Religion, politics and my ticket to Hell

I try not to be vulgar on this thing, on the off chance that someone reading it thinks me a witless wonder. (They can easily make that conclusion without four-letter words.) So, I will mention that later in this post I will be using some profanity, but all in the course of making a point. And, as Billie Connelly said, if you don’t like, you can fuck off.

There is a growing attitude in the press, on the blogs, in the air that this country is suddenly some kind of theocracy. I read this post by David Galbraith and almost lost it. In making his point, he not only invokes Godwin’s law, he sounds like a fool. But the issue really is that he’s only a small voice in a larger choir of idiots who are so hung up on the President’s personnel politics, that they are falling for the whole sinker as well as the hook.

Here’s a memo to all the people who are obsessive about the coming Theocracy: there isn’t one. There never will be one. You want to know why? Because of people like me and the thousands of kids who grew up just like me, oppressed, suppressed and pissed. I grew up in the heart of religious hypocrisy, West Michigan. You couldn’t mow your lawn on Sunday until I was in high school for Chrissake. When Meijer’s opened on Sundays, people boycotted the place. My parents had to leave a church because they sent me to public school. Yeah, I know what it’s like.

And all the lather-mouthed, finger-quivering, know-more-than-yous have it all wrong. The community I grew up in doesn’t want a theocracy. In fact they’d storm Congress if they tried to install one, not out of principal, but for the simple fact that if any religion got chosen, it would be the wrong religion.

The President and his cronies have you in a strangle hold. You’re so damn preoccupied with fighting back some figment of your own imagination, their getting away with far worse. They don’t want all the stuff they keep throwing out there, they want you to self-destruct. They want you to tear yourselves apart by thrashing around in disgust. They want you to compare the current administration to the Third Reich because the imagery of that analogy is so powerful, you can’t see that it’s FUCKING WRONG. If you seriously consider for a single brief moment that this administration in this country is even remotely capable (logistically or otherwise) of implementing a holocaust-style regime… wow, that’s some fabulously fucked up thinking.

Here’s my favorite quote from David Galbraith: (aside: I will stop quoting David as I don’t mean to pick on him, he just parrots so much of this rhetoric, and he’s high on alphabetical list of feeds.)

To deny the fact of evolution and deprive people an education because of a particular belief not shared by everybody, is equivalent to the shameful historical revisionism by anti-Semites who wish to rewrite history because of their own ideological agenda.

That’s right, kiddies. Holding different beliefs about the origin of life is equivalent to murdering over 6 million people. I’ll simplify that. Belief = murder.

One last thing before I hit Mark All Read and remind myself that I keep that feed to keep my perspective. For all the browbeating about how much the Religious Right (whatever that means) forces on people, I have never in my life had so many cultural mores shoved at me than when I moved to a “progressive” town. Makes me pine for the idiocy of the religious in this state. At least they go away when you tell them to fuck off.


Comments

4 responses to “Religion, politics and my ticket to Hell”

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    wow, thank you so much. I'm so sick of hearing about how the U.S. is becoming a theocracy. You'd think that all U.S. laws were based on Jeffersonian deism and no one has ever tried to legislate religion at every point in our history except now.

  2. Amen! (sorry, it was there.) This crap about the Founding Fathers and their supposed religiousity is getting old, even for a country as young as ours. But, I guess we are the eventual product of a culture that, for one reason or another, thought that Europe in the 16th and 17th century was too progressive. Leaving the cool kids back in Europe didn't go a lot for cultural development in the colonies.It always reminds me of Douglas Adams and the bit about the culture that convinced 1/3 of their population, the useless third (telephone sanitizers, marketing specialists, etc..), to flee the planet because it was doomed by a cosmic goat. I really don't have a point to tie it all together, but it seems connected.Ah well, we'll get to hear this all again in our senior years when the boy they send around to unhook us is raving about the newest push to ban some form of transhumanism. “God hates Augments!”

  3. Wow, that's pretty dishonest, or simply a gross mis-reading of the quote.”That's right, kiddies. Holding different beliefs about the origin of life is equivalent to murdering over 6 million people. I'll simplify that. Belief = murder.”That's not what he said at all. He simply equates people trying to prevent education about evolution due to religious motivation to revisionist historians trying to cover up the holocaust. While it's not the best of arguments, it's hardly a Belief = Murder equation.It's pretty slimy to take “individuals trying to suppress education about evolution” and turn them into only “people holding different beliefs about the origin of life” and turning “revisionist historians denying the holocaust” into the Nazi's themselves.While I appreciate a cooler head prevailing in a time filled with chicken littles, this is hardly the way to talk down the masses.

  4. It's hardly dishonest, but I will yield to it being sensational. But just as my equation of belief=murder isn't sound, neither is the assertion that just because some kid hears that somewhere, someone believes that an invisible man created everything over a week, that kid is not being “deprived” of their education. This argument on one side that any education point that remotely involves a topic that could be a relatable to believers is suddenly a systemic deprivation of all children's education is ludicrous. We force-feed kids “diversity”, but then turn around and limit what kinds of diversity they allowed to learn about.Ignoring a large portion of the populace-or, as joe put it, talking down to the masses-is exactly what is being done, just not by me.

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