"Republicans are not anti-science entirely," says Tina Dupuy, "they're anti . . . sometimes"
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In this cartoon by Brian Farrington, which accompanies Tina Dupuy's column on cagle.com, I especially admire the speaker, who could be the poster boy for modern-day American Crap Christianity."Republican politicians embrace a literal interpretation of the Bible when it comes to how we all got here. But their reading gets suddenly metaphorical when it comes to the parts in the Bible about helping the poor."
-- Tina Dupuy, in the column "Republicans Are Not
Anti-Science – They’re Just Pro-Politics"
Anti-Science – They’re Just Pro-Politics"
by Ken
I think of Daryl Cagle's cagle.com as in invaluable political-cartoon repository, but The Cagle Post indeed proclaims its mission as "Cartoons & Commentary," and I was charmed to encounter there a neat column by Crooks & Liars managing editor Tina Dupuy, "Republicans Are Not Anti-Science – They’re Just Pro-Politics."
Despite a global scientific consensus on evolution, Republican politicians embrace a literal interpretation of the Bible when it comes to how we all got here. But their reading gets suddenly metaphorical when it comes to the parts in the Bible about helping the poor.
Citing the Bible as an authority, the current incarnation of Grand Old Partiers tell Americans modern science doesn’t have enough evidence to prove things like evolution or global warming. But further tax cuts for the super rich? Bible is pretty clear about it being easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. And the Republicans are pretty clear on ignoring that part.
"Republicans are not anti-science entirely," Tina ventures, "they’re anti . . . sometimes."
How anti-science can you be with an iPhone in your pocket? It does take some specialization. A bit of partisan specialization. Like having seven out of eight GOP candidates proudly deny evolution as just a theory while debating in the hanger of Reagan’s Air Force One; never questioning aerodynamics or gravity -- which are also, technically, just theories. Texas Governor Rick Perry proudly proclaims his belief in vaccinations to thwart cervical cancer -- a very science-y stance [Or then again . . . ; don't disregard all that Big Pharma cash Governor Rick cultivates -- Ed.] -- but not in laws to thwart climate change. . . .
Republicans are for technology. They don’t want to actually live in the 18th century; they just want to idealize it. Those tri-corner hats were bought on the Internet. They boast proudly of having a bigger/better presence on Twitter and Facebook than Democrats. This is the party that sees endless uses for Predator drones and embraces all innovations with military applications. How exactly do you drug test welfare recipients without science? You don’t! How does one “drill, baby, drill,” frack or remove the tops of mountains without employing someone who knows their way around the periodic table? You don’t.
Actually, there's an often-observed distinction: that right-wingers hate science but love engineering, which is essentially the scientific work product once the scientists have finished with it, so that the knowledge appears to have come straight from God. Dare we call it "post-science"? (Please, I don't mean to disparage engineers, since the good ones do honor to their calling and are essential to our society. But engineering and engineers can alarmingly easily be misused.)
Tina suggests that the very competition-based "free market" that right-wingers worship operates according to the very principle of natural selection that their archvillain Charles Darwin proposed underlies evolution. I'm not so sure this is a direct contradiction, since Darwin after all didn't invent the idea of competition, but in any case if she thinks she can deflate right-wing blowhards with charges of hypocrisy, well, it's been tried. Right-wingers seem really not to care.
Oh, poor Rick Perry took flak for his drug-money-induced championing of forced vaccination of adolescent girls, just as he did for suggesting that the children of undocumented immigrants might safely be allowed some citizenly privileges, but that's not because he was being hypocritical, it's because he was, well, blaspheming. Doesn't the Bible say that all immigrants should be stoned to death, or at least sent back where they came from? (And we'll go out in the fields and our own produce, and we'll clean our own toilets, and perform our own hand labor for degradingly sub-market prices, etc. etc., thank you very much. Yeah, right!) It figures that Governor Perry, who you figure is as ignorant, dishonest, and plumb crazy as anybody in American politics, would find his standing threatened for not being ignorant, dishonest, and plumb crazy enough. Welcome to the 21st-century American political scape.
I don't want to quibble too much, though. The basic point about the two-facedness of American right-wing Christians is on the money.
As much as the GOP has a reputation for pandering to churchgoers, their platform contradicts biblical teachings. Jesus was not a banker or a CEO. He was labor. He was skilled labor at that (think AFL-CIO). But Republicans claim a monopoly on Christianity and use it (as we saw with Perry’s Texas prayer rally) as a prop. It’s part of the stagecraft for their political image. But just like science, when the Bible has something in it they don’t like, they just deny it and move on.
And ay number of people who've actually read the Bible have compiled lists of biblical requirements and prohibitions the Crap Christians "just deny and move on," but nobody's done it better than President Josiah Bartlett (Martin Sheen) and the West Wing writers in this gorgeous scene to which a reader happily recalled my attention awhile back.
Especially I don't want to quibble with Tina because she's nailed the Crap Christians on the central point: their disregard -- I would say contempt, or even outright hatred -- for everything Jesus stood for. The loathing of right-wing American Christians for the teachings of Jesus is so extreme and intense (they detest the guy with every fiber of their beings) as to qualify as pathological, even as they invoke his name at every turn and, as Tina points out, gleefully wave those Bibles they don't bother to read except via the Bible for Crackpots-type glosses.
My question for the Crap Christians -- going beyond the obvious "Why do you hate Jesus so?" (it is obvious, isn't it?) -- would be why they don't instead choose a teacher-role model-figurehead more in keeping with their actual views, which are so at odds with Jesus's. Darth Vader, maybe?
FURTHER THOUGHT: MAKING JESUS ACCEPTABLE
FOR THE RIGHT-WING CHRISTIAN "MIND"
I suppose if right-wingers really don't want to adopt a more suitable mascot for their beliefs, the next-best solution is to transform Jesus into, well, a bit more their kinda guy. I think it was in last year's 12 Days of Christmas Scorn (one of these days I'll dig out the precise link) that Noah reported on the effort now under way to "retranslate" the Bible to turn Jesus into a more macho kind of guy, someone who didn't turn no sissy cheek but instead really knew how to do unto others. It's sort of like having the mountain come to Mohammed -- oops, sorry!
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Labels: Christianity, Far Right
posted by KenInNY @ 6:00 PM
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8 Comments:
Who gives a fuck what the bible says? I sure don't.
It does absolutely no good to argue with conservatives on their playing field. I would even argue that doing so is harmful, because it legitimizes their ridiculous positions.
It's just like O'Bummer offering more and more "tax cuts". It doesn't do any good! Republicans will still hate him, the economy won't get better, and it legitimizes the reprehensible claim that all taxes are bad.
The plain truth is, tax cuts and wars are responsible for our bad economy. There's your culprit right there. Americans deserve what they get, because they voted for it.
I disagree with "me" below. I consider myself a member of the religious left and I can tell you unequivocally that Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, et al are PHONY Christians and not only that, they don't know diddly squat about the Bible. For example, Genesis was never intended to be construed as literal history. The next time someone tells you they are a "creationist", ask them which version of creation in Bible they believe in? There are two and they contradict on another. One in Chapter 1 and the other in Chapter 2 of Genesis. Put them side by side sometime and you will see what I mean.
Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, et al are PHONY Christians
Oh no they're not. They are very, very real insane christians. Just ask them - they'll tell you.
You can make that "no true Scotsman" argument all day long, but it doesn't change the fact that any religion can say anything, or that their interpretation of some hokey text is just as valid as yours.
And they don't know the bible? Who cares? Not their followers. (Not that it matters anyway, since it can be interpreted in unlimited different ways.) They don't know the Constitution either, but that too doesn't matter to the wingnuts.
It's Rick Perry-type christians and no other kind who are running the country. You can't deny it.
Well, that was pretty incoherent. One might think I'd gone 20+ hours without sleep (true).
Anyway, it doesn't do any good to say that so-and-so is not a "real" christian. Nor does it accomplish anything at all to use the bible as an argument for a political side, even to point out contradictions.
In my view, to do so is harmful, because you'll never convince people that their interpretation is incorrect; it simply legitimizes the illegitimate source of authority that gave us these kooks in the first place.
It's interesting that a group that ostensibly despises tyranny is so ready -- anxious even -- to practice the same "big lie" technique attributed to Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler: "Christians are the cause of all our troubles and all Republicans are radical Christians (whatever that means)!"
Your knee-jerk bigotry against Christianity (probably against anyone who would set behavioral rules for you) has caused you to brand all Christians as fruitcakes who handle snakes and rake in money.
That sounds like Hitler's/Goebbles' anti-Jewish pronouncements, unleashing attacks by thugs on families and businesses at first -- then the full Holocaust.
Your hallmark cartoon is the anti-Christian version of the Nazi caricatures of Jews. Are you suggesting that we rise up against Christians?
That'd be sad. Christians contribute more to the poor, in all parts of the country and the world, than any government or agency.
The Roman Catholic Church (we don't handle snakes but we do respect Jesus -- apparently another subversive activity to be punished by the Democrat loony fringe) is the greatest dispenser of funds to help the poor, enslaved, and ravaged than all governments' help combined.
The Bible is a good guideline. Indeed, that you are living in a free country is due to men and women who believed in the Bible's call for freedom and dignity for all people. Unfortunately, the strongest believers were not able to overcome the South's opposition to the anti-slavery wording in the Declaration of Independence; thus beginneth the South's, and later, the Democrats' departure from the basis of that founding document.
The same bunch of Christians wrote the Constitution, O thou who apparently forgot history class. Again, it is groups like yours that wish to deconstruct it to suit your personal beliefs and practices.
Yet the Constitution, while protecting all religion (or lack thereof), freedom of speech, and giving rights to all people (and terribly too late, to slaves) is under attack by minority and special interest groups -- taking your rights with them. Beware!
True believers in democracy -- Biblical or not -- do not attack and demean other people. Call yourselves something else; you have no concept of what the word "democracy" means.
You're just bigots looking for targets -- but I don't hate all y'all because I haven't met you yet. You hate people you've never seen. That must churn in your gut; holding a grudge is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die.
Thanks for setting out that case, David.
And I mean that sincerely, even though I have to say that absolutely everything in it strikes me as stupefyingly uninformed and moronic. I do find it interesting, though, that you so easily slip on the mantle of the Crap Christians. Notice I never referred to all Christians; that's all in your obviously guilty imagination. Nevertheless, if the mantle fits, I say wear it.
What you don't know about the Bible is, apparently, nearly everything. Have you ever actually read it -- and I don't mean just the juicy bits?
You might do well to pay just the teensiest bit of attention to the 24/7 intellectual and physical atrocities being perpetrated just in this country in the name of Christianity. Since you associate yourself with those people, you have the privilege of owning an inhuman extremism not remarkably different from any of the others infesting the globe.
And in the matter of things you're embarrassingly uninformed about, you might take the trouble to educate yourself about the nature of the religious beliefs of the writers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Cheers,
Ken
Your knee-jerk bigotry against Christianity ... has caused you to brand all Christians as fruitcakes
Actually, it was simple observation that did it.
And not just xtians either - all religious believers are insane as far as I can tell. The specifics - whether angels are blue or green, for instance - are totally irrelevant.
Speaking of Hitler (you brought him up, not me), he was a staunch Catholic. (You know, the church that not so very long ago was burning people at the stake in the town square.) In his own words:
"I am completely convinced that I am acting as the agent of God. I am now a Catholic and will always remain so."
"The Ten Commandments are a code of living to which there's no refutation. These precepts correspond to irrefutable needs of the human soul."
"... a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith... We need believing people."
"We were convinced that the population needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
"I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany." (Hey, that one sounds just like that other good xtian, George Bush!)
And since you also brought up the Founders of our country, here are a few more quotes:
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
- Thomas Paine
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."
- James Madison
"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies."
- Benjamin Franklin
There are plenty more. But why should I bother? You think I made them all up anyway. And even if I convinced you otherwise, you'd simply move the goalpost (I know how you people "think") by claiming that Jefferson really wasn't great, or Franklin was having a bad day, or that some other Founding Father really was a believer, or some other such nonsense.
I can be convinced that my position is wrong. Give me some good evidence, and I will reconsider. You refuse to be convinced, no matter what the evidence. That's why I say that religious belief is pretty good evidence of insanity.
Thanks, me -- well done!
Cheers,
Ken
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