I’m catching up on my blog reading, and if you don’t read Roy Edroso’s weekly round-up of the idiocy of the Right Wing blogosphere, you are very much missing out. This week, he chose to dedicate his piece to the reactions of RightBloggers to the death of Steve Jobs. Jobs, of course, was a famously liberal non-Christian who proved the old adage, “Everything conservatives believe about what it really means to be an American is ridiculously dumb.” If you read Roy’s round-up, you will see that, in their typically incoherent, weird way, wingnut bloggers immediately co-opted Jobs as one of their own, because, you know, Freedom, Capitalism, Blah Blah Blah. In that piece, he found Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who has a history of saying incredibly stupid things, staying true to form:
He exited the scene with grace, ensuring that the company he founded would endure when he was off the scene. There is much to learn from his life and his legacy.
At the same time, Christians cannot leave the matter where the secular world will settle on Steve Jobs’ legacy. The secular conversation will evade questions of eternal significance, but Christians cannot. As is the case with so many kings, rulers, inventors, leaders and shapers of history, Christians can learn from Steve Jobs and even admire many of his gifts and contributions. Yet, we must also observe what is missing here.
[…]
But unerring taste, aesthetic achievement, and technological genius will not save the world. Christians know what the world does not — that the mother tending her child, the farmer planting his crops, the father protecting his family, the couple faithfully living out their marital vows, the factory worker laboring to support his family and the preacher preparing to preach the Word of God are all doing far more important work.
We have to measure life by its eternal impact…
Oh dear god that is weird. What is it in the Fundamentalist mindset that makes them, even upon the death of a great man, feel the need to prove to themselves psychologically that, even when they witness the life and death of a man who contributed more to this world than the entire Fundamentalist diaspora has over the past several hundred years, they are still better in some way? I understand that when people live lives that are overrun by dogma and legalism, that a certain superiority complex takes hold. What I don’t understand is how they are able to say things like Mohler said above with a straight face. Jobs was, by all accounts, not only a brilliant businessman and innovator, but an all around great guy. Though his life ended too soon, he lived a great life. Why can Fundamentalists like Mohler not just leave it at that? Why must they make themselves feel better by subtly insinuating [not so subtly to the fellow Fundamentalists they’re dogwhistling] that “weyullllll, that’s real nice and all, but he’s a-burnin’ in heyullll raht now, y’all”?
They are just so bizarre.
