet. (We owe our success not to a special creation but to the celestial version of a traffic accident.)
I think I see. So the objection is that the path of evolutionary progress is too circuitous to have been the result of planning?
I agree that yours is the most obvious conclusion, but I think the theistic evolutionist can answer without trying too hard.
All those evolutionary dead-ends may not have been useless. Rather they created the evolutionary pressure on our most distant ancestors that prepared them to sire, in due time, us hegemons.
Could we have human intelligence without having mammals? And could we have had mammals and their specific adaptations if some tiny lizard-mouse had not been forced to evolve to survive among the dinosaurs? And would that first mammal ever have had the chance to evolve into to primates if the dinosaurs hadn’t been extinguished? So he could argue that our presence both demanded that the dinosaurs ruled the earth, and that they were eventually wiped out.
Well then perhaps the question comes down to how much choice did God have in the first place? Seems to me the evolutionary theist can’t have it both ways. If God could have created a universe and life without all this appalling slaughter and suffering then why didn’t he? If he couldn’t do otherwise then what becomes of all those divine attributes traditionally ascribed to God? The most hopeless position is to say that evolution is just the way God chose to create without examining the implications of what that means.
I also wonder why the will of God so often looks just like random physical processes? Did God really have to divert an asteroid to hit earth at the “right” moment? When we turn on a light switch in our houses we can imagine a little man, fists stuffed full of electrons, rushing through the wires, but this could certainly be filed in the folder with all the other unnecessary hypotheses. Science does not disprove God, it does something even more devastating to him. It makes him unnecessary.
If God could have created a universe and life without all this appalling slaughter and suffering then why didn’t he?
Right, so there you are back to the problem of death and suffering. As to why, well, the theist will just ask who we are to question God. Who can even begin to look over his shoulder to second guess his choices? After all, does the death and suffering of trilobites actually matter in the grand scheme of things?
I also wonder why the will of God so often looks just like random physical processes?
This did have some purchase with me. Why is the bible full of extraordinary and obvious divine interventions in human affair (look at the Exodus!), but in recent history, whatever miracles there are are almost impossible to distinguish from fortuitous natural events? Why is it that God is always just out of sight?
Stephen: “Science does not disprove God, it does something even more devastating to him. It makes him unnecessary.”
There are some very big, looming questions science hasn’t answered. Namely, the origin of life, and consciousness (which doesn’t seem necessary for survival).
Also I think some aspects of biological ethics makes sense because taking care of one another is a path to the greater good. But, when we find examples (quite infrequent for certain) of love for one’s enemy, I think we find a departure from nature. That seems like something that transcends physical necessity into spiritual territory.
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