The Rolling Drone

Many years ago I would read an occasional issue of Rolling Stone magazine, back when it had more—just barely—to do with music than Hollywood starlets and leftist sputterings. The magazine is now celebrating forty years of existence, as Douglas Leblanc of GetReligion.org notes in this lengthy post, and several special issues include interviews that cover topics of interest: music, the Sixties, sex, drugs, and, yes, religion. It includes blatherings from folks such as Norman Mailer (he's still around?!), who offers a cool-headed assessment of Christians:

We are supposed to take care of the poor, if we are good Christians. But in face there is no such thing as a good Christian. A good Christian is one man and one woman in a thousand. The average Christian is a mixture, like the rest of us, with their good and their bad. And churchgoing Christians have been running America in my lifetime. And they saw communism as the spawn of the devil. They didn’t see it as a messed-up system filled with people just like themselves, half-good, half-bad.

. . . The story of the terrorists is that is that they are working against immense odds, relatively speaking. They don’t have large resources. What they have is the possibility to do some dirty things in some dirty places and kill off a few hundred or a few thousand people, and if they can do that, they can feel they are immensely successful, because given the multiplication of the result that cheap politicians like Bush go in for, it will work to a degree. . . .

So what is the story of Bush, then, if that is the story of the terrorists?

Bush is a terrorist.

Do you think he is the worst president of your lifetime?

He is a spiritual terrorist.

It is interesting that, in retrospect, he makes somebody like Nixon look pretty good.

The most intelligent comment (at least from those given by Leblanc) comes from novelist Tom Wolfe:

But as a nonbeliever, you still seem to be defending belief.

Anyone who thinks that religion is bad for society is out of his mind. We are now beginning to see what happens when you don’t have it. People get depressed when they don’t have something to believe.

I think the contemporary conception of the human mind has become more and more depressing. This is my problem with the atheists, people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. They’re saying that there is no ghost in the machine, that it’s all physical. And if it’s all physical, it’s going to obey certain laws. And the endpoint of the argument is that there is no free will, that you and I are machines that have had a certain genetic foundation, and as soon as we know enough about that, we’ll be able to predict what’ll happen when you meet me. We just need the information. That’s a very depressing thought.

Well worth reading, if only to enjoy the, um, intellectual fruits of the countercultural revolution.

Comments

[Ed Peters]

I've looked through about 3 issues of Rolling Stone in my life. Each time I wondered how people with such dumb ideas managed to learn how to read and write.