tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1/tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9084- Comments for God and Guns! The Sequel - Material Girls We're the Military and Airpower Guys of Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online + a stray we found wandering around looking lost. All original material JHD, BHD, JR, WT, and KA 2003-2007 Movable Type 4.12 tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9084 2008-04-21T16:05:15Z 2008-05-24T17:08:07Z God and Guns! The Sequel - Material Girls Snob Like Obama h/t Instapundit Kaus wonders if he too, as an unrequited Marxist, is also a snob about God and Guns. The answer is, "yes", an intellectual snob as I explained in the post below (if you didn't get that from all the meandering around the Road to Emmaus). Rational people can believe in God and have perfectly legitimate reasons and demands to "cling" to their guns. If it were true that people would forsake religion as the opiate of the masses, then Marx's theory would have come true a long time ago, in an industrialized nation where... Kat http://themiddleground.blogspot.com Snob Like Obama h/t Instapundit Kaus wonders if he too, as an unrequited Marxist, is also a snob about God and Guns. The answer is, "yes", an intellectual snob as I explained in the post below (if you didn't get that from all the meandering around the Road to Emmaus). Rational people can believe in God and have perfectly legitimate reasons and demands to "cling" to their guns. If it were true that people would forsake religion as the opiate of the masses, then Marx's theory would have come true a long time ago, in an industrialized nation where living is easy and I'm listening to an MP3 player the size of a thumb as I write this on a computer at the speed of light.

Some how religion, faith remains. Is it only in rural areas? The idea that faith enjoys a larger constituency in rural communities compared suburbs is a myth. The percentages of population might say its heavier per capita in rural areas, but it doesn't even take an official statistical analysis to verify that real growth in churches is in the suburbs. Think about it.

Where are all those "mega churches" located? Where is the major population growth of our nation? It's not just ultra-religious immigrants in urban areas that account for this growth. In wealthy suburbs the nation over, new churches are being built daily. We are talking about a society where a much larger population receives an education by high school in science, math and history that is greater than the education that many "elites" of Marx's time could hope to get from any public entity. We are daily compelled to tie imagination to rational creativity and discovery, to science.

So, why does a much wealthier, healthier and educated "proletariat" still cling to religion?

The reason is very simple: Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, materialism is the opiate. Once you have lived truly comfortably, without having to spare yourself any comforts or small luxuries, even if you can't live exactly like the mega-rich tossing money away like so much flotsam, you soon discover something: all those comforts and luxuries mean nothing. They are empty so long as everything else in your life is empty, too.

No love, no family, no friends, no faith - no joy.

Bitter, in fact.

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