Watching Ahmadinajad's recent speech at Columbia, this peculiar line appeared to me, and I thought instantly that it would make a good front page article for The Onion. This, because, what struck me most about the speech was just how congenial its general message was to the evangelical right in America, stressing the priority of spirituality--or spiritual science--over material science, the various evils inherent in allowing secular powers to pervert the lessons of science, and, of course, the implicit message that only a continual return to the teachings of the prophets, which function precisely to enlighten us to the prejudices and bigotry of our age (or any other) might allow us to escape the disastrous fate of secularization.
So I think I might have, accidentally, stumbled onto a modest proposal for all of those right-wing evangelicals in the U.S. who so bemoan the forces of secularization: Go to Iran! They'll love you there. They agree with virtually every one of your major policy initiatives, from the teaching of religious texts, to the squashing of anti-religious speech. And as an added bonus, they don't even have any homosexuals! Bon Chance!
Incidentally, in all seriousness, those interested in a more informed view of the much-hyped Ahmadinejad would do well to read this.
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