Tuesday, August 08, 2006

A Timely Indictment

OK ... he could probably find kinder-gentler language than "crackpot" but Walter's got some important points to make here!

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Crackpot Christianity and America's Current Moral Degeneration
By Walter C. Uhler

No one should decidedly adhere to an exposition of Scripture that with sure reason is ascertained to be false…in order that, from this, Scripture not be derided by the infidels.
- St. Thomas Aquinas [from Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, p. 300]

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil -- that takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
- Thomas Jefferson

Although he might not agree with my use of the term "Crackpot Christians," Kevin Phillips is certainly correct when he claims that "the radical side of U.S. religion has embraced cultural antimodernism, war hawkishness, Armageddon prophecy, and in the case of conservative fundamentalists, a demand for government by literal biblical interpretation." [American Theocracy, p. 100]

These Crackpot Christians are largely responsible for placing one of their own, George W. Bush, in the White House. Their astounding ignorance, unquestioning faith, war hawkishness, and fascination with the End of Time subsequently rendered them gullible to the Bush administration's lies and exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (especially the apocalyptic "mushroom clouds") and ties to al Qaeda. Thus, they cannot escape responsibility for supporting an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq.

Read it all here

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