Parade Essay on Obama and McCain’s view on Patriotism

Cross posted at the Daily Kos:

This week’s Parade Magazine has essays from Barack Obama and John McCain on patriotism.

One can read the essays and then go online and vote in the poll which asks: which essay is more in line with your views?

Here is where you can find the essays.

From Obama’s essay:

As with most Americans, patriotism starts for me as a gut instinct, a loyalty and love for my country that’s rooted in my earliest memories. It’s not just the recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Thanksgiving pageants at school, or the fireworks on the Fourth of July, but how the American ideal wove its way throughout the lessons my family taught me. [...]

But each generation must understand that the blessings of freedom require our constant vigilance, and that true patriotism also means a willingness to sacrifice for our common good. For those who have fought on the battlefield under the Stars and Stripes—for the young veterans I meet at Walter Reed Army Medical Center or those like John McCain who endured physical torment while serving our nation—no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary. Those who have signed up to fight for our country in distant lands inspire me, just as I am inspired by those fighting for a better America here at home by teaching in underserved schools, caring for the sick in understaffed hospitals, or promoting more sustainable energy policies in their communities.

In the end, it may be this quality that best describes patriotism in my mind—not just a love of America in the abstract, but a very particular love for, and faith in, one another as Americans. The greatness of our country—its victories in war, its enormous wealth, its scientific and cultural achievements—have resulted from the toil, drive, struggle, restlessness, humor, and quiet heroism of the American people. That is the liberty we defend—the liberty of each of us to follow our dreams. That is the equality we seek—not an equality of results but the chance of every single one of us to make it if we try. That is the community we strive to build—one in which we recognize we share common hopes and dreams, one in which we continue to insist that there is nothing we cannot do when we put our minds to it, and one in which we see ourselves as part of a larger story, our own fates wrapped up in the fates of all who share allegiance to America’s singular creed.

You can read McCain’s essay here.

Here is a bit of it:

Today, politics is derided for its self-interest, combativeness, duplicity, and triviality. But such failings are not unique to our age. Both Adams and Jefferson lamented them in their own time. But that’s the great beauty of our form of government, which they helped to create; it accounts for the vices of human nature as much as it hopes for our virtues. This blessed country remains a place of limitless horizons, a country where ideals, where a love of liberty and self-reliance still check the excesses of both government and man.

In return, the gift we can give back to our country is a patriotism that requires us to be good citizens in public office or in the community spaces where government is absent. We should, by all means, argue with each other, as did Adams and Jefferson, about the policies of government and the history we hope to make tomorrow. But it should be an argument among friends, who agree more than they disagree, each of us united in a cause larger than our individual interests, honestly debating the best means to serve that cause, and intent on finding some common ground upon which to overcome together the many challenges before us. To love one’s country is to love one’s countrymen. And if we are to replicate the spirit of our founding age, if we are to be genuine patriots, we must remember also that we are patriots because we love the countrymen we will never know, who will be born after we are gone.

One can vote by using the polldaddy button on the upper right hand corner of either essay.

I’ve included a poll there and will report when more people have taken it (only 27 so far).

But the early numbers: 5 have it tied, 1 gave McCain the edge, and 21 give the edge to Obama.

Sunday July 7 2008

Workout notes 8 miles in West Peoria (1:54, 57 each way) in perfect conditions. My body feels tired and weak; too much driving this week, I think.

Then I went to Forest Park Nature Center with my family and did the outer loop in 56:54 and an extra .75 to give myself just over 4 miles of trail. I saw two families of wild turkeys and a couple of deer along the way.

This walk wasn’t that bad; it is almost as if the road walking loosened me up or something.

My guess is that my attempting to add some running is taking a toll; I have to be patient. But I realize now that the reason I haven’t done well in recent ultras is that I am not in great shape; I am 10 pounds too heavy and I haven’t done enough higher intensity stuff.

Religion: though I identify myself as an atheist or an agnostic (atheist with respect to personal deities; agnostic with respect to a “spirit of the universe”) I am still interested in the history of religion, history of the Bible, etc.

So I found this article to be very interesting:

JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said.

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tablet’s contribution is fully assessed. It has been around 60 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, and they continue to generate enormous controversy regarding their authors and meaning.

The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank, contain some of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings from before the first century A.D. In addition to quoting from key books of the Bible, the scrolls describe a variety of practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about the era are still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises is whether the authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect or in fact mainstream. A conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be discussed.

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

“I couldn’t make much out of it when I got it,” said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. “I didn’t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. ‘You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,’ she told me.”

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

Hat tip to Friendly Atheist.

The interesting thing here is this:

1. The “rise again after 3 days” would NOT be unique to Christianity and
2. The “Resurrection” would be more about redeeming Israel than “washing away the sins of humanity”.

No, this type of find won’t shake the faith of fundies, but it might help mainstream scholars better understand the historical context to the events described in the New Testament.