Canadians, Australians, Brits, are there as many batshit crazy religious nuts

[raccoon]

in your respective countries as there are in the US?

[SidDithers]

1. Speaking from a Canadian perspective...

Sid

[Captain Hilts]

3. Oh yeah there are in Canada... nt

[canadianbeaver]

9. Not to the degree that the US has.....

They are not shoving GOD down anyones throats up here...we are free(for now)to choose our beliefs....makes for a more diverse crowd...

[Captain Hilts]

15. The political dynamic is different. There is more individuality in the provinces...nt

[SidDithers]

16. Not nearly as many...

and they're not nearly as prominent in our politics.

Sid

[Captain Hilts]

31. They are not as prominent in politics. That is true. But head out to Alberta.....nt

[SpiralHawk]

40. "...head out to Alberta" ? They say things are good there in the fall...

...But we've been through that a thousand times or more...

[theoldman]

2. No.

[Captain Hilts]

Britain sent its religious crazies to N. Am and its criminals to Australia. nt

[raccoon]

7. I'd rather have the criminals. :-) nt

[SammyWinstonJack]

10. Yeah me too!

[Captain Hilts]

14. Ain't that the truth! nt

[tridim]

4. I don't think there are that many batshit crazy religious nuts in America either.

Especially if you exclude the Bible Belt.

They just tend bring lots of attention to themselves, and Republicans pander to them like they're a majority.

[zanne]

26. I think you're right.

They use the "The squeaky wheel getss the grease" method. They're a small group, but they're very loud and they all vote.

[LanternWaste]

27. I agree. Our bat shitters are infinitely loud.

I agree. Our shitting bats are infinitely more loud.

I'd think that 99.99% of the religious in this country are no more, nor no worse than in any other country-- quiet, unassuming, co-workers whose only difference is that their faith may be different than ours...

Yet as the quiet and the unassuming don't make for good on-air copy, Phelps, Osteen & Co. get the camera-time and the water cooler discussions-- to the point where many people think they are actually indicative of mainstream religion. :silly:

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. They may be more gullible - because they give so much money to the conmen

The millionaire preachers don't exist on anything like the same scale as they do in the USA. Their incredible richness is part of their loudness, of course - they have the money to run TV stations, drawing in yet more money. So it seems there are more US religious people willing to throw their money at the hucksters.

[mwb970]

37. They are *unbelievably* gullible.

They'll believe anything, from the Rapture to the idea that bush is a great president. But not evolution or global warming, of course - that's science, which is false. The preacher said so.

[MiniMe]

29. The Moral Majority is neither

But they make you think that they are

[spoony]

5. Of which variety are you speaking?

On DU those words could refer to anything from a mad bomber to a Phelps to someone who dares hold a belief in the supernatural.

[raccoon]

13. The Phelps kind. The loud, obnoxious, cuckoo zealot who thinks s/he is

superior to anyone who doesn't believe exactly as s/he does. Who professes to be SOOOOOOOo concerned about the unborn, but doesn't care about the born.

Not everyone who is religious is batshit crazy. The Batshit crazy are a subset of the the religious.

[alarimer]

20. But it is the quieter ones who are more dangerous

Huckabee, for example, is no Fred Phelps. But he is a religious lunatic and possbly might be elected President. In my opinion, those that come across as more "normal" are far more dangerous than the out and out loonies.
People will actually vote for Huckabee even though he is a dangerous religious fanatic.

[malaise]

36. Fuckabee is just as dangerous as Fred Phelps

What a raving lunatic.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. Well, Britain threw a lot out

in the 1600s, hoping to forestall Cromwell. Wouldn't be surprised if many more crossed the pond after the Restoration.

[Prophet 451]

35. We didn't exactly throw them out

It was more like a mutual arrangement that if they were so insane, it would be better if they went off and did it someplace else.

[Arugula Latte]

8. Why don't we set up another penal colony in Australia and ship the religious nuts there?

It could be in the center of the outback, miles from anyone, so the Aussies won't be bothered. The fundie nuts can subsists on rabbits that they catch, thus doing the Aussies a favor by decreasing the population of a non-indigenous species. The Aussies can charge us a kennel fee, and everyone's happy.

[tridim]

12. A kennel fee.

:rofl:

[alfredo]

18. In the US we send them to Washington DC so we can keep an eye on them.

[Djinn]

44. no thanks

we like our lack of religious freakery and would prefer to keep enjoying it

[tavalon]

46. Best.Fucking.Idea.Ever!!!

BTW, I'm not talking the legit Christians or insert your religion heres, I'm talking about the fundie whackadoos.

[lapfog_1]

11. No, the Puritans came HERE to get away from the normal people.

OTOH, Aussies got the convicts (I think I want to live there).

Come to think of it, having the Puritans exiled to the US is sort of like the telephone sanitizers being exiled to earth (how humans came about).

[BooScout]

17. Thankfully NO

The religious nuts was one of the big reasons my husband hated living in the States. Not to mention people like my mother who only found religion to socialize and to be in with the 'right' crowd.

It's weird because until Reagan and then the Bushes, especially the last Bush I don't remember so many religious nuts in America trying to cram their various religious beliefs down my throat or injecting them into the political arena.

It's definitely not something I miss about the States.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

24. Reagan definitely encouraged the nuts

I grew up in a town where nearly everyone attended a church of some kind, but teaching evolution was controversial only among the Jehovah's Witnesses, and we NEVER had school prayer. (This was in the 1960s.)

All of a sudden in the 1980s, with Reagan in office, there were calls for the "reestablishment" of school prayer (which had never been established in Minnesota in the first place) and really vehement "pro-life" protests, not to mention anti-gay initiatives.

I believe that the Republicanites specifically encouraged the nuts as a distraction from the severe economic problems that they were causing.

It doesn't work only with Republicans. Note how a thread on some pop culture scandal gets more responses than a serious discussion of some political principle here on DU.

[mwb970]

38. America's decline accelerated drastically under St. Reagan.

It's amazing what a dreadfully wrong path this third-rate actor set America on. We have never really recovered from his reign - as a result, things are much worse now.

The amazing thing is that America still exists after the pummelling it took from Reagan and the vile bushes.

[Iceburg]

19. Canada - no time for it ... all spare time & energy is devoted to shovelling snow /nt

[Greeby]

21. No, but sadly they get into high places still

Take our most recently departed Prime Minister for example

[Gonzo Gardener]

22. Fervent Christian Fundamentalism is "uniquely American".

I was channel surfing late last night and caught a 5 second blurb from a preacher who said, " It is our mission to infect America with..." *click*.

INFECT... sounds about right.

[ProgressIn2008]

23. The difference seems to be the legitimacy the fundies have in American society

Religious extremists have more leeway in the US. I can't imagine mainstream debate over creationism in Canada, the UK or Australia, for example. Or, the way global warming denials seems to have access the national press in the US. From the Canadian papers I've read, there isn't that kind of stuff out there in the press - it's taken for granted that climate change is a huge issue. That kind of thing.

[warren pease]

25. Here's some numbers re the UK and the US...

A 2003 University of Michigan study concluded that the US "...remains one of the most religious nations in the world." More from the study:

About 46 percent of American adults attend church at least once a week, not counting weddings, funerals and christenings, compared with 14 percent of adults in Great Britain, 8 percent in France, 7 percent in Sweden and 4 percent in Japan.

Moreover, 58 percent of Americans say that they often think about the meaning and purpose of life, compared with 25 percent of the British, 26 percent of the Japanese, and 31 percent of West Germans, the study says.

“While traditional religious belief and participation in organized religion have steadily declined in most advanced industrial nations, especially in Western Europe, this is not the case in the United States,” said Ronald F. Inglehart, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), and director of the ISR World Values Surveys, which were conducted in more than 80 nations between 1981 and 2001.

Some possible reasons cited for the results: Religious refugees set the tone long ago in America; religious people tend to have more children than non-religious groups; and the U.S. has a less comprehensive social welfare system, prompting people to look to religion for help.

In other words, gawd help you if you live in the US, because nobody else will.


wp

[tridim]

28. Most fundies I know think about the meaning of DEATH, not the meaning of life.

I honestly don't believe that question has much to do with fundamentalist christianity.

[warren pease]

30. Yeah, that one struck me as odd too...

I mean, I think about the meaning of life all the time -- especially when I'm broke, for some reason -- and I'm about as polar opposite of fundieland as you can get.

I figure the question probably refers to religious nutcases handicapping the odds of their getting sucked up into the great crystal palace in the sky when they die, rather than doing time in purgatory or getting case into THE EVERLASTING FIRES OF ETERNAL DAMNAAAAAAASHUN.

I doubt these people spend much time engaging in anything remotely introspective.

Good point, btw.


wp

[mwb970]

39. Fundies seem obsessed with sex and pregnancy, and with death.

The stuff in between just doesn't seem to matter much, as long as they've got theirs.

[LeftishBrit]

33. In the UK, no

We are a very secular country, despite the lack of official separation of church and state, and less than half of people are formally affiliated with any religion/church. It might be difficult for a declared atheist to be Prime Minister (though we have plenty of openly atheist MPs); but it would be even more difficult for a Huckabee type to get to be PM. Blair was very religious, but had to be publicly reticent about it, because in the words of Alastair Campbell, "We don't do God".

The main exception to this is Northern Ireland, where the Catholic/ Protestant divide is still salient, and until recently responsible for a great deal of conflict and terrorism. Fundie Protestant Ian Paisley is still very powerful there; and the votes of fundie Protestants and hardline Catholics have led to greater social conservativism - e.g. much stricter laws on abortion - than elsewhere in the UK.

Apart from the relative secularism of Brtiish politics, we also don't have the whole televangelist thing that seems to be so important in parts of the USA.

[Prophet 451]

34. No

I'm a Brit.

We have a few, of course but they're very few and mostly ignored. There's very much a cultural expectation here that faith is a private matter. Virtually no-one doubts that evolution is the most likely explanation, very few object to gay marriage (we call it "domestic partnership" but legally it's identical). Abortion is legally settled ground but rarely brought up in politics but many people still have an emotional response to it.

Remember when Blair said that he thought schools should also teach "intelligent design"? Shocked hell out of us since the ID crowd are a tiny, tiny minority here. Of course, since he left office, it's becoming clear that Blair is a religious nut too.

EDIT: I should also point out that the type of virulent fundementalism you have there which is as much about politics as religion is unique to the USA. the kind of militant faith that gets the Religious Reich accomodated in politics is simply unknown in the UK (outside Northern Ireland) and most of Europe. When we hear about someone like Huckabee, we occasionally ask ourselves if the USA has ever really been civilised.

[devilgrrl]

41. If Britain doesn't have religious whackos, then please explain Ian Paisley to us all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Paisley

[mr blur]

42. See post #33 (nt)

[Djinn]

43. Less than 10% of the Australian population attends

religious services, out of those the numpty brigade is an even smaller minority.

A politician that talks about God will find it hurts him/her rather than helps. Being an atheist would not hurt someone's political ambitions at all.

Apart from the Exclusive Brethren we're pretty free of religious nutters here.

I'm also a UK citizen and it's much the same there. It's much the same in all of the developed world. The US lines up with places like Afghanistan and Saudi on questions of "do you believe in an all powerful god" and "will people who do not follow god's laws be punished after death".

It's very very weird.

[mr blur]

45. Of course we have some in the UK, but they tend to hide

you may remember Tony Blair saying recently that he kept quiet about his "faith" because here people "think you're a nutter" if you talk about it. And so we do. And so you are.

We don't have as many as you do, though, and they're mad in a very British way - more quietly, a lot less hate...