Wednesday, January 21st, 2015
Stephan:
You have heard me say this, but let me condense the proposition to make the argument clear. Fundamentalism, I think is a form of mental illness, couched in a religious context, arising from fear, and particularly the nonlocal consciousness presentiment of what is coming with climate change. People's amygdalas kick in and it is fight or the flight. Rational thought stops. Fear is easy to manipulate for people interested in power, which is why the economic Right favors and funds their fear filled minions. You see this clearly in this report, written by a former well-known Theocratic Rightist.
The characteristics of this syndrome are a sense of self-righteousness, a certitude that one is correct and chosen, yet with a carefully cultivated sense of persecution. There is also severe sexual dysfunction, and an obsession in men over controlling women's sexuality, and a fear of homosexuality.
The dogmas and cultural protocols may differ but, in whatever form it occurs -- Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu -- it is existentially the same, and is the source of most of the mass violence in the world today. This essay presents the Christian religious gestalt aspect of this syndrome very coherently.
Not many seemed to have noticed but I think it is worth remembering that terrorists used to be Communists, and they made no reference to religion at all.
Credit: Shutterstock
As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means.
The Christian home-school movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. The movement saw itself as separating from evil “secular” America. Therein lies the heart of the Tea Party, GOP and religious right’s paranoid view of the rest of us. And since my late father and evangelist
Francis Schaeffer and I were instrumental in starting the religious right — I have since left the movement and recently wrote a book titled “
Why I Am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace“
– believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home school movement […]
That was about the best piece on the subject that I have read, so far.