In this article (click on this link, Ann Applebaum, “Why I Can’t Vote For John McCain”), Ann Applebaum, a formidable intellectual and cultural warrior in Russia (see her book, Gulag: A History), lauds McCain, but criticizes Palin and the anti-Intellectualism that pervades, in this case, the GOP: strangely, it comes from the Evangelical Wing, what Mencken called the Bible Belt (originally it was a perjorative), from the folks who often say, “The only book worth reading is the Bible” without, mind you, ever even reading it[!]; the folks who believe that Agnosticism & Atheism = Nihilism, not because they hang out with Agnostics or Atheists, but rather, they “know” this because their pastors and preists tell them. The folks who say they take the Bible literally, but refuse to even sip red wine (ask yourself, “Did Jesus drink wine?”).

I’m not saying Believer = Intellectual Laziness. What I am saying is that if I’m going to have a conversation with someone who is willing to base their lives around, say, the Bible, (or however they interpret it today) then shouldn’t they have command of it (perhaps, even, in a varity of translations), and command of every great treatise or essay written about it, from St. Augustine up through Aquinas up through Luther’s “Table Talks” and even the crazed John Calvin and, in the New World, command of the idealistic-religious John Winthrop? Is that too much to ask from Believers? Am I out of line, here?

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