How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-republicans-religion-and-the-triumph-of-unreason-1773994.html


Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason


Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

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How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

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This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.
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the religiously insane are dangerous to us all

They are intellectually lazy and do not read. Therefore they are easily influenced by other talking heads, whether it's a preacher, a politician or MSM. It's much easier to be told what to think than think for yourself.

I agree with the writer here-- religion teaches people that belief without evidence, or even in the face of contradictory evidence-- is a virtue. That is a fundamentally irrational way of thinking, and it's bound to affect a person's thought processes on subjects other than religion.

Most people are born curious. Their curiosity has to be conditioned out of them. Religion and Republicanism are the tools that do that.

Ya see, in my reality, a progressive minded person got elected who I sincerely believed was going to at least try to get us public healthcare, an end to wars based on lies, a revised or revoked nafta, an end to the govt spying on us, close guantanamo, and on and on. I was so excited. Unfortunately I was living in fantasy land. What I was really voting for a was yet another DLC corporatist turd and his cronies to give away the treasury to crooked banks and insurance companies while thumbing their noses at us.

"However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America."

Yeah and the democratic party is now filled with cultists who happily explain every one of Obama's betrayals of us on the left as "part of the chess game" that of course we are all to slow to understand. Before I go yelling at my misguided neocon neighbors for being unrealistic, I need to yell at myself for believing. CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN Remember?

When the final bill comes out and we realize we now are forced by law to give our money to the same crooked ins cos and moneyed interests we've already given trillions in govt money to, who will look dumber, the people who were against it all along or those of us who caught on late?