Cruz Clearly The Theocratic Jesus Candidate. The Anointed One Of The Religious Extremists.

[TheMastersNemesis]

As far as the religious right is concerned THEY own the country and the rest of us need to get used to it. Theocracy is God's will. Secularists need to get out of the way. I keep hearing and feeling that meme from them. And the MSM is silent about the danger they are.

We underestimate them at our peril and the peril of our democracy. And billionaires are willing to support them an the GOP because it means absolute power for that class. Apathy and bigotry plays right into their hands.

[2naSalit]

1. That's where they're at. nt

[saltpoint]

2. I think they are dangerous because

they exemplify the adage that it is a dangerous person who does not know what he or she does not know.

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“Religion is, at its heart, a way of denying the authority of the rest of the world.”

--Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief

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You are right about Cruz. He is a zealot, a theocrat, a Dark Ages sensibility with an Ivy League education. He's unafraid of alienating virtually all members of the Senate but savvy enough to organize fundie churchfolk. He's a close second to Trump in Iowa, or first outright, depending on the poll.

The fundies oppose government because government represents a wide consensus that must be reached and implemented. Their fundie God doesn't need all those extra steps. He can snap his finger and create whole worlds in one day.

And the fundies oppose Science because it is peopled by infinitely curious minds -- people in fields and river valleys and laboratories and research centers -- trying to learn the code of the universe. The fundies point to their Bible and insist that what's in it is all anybody needs to know.

[MisterP]

5. my European relatives always just stop and stare when I mention that half the country

thinks the universe is 10-6,000 years old; even Wesley and Darby's DIY religiosity didn't fully comprehend what might happen with it

it's an overtrivialized dumpster fire compared to what they got in the other 5 inhabited continents

[saltpoint]

7. The folks who go around citing history

as 6 to 10 thousand years... are scary.

[MisterP]

8. this is a very good book on the subject (Gould excepted)

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jksadegh/A%20Good%20Atheist%20Secularist%20Skeptical%20Book%20Collection/Oxford%20University%20Press%20-%20Where%20Darwin%20Meets%20the%20Bible%20Creationists%20and%20Evolutionists%20in%20America.pdf

it lets nobody off the hook--and apparently creationism started as a pretty diverse bunch--if it wasn't pink(o), it was *ahem* a tad lavender

[saltpoint]

9. I appreciate your providing

the link on this, MisterP. I am 100 percent ignorant of this history.

[MisterP]

10. it can get weird--Stalinists and eugenicists running around

[saltpoint]

11. It sounds like it. What I was

completely ignorant of was how diverse the origins actually were. My response is usually to understand Creationism as a one-dimensional "movement," when it looks as if there were many disparate paths and principles involved.

[MisterP]

12. yeah, if there's an "American studies" as an academic field its main question will be "how to

explain creationism?" it gets at the heart of everything from the rabidness of its anticommunism to why the IFLS types sound like the warming deniers to why people liked Reagan so much even though his wife signed more state documents than he did, playing with finger puppets

[saltpoint]

13. Given that the folks who want Creationism

as part of public school curricula are very authoritarian, the very mention of 'Creationism' sends me into alarm.

A good high school English teacher needs a non-reactive way of teaching Lord of the Flies, for example, without appearing to endorse Biblical values. Golding said that his novel was a Biblical allegory, and its genius has a lot to do with how well he used Biblical narratives. If the students don't know at least some residual Biblical knowledge, they aren't going to get full impact of that novel.

But the Creationism folks don't want a non-reactive environment. They want the Ten Commandments hung over the school doorway. In Ted Cruz's recent phrase, they want to "invigorate the body of Christ."

[MisterP]

14. the most fatal thing to creationism is to take either Testament seriously

their "biblical values" are just very narrow, brazenly-reconstructive 50s American ones; a good theological or lit-crit view of Golding and the Old Testament would bust the flag-waving, cosseted, costive anti-theology that counts as fundamentalism right out of the water: that's why they have A Beka Books instead of theology

[saltpoint]

17. I hear you. I keep seeing Golding's novel

as a lesson of the heart and mind because it might -- in the hands of a really good classroom teacher -- be instructional for how young people might respond to others' strife.

The pig on a stick is not the point, at least not to me. It's how the island society deteriorates into violence. Piggy's glasses are broken in a fracas, and the kids' collective vision is broken with it. Simon helps the younger kids built huts and he reaches to the out-of-reach branches of fruit trees so they'll have something to eat. We know Golding wants us to understand the good in that. The most balls-out atheist could pick it up and appreciate the contrast. I'm a secular reader and felt drawn to the characters enough to "take sides."

And then there's Roger, one of the very rare true nihilists in literature.

I don't know the borders of the zone where a teacher can bring these characters to life and make them understandable in context without the interference of the fundies. There are always fundie parents phoning the school principal to wail about the violence in Lord of the Flies. "It's inappropriate," they insist. Well hells bells, of course it's inappropriate, which is why it's powerful, and why your tenth or eleventh grader should read the damn thing.

[MisterP]

20. and of course warning against idolatry and seeing nihilism as a bit bracing could be 40s Catholic as

much as it could be 40s secularist!

fundies feed on the sheer inexperience of young people, recruiting by offering all the answers, substituting two or three guys for God itself--but others replace divinity with the Natural World, or Computers, or Mankind, or Spaceflight, or their Nation: where they go wrong is not the content, but the process of making an ersatz to begin with

a lot of fundamentalism rose in the US in the suburbs after the crises of faith brought about by 60s prosperity and 70s crash, Vietnam and the New Age: so you have people who only live with "their kind of people," talk to "their kind of people," shop with "their kind of people," report anyone who doesn't belong near "their kind of people"--it can get stir-crazy and militantly controlling very quickly even without fundamentalism in the mix

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/08/inside_a_snooty_and_casually_racist_santa_monica_neighborhood_listserv.php

[saltpoint]

21. Had not the Corden piece on bike lanes.

It's great. Thank you for posting it.

In his study The True Believer, Eric Hoffer suggests that an individual's adherence to and faith in a mass movement -- the rise of Hitler in Germany, membership in the Ku Klux Klan, or zealous attachment to Biblical literalism and other fundie cult-like fundamentalism -- begins with a lack of faith in oneself.

I love your point on fundamentalism rising in the U.S. suburbs. A large percentage of mega-churches are in the suburbs and farther reaches of cities, and seldom smack downtown. When U.S. Americans lived downtown, inside cities, in city neighborhoods, there was awareness of different ways of life among different social and ethnic groups. Out in the suburbs, it's overwhelmingly white and cookie-cutter life patterns.

The standard of living grew rapidly after the Second World War, allowing a lot of white folks to move to the suburbs. They crowed about the "safety" inherent there, by which it might have meant they no longer wanted to deal with those ethnic and racial diversities.

During the same period after the War:

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“In only one place do the twin themes of outward prosperity and inward dread come together, and that is in the figures for tranquilizer sales, which rose from $2.2 million in 1955... to $150 million by 1957.”

--Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven

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The suburbs were Sameness On Purpose, and we're still paying the price for "safety" like that.

[MisterP]

22. suburbia's gotten even *more* identical: in houses built before 1990 you're at least

allowed to change the color or put up a treehouse without the HOA golf-cart enforcers writing a ticket; now they're identical serries of low-quality greige Fauxtalians and jumbled McMansions, extending almost straight up from the sidewalk and lot boundaries; walkscores plummeted from 50% in houses built in the 60s to 1-20% starting 1985; they're not physically or financially accessible any more, just for those who've "made it" and wouldn't care if gas was $1 or $10, they just "have money" (but worry about losing it); it's even more strongly "whitening" because it's a money hurdle, while inner-ring suburbs are filling up with the more working-class

many even deem suburbia the world's biggest utopian project, a place where the GI could afford what the gentry barely had anymore before the war, where the blue collars became middle class all at once, whole counties rededicated to raising children, a proper "filiarchy"; of course that meant the wages earned in the city core crossed city and county lines and the whole thing was subsidized with only one color in mind!

still, much of what'd soured people on the burbs--car-dependence, homogeneity, the self-selection, the boredom, the boom-and-bust cycle--were all potentially addressable: but instead even the liberal suburbanites voted for Reaganomics and his plush aerospace grants so, again, we held off on addressing any problems on Riyadh's decade of falling gas prices, and now fight through traffic from megachurch to test-focused school where the traffic jam lasts an hour; everything they complained about suburbia in the 50s-70s has increased tenfold

a lot of work is on getting the burbs to work WITH the city rather than against it--and frankly the Lena Dunhams of the world are making Brooklyn less homogeneous than Long Island, for instance! so there's a turn toward the city core, toward choice and convenience as well as "peace and quiet" (and being with "the right sort of people&quot

Santa Monica and Beverly Hills are trying to keep the subways out with the crassest of race-baiting, while freeway-centric Orange County wants more commuter rail--go figure!

[saltpoint]

23. MisterP, you have a

stand-alone post with your third paragraph:

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"...much of what'd soured people on the burbs--car-dependence, homogeneity, the self-selection, the boredom, the boom-and-bust cycle--were all potentially addressable: but instead even the liberal suburbanites voted for Reaganomics and his plush aerospace grants so, again, we held off on addressing any problems on Riyadh's decade of falling gas prices, and now fight through traffic from megachurch to test-focused school where the traffic jam lasts an hour; everything they complained about suburbia in the 50s-70s has increased tenfold."


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Absolutely top-drawer stuff. Thank you.

[MisterP]

24. aww! a lot of it's from the founder of The Tyee, David Beers

http://articles.latimes.com/1996-10-06/books/bk-50892_1_blue-sky-dream
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Sky-Dream-Memoir-Americas/dp/015600531X

[Rosa Luxemburg]

3. Jesus wouldn't like Cruz

Jesus didn't have much time for bigots.

[Midnight Writer]

4. Cruz is a "Seven Mountains" dominionist. Check out his father's sermons.

His father preaches that Ted is "The One Chosen By God" and was raised from birth to be the leader that returns control of our lives to God.

You may belief that it is unfair to use his elderly father to judge Cruz. However, if you want to book the elder Cruz for a paid event, call Ted Cruz's US Senate office, and a Senate staffer there will make the arrangements. No separation of Church and State in this family.

[saltpoint]

6. Yes. Rafael is an unsettling

presence in the GOP primary race.

Cruz is one of just a couple or three Republican hopefuls with a chance at the nomination. If he is nominated in Cleveland, it is possible that he tries to extend his network of local pastors.

I don't think he can. As loud as the fundies are, they are not yet a majority component of the U.S. electorate. And so it is possible that the fundies have destroyed the GOP "establishment" and that, in the event of a Cruz nomination, the voters will finish the party off. If Cruz loses big, downballot Republicans all over the place are threatened, too.

Year or so ago there was talk in GOP circles of outreach to women and minorities. Not hearing a whole hell of a lot of that talk lately.

[Hortensis]

15. Even talk of "OUT-reach" is a major identifier of

the disease that's killing the GOP.

When the GOP throws open its doors and invites America's minority conservatives and empowered female conservatives into the party, then we'll know it's healing itself. It seems more likely, however, that fed-up minorities will have to go in uninvited and start throwing their considerable weight around.

Saltpoint, I agree; however, it's a rational and hopeful outlook, and every time in the past 30 years that I hopefully believed "sensible" Republicans would vote rationally and responsibly, that they would finally have to break away from the diseases running amok on their right, they have proven me wrong.

Notably, far-right extremists - religious, economic and social - are a minority, and they, and their plutocrat manipulators, could never have prevailed without the more moderate core of conservatives ultimately falling in with them. Over and over and over and over...

But I'll hope you're right again anyway.

[saltpoint]

16. Your analysis is one of those

hard-bitten realist's looks at difficult circumstances.

I'm sorry to say I have to join you on being proven wrong by "sensible" Republicans. I used to assume there were sensible Republicans. I'm much less sure now.

If Cruz is nominated, the demographic breakdown suggests that the GOP would be crushed in November, likely sinking many down-ballot Republican candidates as well. That would be a truly historic repudiation of the fundies and other Bagger-types. They would have been given their chance and then lost on a grand scale.

The problem with that narrative is that if someone like Cruz is that close to power, events may conspire to propel him into the White House. It's a perilous gamble. We've had way too many close elections post-Eisenhower.

There's plenty to be nervous about this next general election. Let's hope the gods and goddesses cut us progressives some slack and chain the GOP to a giant stone.

[Hortensis]

18. Beseech and amen.

[ladjf]

19. It takes an idiot to elect an idiot. The question for America is

are the idiots in the majority? Answer, who knows? But, we will find out after the election.