They really want a theocracy: The GOP candidates who want to make you bow to their lord

by Jeffery Tayler

10-29-2015

GOP wants Christianity as our official religion. Middle East's on fire. Theocrats are marching and must be stopped

Source: AP/Reuters/Chris Keane/Kevin Lamarque/Patrick Semansky

If the number of those professing no loyalty to make-believe celestial despots (thankfully) continues to grow, faith derangement syndrome is advancing to its final stage among those suffering from it.

A new PPP survey reveals that Republicans are afflicted most, with 44 percent now favoring installing Christianity as the United States’ official religion. (Lest we forget, the GOP’s roster of potential 2016 candidates is stocked with rabid believers, and even faith-faker Donald Trump is courting evangelicals.) A shocking 28 percent of Democrats are also theocratically inclined. Only 53 percent of Republican and Democratic voters combined oppose declaring Jesus jabberwocky our national faith.

The upshot: almost three out of four adult Americans would, in effect, junk the First Amendment, and with it, our gloriously godless system of governance.

These statistics should prompt all rationalists to sound the proverbial tocsin with unrelenting fury. The religious-secular divide among Americans is deepening, putting those who value reason, evidence and consensus-based decisions in direct opposition to putrid supernatural gobbledygook’s slackwitted votaries; in other words, to those who hear voices, see visions, and engage in kooky superstitious rituals – prayer, for instance – that would lead to their immediate institutionalization if such symptoms were not classified under the (scandalously) ennobling rubric of “religion.”

Remember, the PPP survey deals not with the simple spread of faith, but with the desire of one part of the population to force its antiquated way of life and counterfactual worldview on the other.

The situation, thus, is dire. We no longer have time for niceties. We need to speak out forcibly against faith and expose it for what it is – a delusion deleterious to liberty and the commonwealth.

The stakes are high. The faith-deranged support a (largely successful) nationwide campaign to restrict women’s reproductive rights and introduce Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, of which there are now 21 in force, with others on the way. As a result of decades of Christian propaganda, performing abortions can be life-threatening for doctors. And in times of widespread fiscal austerity, the government loses about $83 billion a year to religious tax exemptions. This should all outrage us and incite us to act.

Yet we have it relatively easy. Abroad, a terrorist state founded on religion is destroying Syria and driving refugees into Europe. Sectarian violence threatens to bedevil Iraq indefinitely. Boko Haram is wreaking more and more havoc in West Africa. A Christian-Muslim conflict is ripping apart the Central African Republic. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is spiraling out of control. The longstanding hostility between India and Pakistan could erupt into a nuclear war that would end life on Earth as we know it.

Even in countries at peace, religion offers justification for violence and oppression. Take Saudi Arabia, for instance, where floggings and beheadings, often for apostasy or blasphemy, are routine events. Female genital mutilation is endemic in 28 mostly Muslim countries. Last January, religion motivated young men to commit mass murder in the heart of Paris, and over cartoons. Then, a month later, another faith-inspired terrorist opened fire on a free speech conference in Copenhagen while the Femen leader Inna Shevchenko was speaking, killing one and wounding three.

This is all almost too depressing to contemplate. Yet there’s an even direr reason to speak out forcibly against religion now — our species’ fading prospects for survival. Global warming, scientists show, is proceeding far more rapidly than had been predicted. The consequences have been to spark demonstrations in Syria that led to the civil war there, and worsen drought in the Sahel, helping birth Boko Haram. As the Himalayan glaciers melt, the Ganges River plains are threatened. Sea levels may rise as much as four feet by the end of the century. There may well be 150 or 200 million climate change refugees by 2050, and mostly from deeply religious parts of the world.

Source: Salon