Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason

http://www.truthout.org/082209A

Wednesday 19 August 2009

by: Johann Hari | Visit article original @ The Independent UK

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

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.

I especially like this part:

"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."

k&r

it's a faith, however--fundamentalism
when fundies are making arguments, it's not that they only say "I feel like this" or that "the Bible says so" or "I unquestioningly obey my pastor."
1) they make crap arguments from the Bible, mostly because they take things literally; they're also selective, because they never seemed to have ACTUALLY READ THE BOOK: this is why they endorse creationism but not geocentricism, and why American creationism was basically dead letter in 1859-1910. This leads us to...
2) they only read other fundies. Mainstream theologians (who have to go to seminary instead of just a mail degree or Oral Roberts's God-warrior factory) are generally widely-read; they can be conservative, but not screaming Palin followers (heck, even Papa Ratzi recently denounced capitalism--and he's the one who tried to scatter Liberation Theology to the winds in the 80s). However, fundie literature tends to recycle things over and over: Jack Chick only cites Ken Ham, Charles Chiniquy, Avro Manhattan, Jeff Godwin, Alberto Rivera, Bill Schnoebelen, Leo Taxil, Alexander Hislop. These are all near-total nobodies outside of fundagelical circles, and few of them are from the 20th century.
all this contributes to a severely pathological style among fundies; it's not that they mistrust eggheads or don't believe everything Big Science tells them, but that they don't even know what those intelligentsia and scientists are saying: they honestly believe that stem cells are harvested from toddlers executed a la The Giver, that the Russians/Iraqis/Malagasy have their missiles pointed at their backyards, that God invented capitalism and spoke English, and that the Canadian life expectancy is in the forties. And since they're slaves to fashion, they'll immediately drop an issue once it's no longer hot-button (e.g., Satanic Ritual Abuse), and pick up the next one with the same hysterical fervor. It's not so much the presence of emotions (how peaceful were the bloodless Victorians and 50s Organization Men?) or faith as their total imbalance.