How many posts at this site have been about the election? I haven’t counted them, but there are so many that it almost seems like an obsessive pursuit. It’s almost a little embarrassing, especially for a website that does not present itself as a current events or news commentary site.
On the other hand, the upcoming election is compelling to many of the authors at this site (I am the most guilty), because John McCain and Sarah Palin embody so many of the characteristics that inspired the creation of this blog in the first place.
Back in 2004, a handful of my acquaintances became emboldened by the national political mood and came fully out of the closet with their fundamentalist explanations for how the world works and how it must be changed. The positions were strikingly uninformed and one-sided. They were proud of their lack of any basis for the conclusions other than the Bible or their version of our “Christian” government. They showed no ability to understand the basis for the beliefs of people who disagreed with them. They quoted the Bible incessantly without showing any understanding of the historical development of the Bible as a book of stories, many of them entertaining or inspiring, but many others disturbing and self-contradictory.
I took advantage of this opportunity, just as I still do today, to question such beliefs. Because I was hearing such silliness out of the mouths of real human beings, I was inspired to write, research, converse, and write some more, in an attempt to figure out what was going on. I wanted to know if my worldview was utterly and starkly disconnected from that of fundamentalists and neocons or whether there was some possible translation by which we could still communicate with each other. In those early days of this blog, I remember feeling frustrated, sometimes angry with fundamentalism of all stripes. I now realize that good-hearted people who happened to have traditional religious beliefs (but who were not fundamentalists) got caught up in my frustration. It’s not that I don’t have differences of opinion with non-fundamentalists religious believers, but I have gradually come to the conclusion that it is fundamentalism that is the real problem. I am now fully aware that there are many good hearted people who sincerely believe in a sentient God who are my full-fledged allies, despite our many differences in the way we respond to the mysteries of life.
One way of illustrating my re-orientation is to consider that there are many agnostics, ignostics and atheists out there with whom I have less in common than with many good-hearted and thoughtful believers in gods and religions. This becomes all the more clear when I articulate what really should be our main concern as inhabitants on this planet: to get along with each other and to make the community a better place for all people. Yes, many nonbelievers are also good-hearted (Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism is one of my favorites [1]), but not all nonbelievers are good-hearted. The ultimate question is to ask with whom I would have more in common: a goodhearted thoughtful believer in “God” or a self-centered and intolerant nonbeliever? Because the answer to that question is clearly the former group, this means that I am not here to wage a war on religion itself. It is my firm belief that each of us acts on beliefs that we cannot prove. [2] My attack is on destructive impulses, regardless of the manner in which someone packages his or her destructive belief system.
I will continue to explore why people who claim to believe in God make their (to me untenable) supernatural claims. This is a fascinating topic that deserves the increased amount of discussion that it is now getting. It is clear to me, however, that thoughtful and kind-hearted people who believe in gods and who belong to religions are not a threat to my way of life, whereas fundamentalism is a threat because it shuts down the brain in a way that prevents meaningful discussion of real-life issues and all too often inspires heavy-handedness, reckless and insensitive conduct. Fundamentalism is usually based upon out-of-control anxiety and fear, hyper-groupishness, obeisance to authority, and intolerance to the differences of others. It is also clear to me that fundamentalism comes in a variety of flavors, the most visible being religious fundamentalism (there are Christian, Muslim versions, for example). There is also political fundamentalism, of course. Those who are neoconservatives represent an especially dangerous version. It is my belief that the highly visible decay of the United States is due to the rise of both political and religious fundamentalism.
I started this site back in 2006 because I realized that humans need a constant and a healthy dose of skepticism to keep themselves from falling prey to various types of fundamentalism. This self-vigilance needs to be unrelenting, but our inner personal battles also need to be fought intelligently. Those of us who are too skeptical become paralyzed with doubts and we thus fail to reach back out into the world to actually make the world a better place. For fundamentalists–those who reject skepticism–there will be lots of reaching out in the community because movement always seems like progress, but there is a huge difference between changing one’s community and intelligently changing one’s community. There is no better example than the US invasion of Iraq, where our political and social leaders were anxious for some sort of tangible activity that would “respond” to the 9/11 attacks. It is clear now that what we got is an extremely expensive (in terms of money and lives) endeavor which made the world and the United States worse off and completely failed to “respond” to the 9/11 attacks.
John McCain and Sarah Palin now assert that they are different than George W. Bush. It is equally clear that they wish to continue the same failed policies of the current Administration, especially the war-mongering. Based on the kinds of answers they are giving to questions posed to them, it is also clear that McCain and Palin are political fundamentalists who reject any evidence that does not fit in their pre-conceived notion of how the world works. We can’t afford any more leaders who reject the importance of inconvenient evidence. We desperately need leaders who are self-critical and who are not embarassed to admit this.
It is without apology, then, that we will continue to take an unrelenting side-excursion into politics, at least until November, because it is really not detour at all. Rather, the current campaign is allowing us to see, in a tangible and high-stakes way, the intellectual concerns raised in this site ever since we appeared in 2006.
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