Hillbilly Gun Show
2017-05-01 13:44:31 UTC
Dirty old man Bill O'Reilly won't be running his War On
Christmas bully pulpit out of Fox News next holiday season.
9 ways Christian zealots cripple America
Heres a list of 9 terrible things religion has brought upon
American culture. To be clear, as many religious people also
have their problems with some of the excesses of Christianity
in America, this is more a reminder of the problems with those
excesses than some kind of slam on religious people generally.
1. War on Christmas hysteria
Its become an annual tradition, along with Christmas pop-up
shops and holiday shopping specials: Fox News trying to scare
their viewers into thinking the evil liberals are going to
steal Christmas from them. This year, so far, the culprits are
Muslims wanting their own holidays,women who dare complain if
holiday stress gets to them, and Obama for supposedly not being
gung-ho enough. (Reality check: The Obama White House has, if
anything, upped the ante for White House Christmas decorating.)
All of this dishonest panic about the imminent demise of
Christmas is little more than an excuse for conservative
Christians to get even more aggressive. By redefining every
reasonable limit on their proselytizing or attempt at being
more inclusive as somehow oppression, theyre able to shove
their religion on others in the guise of resisting this
imaginary oppression.
2. Terrible social safety net
The Jesus Christ of the Bible is forever going on about the
need to clothe and feed the poor, but the Jesus Christ of the
right-wing imagination is just as quick to kick a homeless
person as he is to give him a meal. One of the biggest projects
of fundamentalist Christianity of the past few decades is to
create a religious justification for slashing the social safety
net. Thats why conservative Christians tend to ignore the
hundreds of verses in the Bible about feeding the poor and
focus instead on a single verse, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which
reads, For even when we were with you, this we commanded you,
that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
This verse, in context, is little more than Apostle Paul laying
out the community-specific rules for a church during his
erabasically saying that everyone in the church should pitch
in and helpbut conservative Christians have exploited the hell
out of this verse to justify all manner of starving the poor
and casting them out to sleep in the cold. Megachurch pastor
John Hagee interprets the verse to mean that welfare should be
ended. Rep. Kevin Cramer whips the verse out to justify
starving SNAP-dependent children. And Rep. Stephen Fincher does
the same, even though he wasnt against taking millions in
government aid himself, in the form of farm subsidies.
3. Creationism
One of the most peculiar ways conservative Christians try to
assert cultural dominance in the U.S. is to reject the theory
of evolution and instead insist on some sort of Biblical
literalism that suggests humans were created by God instead of
evolved over time. Because of this, only Turkey has lower rates
than the U.S. in the Western world of acceptance of the theory
of evolution. Unfortunately, conservative Christians refuse to
limit themselves to simply believing weird stuff. Instead,
creationists are forever trying to find new ways to push their
religious beliefs off as science in science classrooms, even
though the courts have firmly told them they really cant be
doing this.
4. Battles over proselytizing in schools
Creationism is just a small part of a larger, ongoing hunger
the Christian right has for access to children in public
schools. The First Amendment should forbid exploiting the fact
that kids are required to go to school to foist Christian
beliefs on them, but the lure of all that captive audience
means conservative Christians keep trying.
In a recent example, the school district in Orange County,
Florida, thought theyd be clever and merely allow a
Christian group to pass out literature at the high schools, by
exploiting a loophole that says proselytizing is okay so long
as all groups get to it. Their bad faith, however, was swiftly
exposed when the Satanic Temple demanded equal access to the
children, forcing the school to reconsider their pro-
proselytization policy.
5. Convincing people to vote against their own self-interests
The 2014 midterm elections were strange, in that nearly every
time voters had a chance to vote directly on legislationsuch
as raising the minimum wagethey voted for the liberal side,
but somehow Republicans still swept the elections. There are
many complex reasons for this, but one of the most
straightforward is that this is the problem with religiosity.
Republicans thump the Bible hard and frequently, and that
causes a lot of people to believe that a vote for Republicans
is a Christian vote. The fact that Republicans refuse to walk
the walkattacking the poor to fluff up the coffers of the
wealthy every chance they getmatters little. The religiosity
is skin deep, but thats all it needs to be to get votes.
6. Christian entertainment
The sense that the world is corrupt and sinful has led many
conservative Christians to feel uncomfortable withor boycott
entirelymainstream music, TV shows and movies. This, in turn,
has created one of the great scourges of American culture:
explicitly Christian entertainment. When wholesomeness is
prioritized over quality, no big surprise, quality suffers.
Thus theres an endless outpouring of crappy Christian movies
(sometimes with Kirk Cameron!), terrible Christian music that
weakly rips off mainstream music, and even fourth-rate
Christian comedians peddling deeply unfunny humor. You almost
feel sorry for the people that have to endure this nonsense,
but then again, they bring it on themselves.
7. Faith healing
One of the saddest aspects of the grand American tradition of
competitive piety is how many charlatans gleefully exploit
peoples desire to be the most faithful to squeeze them for
their money and/or loyalty. Faith healing is one of the biggest
scams going, with the so-called healers conning the true
believers, who often have serious health problems, into
believing that all they need to get better is pray. In some
cases, the belief that all you need is prayer goes so deep that
parents have allowed their children to die of preventable
causes rather than take them to a doctor, a practice that is
sadly legal in many states.
8. The modern Republican Party
Many political observers are prone, at times, to wonder how it
is that the Republican Party of the mid-20th century seems to
have disappeared entirely. Gone are Republicans like Dwight
Eisenhower or Gerald Ford, who while certainly conservative, at
least seemed to feel somewhat beholden to things like facts
or desire to govern, and instead it seems like every new crop
of Republican politicians going into office is nuttier than the
last.
This is almost entirely due to religion. The past few decades
have been a stampede of religious fanatics into high office.
The results are disturbing: Congressional panels convened to
push the idea that contraception is some great moral evil,
Congress forbidding the EPA from consulting actual scientists
on science questions, anti-science fanatics heading science
committees, anything Michele Bachmann had to say during her
stint in Congress. Sure, some of the anti-fact ideology of the
Republican Party isnt about religious claimseven some non-
believing conservatives deny the reality of climate changebut
the Bible thumpers and their insistence that conviction matters
more than facts really helped get the Republican Party to a
place where politicians feel confident ignoring inconvenient
facts entirely.
9. Rape culture
Most of us are fully aware of how conservative Christian
hostility to reproductive rights and gay rights is setting back
progress, but its also true that Christianity plays a big role
in making it hard to address the problem of sexual assault.
Many conservative Christians eagerly spread the discredited
myth that women make up rape in order to cover up for having
consensual sex, which is what Rep. Todd Akin was doing when he
claimed women cannot get pregnant from legitimate rape. But
more than that, because of their hang-ups about sexuality,
conservative Christians generally get wrapped up in the idea
that the problem with sexual violence is less the violence part
and more the sex part.
Witness, for instance, National Review writer Carl Eric Scott,
when he writes about the problem of rape: He assumes that the
problem is not forced sex, but consensual sex, and his
solutions to the rape problem are all centered around trying
to discourage consensual sex. Its a little like arguing that
the way to stop a mugging problem is to discourage gift-giving.
Unfortunately, because they keep injecting their anti-sex
agenda into the discourse about rape, conservative Christians
continue to confuse the issue about what exactly causes rape,
by leading people to believe its just about too much sex when
its actually about power and domination.
https://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/9
_ways_christian_zealots_cripple_america_partner/
Christmas bully pulpit out of Fox News next holiday season.
9 ways Christian zealots cripple America
Heres a list of 9 terrible things religion has brought upon
American culture. To be clear, as many religious people also
have their problems with some of the excesses of Christianity
in America, this is more a reminder of the problems with those
excesses than some kind of slam on religious people generally.
1. War on Christmas hysteria
Its become an annual tradition, along with Christmas pop-up
shops and holiday shopping specials: Fox News trying to scare
their viewers into thinking the evil liberals are going to
steal Christmas from them. This year, so far, the culprits are
Muslims wanting their own holidays,women who dare complain if
holiday stress gets to them, and Obama for supposedly not being
gung-ho enough. (Reality check: The Obama White House has, if
anything, upped the ante for White House Christmas decorating.)
All of this dishonest panic about the imminent demise of
Christmas is little more than an excuse for conservative
Christians to get even more aggressive. By redefining every
reasonable limit on their proselytizing or attempt at being
more inclusive as somehow oppression, theyre able to shove
their religion on others in the guise of resisting this
imaginary oppression.
2. Terrible social safety net
The Jesus Christ of the Bible is forever going on about the
need to clothe and feed the poor, but the Jesus Christ of the
right-wing imagination is just as quick to kick a homeless
person as he is to give him a meal. One of the biggest projects
of fundamentalist Christianity of the past few decades is to
create a religious justification for slashing the social safety
net. Thats why conservative Christians tend to ignore the
hundreds of verses in the Bible about feeding the poor and
focus instead on a single verse, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which
reads, For even when we were with you, this we commanded you,
that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
This verse, in context, is little more than Apostle Paul laying
out the community-specific rules for a church during his
erabasically saying that everyone in the church should pitch
in and helpbut conservative Christians have exploited the hell
out of this verse to justify all manner of starving the poor
and casting them out to sleep in the cold. Megachurch pastor
John Hagee interprets the verse to mean that welfare should be
ended. Rep. Kevin Cramer whips the verse out to justify
starving SNAP-dependent children. And Rep. Stephen Fincher does
the same, even though he wasnt against taking millions in
government aid himself, in the form of farm subsidies.
3. Creationism
One of the most peculiar ways conservative Christians try to
assert cultural dominance in the U.S. is to reject the theory
of evolution and instead insist on some sort of Biblical
literalism that suggests humans were created by God instead of
evolved over time. Because of this, only Turkey has lower rates
than the U.S. in the Western world of acceptance of the theory
of evolution. Unfortunately, conservative Christians refuse to
limit themselves to simply believing weird stuff. Instead,
creationists are forever trying to find new ways to push their
religious beliefs off as science in science classrooms, even
though the courts have firmly told them they really cant be
doing this.
4. Battles over proselytizing in schools
Creationism is just a small part of a larger, ongoing hunger
the Christian right has for access to children in public
schools. The First Amendment should forbid exploiting the fact
that kids are required to go to school to foist Christian
beliefs on them, but the lure of all that captive audience
means conservative Christians keep trying.
In a recent example, the school district in Orange County,
Florida, thought theyd be clever and merely allow a
Christian group to pass out literature at the high schools, by
exploiting a loophole that says proselytizing is okay so long
as all groups get to it. Their bad faith, however, was swiftly
exposed when the Satanic Temple demanded equal access to the
children, forcing the school to reconsider their pro-
proselytization policy.
5. Convincing people to vote against their own self-interests
The 2014 midterm elections were strange, in that nearly every
time voters had a chance to vote directly on legislationsuch
as raising the minimum wagethey voted for the liberal side,
but somehow Republicans still swept the elections. There are
many complex reasons for this, but one of the most
straightforward is that this is the problem with religiosity.
Republicans thump the Bible hard and frequently, and that
causes a lot of people to believe that a vote for Republicans
is a Christian vote. The fact that Republicans refuse to walk
the walkattacking the poor to fluff up the coffers of the
wealthy every chance they getmatters little. The religiosity
is skin deep, but thats all it needs to be to get votes.
6. Christian entertainment
The sense that the world is corrupt and sinful has led many
conservative Christians to feel uncomfortable withor boycott
entirelymainstream music, TV shows and movies. This, in turn,
has created one of the great scourges of American culture:
explicitly Christian entertainment. When wholesomeness is
prioritized over quality, no big surprise, quality suffers.
Thus theres an endless outpouring of crappy Christian movies
(sometimes with Kirk Cameron!), terrible Christian music that
weakly rips off mainstream music, and even fourth-rate
Christian comedians peddling deeply unfunny humor. You almost
feel sorry for the people that have to endure this nonsense,
but then again, they bring it on themselves.
7. Faith healing
One of the saddest aspects of the grand American tradition of
competitive piety is how many charlatans gleefully exploit
peoples desire to be the most faithful to squeeze them for
their money and/or loyalty. Faith healing is one of the biggest
scams going, with the so-called healers conning the true
believers, who often have serious health problems, into
believing that all they need to get better is pray. In some
cases, the belief that all you need is prayer goes so deep that
parents have allowed their children to die of preventable
causes rather than take them to a doctor, a practice that is
sadly legal in many states.
8. The modern Republican Party
Many political observers are prone, at times, to wonder how it
is that the Republican Party of the mid-20th century seems to
have disappeared entirely. Gone are Republicans like Dwight
Eisenhower or Gerald Ford, who while certainly conservative, at
least seemed to feel somewhat beholden to things like facts
or desire to govern, and instead it seems like every new crop
of Republican politicians going into office is nuttier than the
last.
This is almost entirely due to religion. The past few decades
have been a stampede of religious fanatics into high office.
The results are disturbing: Congressional panels convened to
push the idea that contraception is some great moral evil,
Congress forbidding the EPA from consulting actual scientists
on science questions, anti-science fanatics heading science
committees, anything Michele Bachmann had to say during her
stint in Congress. Sure, some of the anti-fact ideology of the
Republican Party isnt about religious claimseven some non-
believing conservatives deny the reality of climate changebut
the Bible thumpers and their insistence that conviction matters
more than facts really helped get the Republican Party to a
place where politicians feel confident ignoring inconvenient
facts entirely.
9. Rape culture
Most of us are fully aware of how conservative Christian
hostility to reproductive rights and gay rights is setting back
progress, but its also true that Christianity plays a big role
in making it hard to address the problem of sexual assault.
Many conservative Christians eagerly spread the discredited
myth that women make up rape in order to cover up for having
consensual sex, which is what Rep. Todd Akin was doing when he
claimed women cannot get pregnant from legitimate rape. But
more than that, because of their hang-ups about sexuality,
conservative Christians generally get wrapped up in the idea
that the problem with sexual violence is less the violence part
and more the sex part.
Witness, for instance, National Review writer Carl Eric Scott,
when he writes about the problem of rape: He assumes that the
problem is not forced sex, but consensual sex, and his
solutions to the rape problem are all centered around trying
to discourage consensual sex. Its a little like arguing that
the way to stop a mugging problem is to discourage gift-giving.
Unfortunately, because they keep injecting their anti-sex
agenda into the discourse about rape, conservative Christians
continue to confuse the issue about what exactly causes rape,
by leading people to believe its just about too much sex when
its actually about power and domination.
https://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/9
_ways_christian_zealots_cripple_america_partner/