Time To Measure the Drapes

When President Bush said before the midterm elections that the Democrats shouldn’t “measure the drapes” he wasn’t telling us that he believes in democracy and that the American people and not the Democrats or the Republicans have the ultimate say. No, he was saying that God had spoken to him and that the Democrats were going to lose again. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of our President – his self-righteous certainty. It was good to see him humbled today. An excellent explanation of the dangers of unquestioning religious faith and the inability to entertain doubt and ambiguity appears in Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Armstrong, a Roman Catholic nun, describes her struggle to deal with the doubts that led her to leave the convent and ultimately the Church itself. Everyone, people of faith and atheists alike, can profit from this book.