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Edited on Wed May-25-05 08:27 PM by arendt
The New Religious Assassins
by arendt
"During the evolution of complex life, the force of gene selfishness had to be tamed. Complex life is built not only from many genes, but from many cooperating genes...The cooperation between the genes of a body did not just happen. It required special mechanisms for it to evolve, mechanisms that arrange affairs such that each gene is maximally selfish by being maximally cooperative with the other genes in its body.
"...natural selection is less likely to favor increases in complexity if it can also favor genes that proliferate within cells (selfish genes). Genes that devote themselves to intra-cellular punch-ups will not also contribute to the great creative arts of complexity. The problem is that the advantage of any increase in complexity will usually be small. There may, for instance, be an ecological opportunity for organisms that are more complex than the current members of their species, but the advantage would probably be only 1-2 per cent. Compare this with the double advantage gained by a mutant gene that abandons its proper function in the cell and instead evolves to scratch out its sister gene. Complex life required the genetic system to rule out the double-advantage selfish option, leaving the genes to explore the 1-2 per cent advantages of increased complexity."
........Mark Ridley, "The Cooperative Gene"
Christian fundamentalism is a totalitarian, reactionary political movement, not a genuine religion. Genuine religion is inclusive and cooperative, not exclusive and confrontational. Genuine religion supports the individual's search for spiritual peace; it does not call for its followers to murder their way to heaven. A search for peace customarily begins by learning to live amicably with billions of fellow humans on this planet. That is, genuine religion seeks solutions to problems that are fair to everyone and that improve the world without hurting anyone. If doctors take the Hippocratic Oath to "first do no harm", shouldn't religions do the same?
Fundamentalists do not believe in cooperating to create incremental improvements in the world and the nation we all live in together, like cells in the same body. Instead, they believe in disruption, confrontation, and outright slaughter of their opponents. They devote most of their energy to trying to get faith-based handouts and to force the government to destroy the Constitution and replace it with the Bible. What else is this but the behavior of a very selfish gene?
You might be interested to know just how selfish genes can get. In his book, Ridley cites well-known examples of "assassin" genes. Each sperm cell contains an equal number of paternal and maternal genes. As sperm cells divide, the genes are shuffled to provide genetic randomness. But, an assassin gene destroys any chromosomes that don't contain an assassin gene, thereby wiping out its sperm competition before it gets to the starting line instead of competing with it. I'm waiting for a fundamentalist to explain exactly how assassin genes correspond to Intelligent Design unless the designer is Richard Dawkins.
We have experienced in this country, the "stealth" takeover of the Southern Baptists by rabid fundamentalists, followed by the stealth takeover of the GOP by fundamentalists led by Ralph Reed and the so-called Christian Coalition. In each of these takeovers, the fundamentalists did not convince anyone of the superiority of their arguments; they simply packed the meetings, used every parliamentary trick they could find to grab power, and, once established, they immediately rooted out and destroyed any organized resistance to their theocratic power structure. The radical right behavior in this country is the political equivalent of assassin genes. It doesn't seek to win electoral competitions; it seeks to destroy the electoral process.
One of the fringe benefits of being unable to think critically is that fundamentalists, people who swear they hate Darwin and Richard Dawkins (author of "The Selfish Gene"), see no contradiction in the fact that they constantly engage in cut-throat competition against urban, Blue State America, regardless of the fact that their behavior makes America poorer. Under Bush's rule, America has seen a net loss of jobs, massive exportation of our industrial base, the squandering of our financial surplus and our political capital. But that's only bad if you think of America as having 50 states. If you think of America as being the revived Confederacy, then its good news that the Yankees are finally getting robbed and hurt. I suppose revenge is one of those compassionate conservative virtues.
You might have been hoodwinked into believing that fundamentalists at least believe in the free market. But, that's another lie. The selective demands for a "free market" of ideas correspond only to those times when fundamentalism lacks political power - it never wants for big-money financial backers. When out of power, fundamentalism preaches fair competition; when in power, it preaches holy war. Clearly, the fundamentalists use the rhetoric of markets, like they use everything else, to gain power. But they don't believe in it. And that suits the crooked media, oil, and military companies who back them just fine - they don't believe in free markets either. They believe in no-bid contracts, massive cost overruns, and billions of tax dollars "gone missing" without any serious investigation.
With the assassin gene in mind, we must consider the naked aggression of so-called-Christian fundamentalism. Here are supposedly spritiual people who say the Bible tells them they can kill people who aren't of their religion. Here are people who clearly do not care for future generations, because they openly wish for nuclear war and take steps to make it more likely to happen. Here are people who do not even care to protect the planet (supposedly put in our stewardship by god) from imminent dangers - climate change, ecosystem collapse, and massive pollution including depleted uranium that is mutating our own soldiers' genes.
How can anyone pass off this litany of "apres moi, la rapture" as Christianity?
Just as multi-celled life could not evolve until they learned to suppress ruinous killer genes, complex societies could not evolve until they learned to suppress religious fanaticism. It is the ultimate selfish gene. However, America has been so damaged by twenty five years of corporate and fundamentalist selfishness that it is debatable whether it still is a complex society or just a newly-dead corpse in which corporate and religious maggots will momentarily find juicy bits to devour.
America is having a Santayana moment about religious fanaticism. We are about to learn the hard way what we should have learned from a century of secular and religious fanaticism, from the Nazis to the Taliban. I commend to you the words of a genuine Christian resistance fighter:
"Every time a church tried to act through the propaganda devices accepted by an epoch, the truth and authenticity of Christianity were debased...In such moments (when acting through propaganda), Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all its expressions and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax...Thus reduced to nothing more than an ideology, Christianity will be treated as such by the propagandist...this ideology will no longer be Christianity. It will be just another doctrine."
........- Jacques Ellul "Propaganda"
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