Heather MacDonald's Brain
If only the fundamentalist idiots running our country had half of it; collectively, we'd be many times smarter. Of course, the 'nutters in power call themselves conservatives, but they're actually anything but. So much of the time, what they mean by that -- it's code, really -- is that they're on a leash to their religion...mental muppets...on call to vote against science and for prayer in schools and all the rest.
How many top people in our government do you consider deep thinkers -- or even rational thinkers? Names, please. And P.S. You aren't a rational thinker if you sequester part of your rationality to believe in god, Santa, or the tooth fairy. Heather writes:
Upon leaving office in November 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft thanked his staff for keeping the country safe since 9/11. But the real credit, he added, belonged to God. Ultimately, it was God’s solicitude for America that had prevented another attack on the homeland.Many conservatives hear such statements with a soothing sense of approbation. But others—count me among them—feel bewilderment, among much else. If God deserves thanks for fending off assaults on the United States after 9/11, why is he not also responsible for allowing the 2001 hijackings to happen in the first place?
Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.
Conservative atheists and agnostics support traditional American values. They believe in personal responsibility, self-reliance, and deferred gratification as the bedrock virtues of a prosperous society. They view marriage between a man and a woman as the surest way to raise stable, law-abiding children (Amy says: count me out on that one -- Heather should meet the Loftons.). They deplore the encroachments of the welfare state on matters best left to private effort.
They also find themselves mystified by the religiosity of the rhetoric that seems to define so much of conservatism today. Our Republican president says that he bases “a lot of [his] foreign policy decisions” on his belief in “the Almighty” and in the Almighty’s “great gifts” to mankind. What is one to make of such a statement? According to believers, the Almighty’s actions are only intermittently scrutable; using them as a guide for policy, then, would seem reckless. True, when a potential tragedy is averted, believers decipher God’s beneficent intervention with ease. The father of Elizabeth Smart, the Salt Lake City girl abducted from her home in 2002, thanked God for answering the public’s prayers for her safe return. When nine miners were pulled unharmed from a collapsed Pennsylvania mineshaft in 2002, a representative placard read: “Thank you God, 9 for 9.” God’s mercy was supposedly manifest when children were saved from the 2005 Indonesian tsunami.
But why did the prayers for five-year-old Samantha Runnion go unheeded when she was taken from her Southern California home in 2002 and later sexually assaulted and asphyxiated? If you ask a believer, you will be told that the human mind cannot fathom God’s ways. It would seem as if God benefits from double standards of a kind that would make even affirmative action look just. When 12 miners were killed in a West Virginia mine explosion in January 2006, no one posted a sign saying: “For God’s sake, please explain: Why 1 for 13?” Innocent children were swept away in the 2005 tsunami, too, but believers blamed natural forces, not God.
The presumption of religious belief—not to mention the contradictory thinking that so often accompanies it—does damage to conservatism by resting its claims on revealed truth. But on such truth there can be no agreement without faith. And a lot of us do not have such faith—nor do we need it to be conservative.
Amy,
This is why i have so many problems with Christianity. No one seems to be able to explain to me why god saves one child in a disaster such as the Christmas tsunami yet drowns hundreds of others. god always seems to get credit for all of the good stuff but none of the bad.....
Rob at August 15, 2006 5:48 AM
That makes two of us. I don't understand how thinking adults can believe stuff like this. I mean, why not believe in Zeus if you believe in "god"?
Amy Alkon at August 15, 2006 5:58 AM
Rob -- God kills the ugly children and lets the cute ones live.
Lena at August 15, 2006 6:28 AM
God is a beauty pageant?
Amy Alkon at August 15, 2006 6:36 AM
WHat about Jon-Benet?
eric at August 15, 2006 7:37 AM
In Jon-Benet's case.... god was punishing the parents for something they did or their grandparents or their next-door neighbors college roommates best friends sister did....don't you all know that this stuff runs downhill like....like.....well....you know? All of this coming from a ministers son....
Rob at August 15, 2006 7:53 AM
Also, HM is fun to look at
Crid at August 15, 2006 9:57 AM
God is another excuse for not thinking.
ResearchGuy® at August 15, 2006 1:50 PM
God has given us free will - his only intervention is how we let him in to our lives. Whether, climate is controlled by God, I will one day find out but I will be dead and I won't be able to tell you but how people treat and hurt each other is about people - not God.
claudia at August 15, 2006 3:05 PM
You gave me a headache Claudia. But I did read your post about a dozen times.
Do you mean weather? What about when God used to intervene frequently, like all those fun Bible stories? Why would anyone who has read the First Testament think that God is benevolent?
Make that two dozen times. I need a martini.
eric at August 15, 2006 4:41 PM
Do you remember that old Saturday afternoon TV movie "Donovan's Brain"? It wasn't about the old folk singer. Actually, I don't remember what it was about at all, but I loved the big brain floating around in the fish tank.
Lena at August 15, 2006 8:50 PM
I find in conversation that people worship the Bible, not God, in that everything they think is dependent on its pages.
While that is irrational, and only one of hundreds of irrational things people do, neither Bible fantasy nor dismissal brings us closer to the answer of that wonderful question, "Why?"
Radwaste at August 17, 2006 2:29 AM
You can't have a logical conversation with someone who is religious. Religion is all about non-questioning non-thinking obedience, and there is also a lot of emotion involved, which makes people irrational when you ask questions.
I just avoid converations on the subject, and treat it as a socially acceptable form of insanity.
Why does there have to be reasons for things? Things just ARE. Accept them and you will have a much happier life. You probably wouldn't understand if you were told anyways-humans really aren't that smart.
Canada at August 18, 2006 6:15 AM
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