The Rightists

I find it interesting how the current hatemongers in the U.S., being populated mostly by evangelicals, have the balls to accuse folks of the blatant hypocrisy with which they themselves blare over the airwaves. For example, here's a paragraph I copied from an article on the CNN website today:

"I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology," [Focus on the Family founder James] Dobson said, later adding that Obama is "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."

That is his response to a speech given by Barack in 2006:

"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" Obama asks in the speech. "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?

I read it as Obama being open to religious consideration when it comes to governing but not governing under religion's edicts and canons. As an atheist, I see absolutely no point of mixing governing and religion. Does "an eye for an eye" make more sense than diplomacy?

Dobson later threw this into the mix:

"Evangelicals are people who take Bible interpretation very seriously, and the sort of speech he gave shows that he is worlds away in the views of evangelicals."

Here's something I'm borrowing from Alpha Bitch to rebuff this last statement:

"Myth: America is a Christian Nation...Suffice to say for now that any country with ZERO mentions of god, and only two mentions of religion (both of which pointedly exclude religion from the government and legislative process), in its foundational documents is pretty clearly not a religious nation of any stripe. Read the Constitution sometime, mm'kay? I know it's usually not required in school, but it's very enlightening. So what difference does this little delusion make in today's society? Well, ask any teen girl who got pregnant, because the only information she got about birth control was from an "abstinence only" sex-ed program … where all you learn is how often birth control fails, never mind how to use it properly, because premarital sex is a sin. Visit a school where science teachers have to include a unit on "Intelligent Design", aka. God Created the World (which is not any kind of scientific theory), right along side the theory of Evolution, or where the library had to remove books which somehow offended the sensibilities of a loud local church. Or how about NGO foreign aid organizations receiving government funding who, thanks to Reagan's biblical policies (enthusiastically upheld by both generations of BushCo presidencies, while suspended during the Clinton administration), cannot educate women in Third World countries about abortion, because that's a sin too? The US does guarantee that you can practice whatever form of holy superstition you like, but the Founders were really quite clear that you have no right to try legally forcing your religious values down other people's throats."

Here's another tidbit Alpha Bitch wrote earlier this year:

"Creationism is bullshit. Seriously. A big magic guy in the clouds did not wiggle his fingers and create the earth in 6 days. Didn't fucking happen. And I think anyone who professes to believe such a thing ought to be barred from political office. What if there was a religion claiming the world was flat, and the whole "round" thing was just an optical illusion created by God to test our faith? Would ANYONE be suggesting we teach it in schools? Would anyone vote for a politician who claimed to believe it? For fuck's sake, people. It's 2008. We have fossils. We have carbon dating. Get a clue!"

I'm sure to have pissed a few folks off. But take a moment and think about it please. Then ask yourself this:

Why do we yearn for explanations about what's happening or happened only to make up explanations that cannot possibly be true but that which we wish and demand it be true without any proof?