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How better to spend the Fourth of July than prooftexting the United States Constitution? Bob Ellis took some time away from fireworks to post the rhetorical hatchet work of Rapid City pastor Rev. H. Wayne Williams. The good pastor's manipulations and contortions might evoke hilarity, if it weren't for the horror of people actually thinking such miscontextualization constitutes solid political science.
Take it from these sources: prooftexting (or -- word of the day! -- eisegesis) is the wrong way to read the Constitution, the Bible, or any other important or (dare I say it?) sacred document. (Read also here, here [hee hee], here, and here ["For instance, the idea of the United States as a 'Christian Nation' is the creation of egos who gloat over being powerful. It has no basis in history or fact, but more important, it has no basis in the Bible. Yet some leading politicians and pastors interpret the Bible through this notion."])
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1 day ago
A great post, one that saves blogs as a genre from ignorant ignominy.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone really wants to find evidence of the failures in American education, one need only go to these "prooftexting" (if only it were as valid a process as the prooftesting of Scotch and other spirits) posts to see ignorance and ratioincompetence reigning supreme.
It is difficult to understand how anyone who has actually read "1984" does not see prooftexting as the process of purging the language of its historical meanings and creating the Newspeak that the protagonist of Orwell's novel was assigned to do. As prooftexting seems to be the official, operant language theory of a certain political spectrum, it is no wonder that public education and secular matters that deal with intellectual competence and integrity have such an obsessive hold on that segment of the regressive public.
Apparently, Mr. Ellis has never heard of Roger Williams and the precedents he established that found their way into the Constitution.
Thanks for a post that indicates not all is lost to the American Shiara (not the perfume of that name).