I overheard a coworker expressing her dissatisfaction with mainstream news networks. “Don’t watch the news,” she advised me, “just read Revelations.”
Religion is all well and good. Or, rather: belief is fine. As long as religion doesn’t begin to impede the progress of rational people, I don’t mind. When churches start burning scientists at the stake, barring same sex couples from marrying, or teaching creationist pseudoscience as fact is when I gear up for battle.
Such is the case in this instance: an irrational belief in Biblical inerrancy giving rise to a wholesale disregard for worldly matters. A resignation, an inevitablist attitude, or a belief in determinism and predestination: don’t all these lead to some kind of political nihilism? ‘Why vote? Your vote won’t count anyway!’, or ‘I’ll vote and leave the rest up to God’, et cetera, et cetera.
Religion is all well and good, except for when it becomes a regressive force within society, e.g. restricting the rights of consenting adults or sowing the seeds of political ambivalence.
Here’s another gem, uttered from the same mouth in the same ten minute period:
“Well,” she offered, “I vote my morals.” I took offense at the implication that liberals — for, certainly, she was a conservative — don’t vote their morals, or, otherwise, vote knowingly for immoral practices.
It’s this kind of black-and-white, on-or-off, good-and-evil perception of reality that is anathema to a productive democratic process. It is troubling, the miniscule amount of civil and informed debate that goes on nowadays, and wantonly characterizing The Other Side as brazenly, unanimously and incorrigibly immoral is meaningless conversation.
I used to be a staunch believer in evolution until I stopped believing a lot of what I read in text books, and what I heard from those I wanted to believe, because it served my own purposes and beliefs. After 8 years of study into imperical evidences and into historical convictions and cases of fraud involving evolution’s most cherished icons, I’ve come about full-circle. I agree with the Chinese’s original pre-communistic view that the world is approx. 6000 years old— and forget about whether some god or aliens planted the seeds– the claim of evolution is totally bogus, physically impossible and violates most of the laws we have come to accept in mathematics and physics. It is physically impossible for Darwinian biology and the laws of physics to both, be true. All the math that isn’t based on metaphysical assumptions at its deepest core, point to a young earth.
Denial is so much easier isn’t it…
The fossil record must be planted…just ask the Baptists…..sigh