Republicanism: we tell you what to think so you don't have to

Annie Laurie at Balloon Juice posts an excerpt from an Esquire article about the Republican's hardening resistance to reality.

[Esquire]: ... [F]or most self-identified “conservatives,” it will never matter how high the water rises or how convincingly the evidence mounts, because from the start the debate about global warming has never been a debate in which rules of evidence apply. Rather, it has been a tectonic collision of belief systems, [where] the vision of America as a uniquely secular nation and the vision of America as a uniquely Christian one smash together and create earthquakes before they create mountain ranges, and in which secular Americans expressing concern for their children’s future and Christian Americans expressing concern for their children’s future turn out to be talking about two different things entirely…

... When Limbaugh derides global warming as a “religion,” he’s on to something, ... global warming has become a religion because Rush and Co. have succeeded in making it one. He has succeeded in recasting the global-warming debate in the same way he has succeeded in recasting the debate over everything else, from taxes to health care to gay marriage. He has made an issue that should be amenable only to fact amenable to faith, indeed subservient to it, so that if people don’t “believe” in global warming, it’s not happening. The great secret to the success of the Republican party since it became an arm of the American church and the American corporation is that it pretends to abide by “absolutes” while remaining committed to the relativism at the heart of all religion, which is that if you believe in something, it exists, and if you don’t, it doesn’t. [emphasis mine]

Laurie concludes with this: "It’s taken us some twelve thousand years to reach our current state of affairs, when a tiny minority of the population of one nation-state has the ability to use...“religious impulse” as a weapon that could potentially destroy the entire human biosphere, and not just that part of it within their own limited fiefdom. Ah, progress…"

Republicanism is a faith-based political party, no different than a religion.  To be a Christian or  Republican you have to believe things that common sense says is not true. The "preachers" in the Republican party are rich people who want to protect their wealth even if it means possibly destroying the planet.  They are hedonists who live only for today and the immediate future, and they succeed because too many Americans are too damn lazy (or stupid) to question why the experts are always "wrong" on issues important to Christians and right on everything else.

--Trakker

 

Comments

[horsec]

Experts don't understand the importance of being right

Americans are too damn lazy (or stupid) to question why the experts are always "wrong" on issues important to Christians and right on everything else.

Being wrong threatens the persona. You're no longer the clever person you thought you were. People can't handle being wrong about anything. Christianity isn't the problem per se. People aren't built to kick off their security blanket, their belief in the correctness of their belief.

[Trakker]

You're no longer the clever person you thought you were. People can't handle being wrong about anything.

Most of the people I know accept the fact that we don't know everything, and they place a certain amount of trust in the people who do know the things we don't, because we really want to make the right decisions. I'm sure you are the same way. But we quickly learn to distinguish between who actually knows their stuff and those who are blowing smoke.

It seems to me that fundamentalist Christians and Republicans lack this desire to make the right decision, evidently they are so insecure that they can't handle reality if it collides with their fantasies. Too bad they now run this country.