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| Indecision 2012 - GOP Almighty | ||||
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All of these Republican candidates think that God is on their side. Most of them have even claimed that God told them to run for office.
Well, either God is just screwing with them, or the vast majority of them are mistaken. And that's putting it as mildly as I can, since it could easily be that they're all mistaken.
This is the problem with faith-based thinking. And faith-based thinking, though much too common in the Democratic Party, too, is rampant in the Republican Party.
Faith just means believing what you have no good reason to believe. After all, if you had a good reason to believe it, you wouldn't need faith. It's pretty obvious that God doesn't want all of these candidates to become president, if he wants any at all (or if he even exists). They're all just believing what they want to believe.
And sadly, this carries over into their political and economic positions, too. We've had abundant evidence, in the past decade or so, that trickle-down economics doesn't work. But they still have faith. They deny the overwhelming scientific consensus - based on clear evidence - of global warming and evolution, among other things, because they have faith.
The Bush administration had faith that the Iraq war would "pay for itself" and that we'd be "greeted as liberators." The boring details about Sunni and Shiite Muslims were for those "elitists" with education and experience in the Middle East. What did they know? How could they compete with Republican faith?
And when the evidence directly contradicts your faith, well, "God works in mysterious ways." Yeah, it couldn't be that you're wrong, could it? It couldn't be that faith is a terrible way to determine the truth.
No, none of that could possibly be true. Why not? Well, you just have faith.
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2 comments:
"And when the evidence directly contradicts your faith, well, "God works in mysterious ways." Yeah, it couldn't be that you're wrong, could it? It couldn't be that faith is a terrible way to determine the truth."
Something to consider about that paragraph:
My go-to political/social guru has always been George Carlin. Of his many takes on religion the one that comes to mind is "What about the Divine Plan?" Remember, we were always taught in church that God has a Divine Plan.
Here's the deal: If He has a"Divine Plan." what's the point in praying?
That's where the "God works in mysterious ways" and "It's God's will" thing comes in. "He's" going to do whatever "He" wants to anyway.
Try that on one the members of "God's Only Party" and watch their heads explode.
Yup. Praying began as a way to placate a god who was immensely powerful, but otherwise rather human. Those gods didn't have your best interests at heart, so you had to keep them happy. (They were shallow enough to want people worshiping them.)
Sometimes, you could trick them, but that rarely ended well. But you could persuade them to do what you wanted,... sometimes. (They were nothing if not fickle, and no matter what, you couldn't count on them. Pray all you like, and they still might crush you on an idle whim.)
But it made sense to keep a god as happy as possible, just as it made sense to keep a powerful human - a king, for example - happy. Lesser men walked carefully around such powerful beings (even the imaginary ones).
But these days, it makes no sense to try to persuade an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent god to do something he wasn't planning to do in the first place. And why would such a god be so egotistical and so insecure as to want worship from lesser beings?
Well, if believers were that rational, they wouldn't be believers. :)
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