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They’re all just this deluded and deranged: Anti-intellectual religious wing-nuts run the GOP
Faith-inspired anarchy and bloodshed continue to spread around the globe, with no letup in sight.
January has proved especially sanguinary. Three days after President Obama’s State of the Union reminder to us all that he took out Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida (specifically, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) sprang back into action and launched one of its most lethal assaults in recent years, laying siege to a hotel in the West African country of Burkina Faso, killing 30, injuring 156, and taking hostage 176. Nigeria-based Boko Haram dispatched female suicide bombers to blow up a mosque in Cameroon, leaving at least 10 dead. The Taliban struck in Pakistan, assailing a university and murdering dozens. And in Iraq and Syria, ISIS may be losing ground, but it amounts to something more, pace Obama, than “masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks,” with a beguiling Islamist ideology that still draws new recruits (more than 6,000 since last fall), thousands of women and children still enslaved, and operations now expanding in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.
Yet here at home there was a bright spot! President Obama at last gave the green light for a stealthy, FBI-orchestrated mission that brought to a peaceful to end the occupation, led by heavily armed Mormon extremists acting on orders from the Lord Almighty, of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Kudos to our leader! The president is, of course, tasked with ensuring (secular) justice for us all. He had to act, lest the credibility of the federal government suffer further erosion.
Sorry, I was actually just indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. Nothing of the sort happened. Those same faith-crazed seditionists are more entrenched than ever, and now pledge to “never, ever” return the Malheur facilities to the federal government. This they do without the slightest resistance from Washington – a matter that has irked Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown, who has called on the federal government to “move quickly to end the occupation and hold all of the wrongdoers accountable.”
In sum, these are times that try rationalists’ souls. Yet our politicians are offering precious little frank discourse on the one thing inspiring all the above-mentioned instances of murder and mayhem – religion. Which is to say, a congeries of ideologies mandating, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, belief in fantastic, often ludicrous, unverifiable assertions about the cosmos and mankind’s place in it.
Such anti-intellectual constructs would attract scorn and derision were they to obtain in any other sphere of human endeavor. Take science. If I were to proclaim, without offering a whit of proof, that the law of gravity does not apply to me, that I disobey it at will, that I have always disobeyed it, and that I demand all and sundry accept the veracity of my absurd proclamation, and respect it, cherish it, and even kill in its name, I would rightly be thought insane. Imagine, however, that a Nobel Prize science committee awarded me millions, great statesmen lauded me, prominent thinkers took me seriously, and the average Jane or John Doe not only ransacked their meager savings to donate to me, but held me in the highest regard, or at the very least esteemed it impolite, even indecent, to criticize me.
Who would the dupes be then? Not I! I would be laughing all the way to the bank! Which is just what faith’s potentates are doing.
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/24/theyre_all_just_this_deluded_and_deranged_anti_intellectual_religious_wing_nuts_run_the_gop/
January has proved especially sanguinary. Three days after President Obama’s State of the Union reminder to us all that he took out Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida (specifically, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) sprang back into action and launched one of its most lethal assaults in recent years, laying siege to a hotel in the West African country of Burkina Faso, killing 30, injuring 156, and taking hostage 176. Nigeria-based Boko Haram dispatched female suicide bombers to blow up a mosque in Cameroon, leaving at least 10 dead. The Taliban struck in Pakistan, assailing a university and murdering dozens. And in Iraq and Syria, ISIS may be losing ground, but it amounts to something more, pace Obama, than “masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks,” with a beguiling Islamist ideology that still draws new recruits (more than 6,000 since last fall), thousands of women and children still enslaved, and operations now expanding in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.
Yet here at home there was a bright spot! President Obama at last gave the green light for a stealthy, FBI-orchestrated mission that brought to a peaceful to end the occupation, led by heavily armed Mormon extremists acting on orders from the Lord Almighty, of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Kudos to our leader! The president is, of course, tasked with ensuring (secular) justice for us all. He had to act, lest the credibility of the federal government suffer further erosion.
Sorry, I was actually just indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. Nothing of the sort happened. Those same faith-crazed seditionists are more entrenched than ever, and now pledge to “never, ever” return the Malheur facilities to the federal government. This they do without the slightest resistance from Washington – a matter that has irked Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown, who has called on the federal government to “move quickly to end the occupation and hold all of the wrongdoers accountable.”
In sum, these are times that try rationalists’ souls. Yet our politicians are offering precious little frank discourse on the one thing inspiring all the above-mentioned instances of murder and mayhem – religion. Which is to say, a congeries of ideologies mandating, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, belief in fantastic, often ludicrous, unverifiable assertions about the cosmos and mankind’s place in it.
Such anti-intellectual constructs would attract scorn and derision were they to obtain in any other sphere of human endeavor. Take science. If I were to proclaim, without offering a whit of proof, that the law of gravity does not apply to me, that I disobey it at will, that I have always disobeyed it, and that I demand all and sundry accept the veracity of my absurd proclamation, and respect it, cherish it, and even kill in its name, I would rightly be thought insane. Imagine, however, that a Nobel Prize science committee awarded me millions, great statesmen lauded me, prominent thinkers took me seriously, and the average Jane or John Doe not only ransacked their meager savings to donate to me, but held me in the highest regard, or at the very least esteemed it impolite, even indecent, to criticize me.
Who would the dupes be then? Not I! I would be laughing all the way to the bank! Which is just what faith’s potentates are doing.
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/24/theyre_all_just_this_deluded_and_deranged_anti_intellectual_religious_wing_nuts_run_the_gop/
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