Why aren’t Republicans more afraid? The entire premise of both the government shutdown and the threats to force the government into debt default is that Democrats care more about the consequences of these actions than the Republicans do. Republicans may go on TV and shed crocodile tears about national monuments being shut down, but the act isn’t really fooling the voters: The only way to understand these fights is to understand that the GOP is threatening to destroy the government and the world economy in order to get rid of Obamacare (as well as a panoply of other right wing demands). Just as terrorists use the fact that you care more about the lives of the hostages than they do to get leverage, Republican threats rely on believing they don’t care about the consequences, while Democrats do.

So why aren’t they more afraid? Businessweek, hardly a liberal news organization, said the price of default would be “a financial apocalypse” that would cause a worldwide economic depression.  This is the sort of thing that affects everyone. Having a right wing ideology doesn’t magically protect your investments from crashing alongside the rest of the stock market.

The willingness of Republicans to take the debt ceiling and the federal budget hostage in order to try to extract concessions from Democrats is probably the most lasting gift that the Tea Party has granted the country. More reasonable Republican politicians fear being primaried by Tea Party candidates. A handful of wide-eyed fanatics in Congress have hijacked the party. The Tea Party base and the hard right politicians driving this entire thing seem oblivious to the consequences. It’s no wonder, since so many of them—particularly those in leadership—are fundamentalist Christians whose religions have distorted their worldview until they cannot actually see what they’re doing and what kind of damage it would cause.

The press often talks about the Tea Party like they’re secularist movement that is interested mainly in promoting “fiscal conservatism”, a vague notion that never actually seems to make good on the promise to save taxpayer money. The reality is much different: The Tea Party is actually driven primarily by fundamentalist Christians whose penchant for magical thinking and belief that they’re being guided by divine forces makes it tough for them to see the real world as it is.

It’s not just that the rogue’s gallery of congress people who are pushing the hardest for hostage-taking as a negotiation tactic also happens to be a bench full of Bible thumpers. Pew Research shows that people who align with the Tea Party are more likely to not only agree with the views of religious conservatives, but are likely to cite religious belief as their prime motivation for their political views.  White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to approve of the Tea Party. Looking over the data, it becomes evident that the “Tea Party” is just a new name for the same old white fundamentalists who would rather burn this country to the ground than share it with everyone else, and this latest power play from the Republicans is, in essence, a move from that demographic to assert their “right” to control the country, even if their politicians aren’t in power.

It’s no surprise, under the circumstances, that a movement controlled by fundamentalist Christians would be oblivious to the very real dangers that their actions present. Fundamentalist religion is extremely good at convincing its followers to be more afraid of imaginary threats than real ones, and to engage in downright magical thinking about the possibility that their own choices could work out very badly. When you believe that forcing the government into default in an attempt to derail Obamacare is the Lord’s work, it’s very difficult for you to see that it could have very real, negative effects.

It’s hard for the Christian fundamentalists who run the Republican Party now to worry about the serious economic danger they’re putting the world in, because they are swept up in worrying that President Obama is an agent of the devil and that the world is on the verge of mayhem and apocalypse if they don’t “stop” him somehow, presumably be derailing the Affordable Care Act. Christian conservatives such as Ellis Washington are running around telling each other that the ACA  will lead to “the systematic genocide of the weak, minorities, enfeebled, the elderly and political enemies of the God-state.” Twenty percent of Republicans believe Obama is the Antichrist.Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner argued that Obama is using his signature health care legislation to promote “the destruction of the family, Christian culture”, and demanded that Christians “need to engage in peaceful civil disobedience against President Obama’s signature health care law”.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined in, demanding that the Republicans shut down the government rather than let Obamacare go into effect. The excuse was their objection to the requirement that insurance make contraception available without a copayment, saying ending this requirement matters more than “serving their own employees or the neediest Americans.”

The Christian right media has been hammering home the message that Christians should oppose the Affordable Care Act. Pat Necerato of the Christian News Network accused the supporters of the law of committing idolatry and accused people who want health care of being covetous. The Christian Post approvingly reported various Christian leaders, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, saying things like the health care law is “a profound attack on our liberties” and lamented “Today is the day I will tell my grandchildren about when they ask me what happened to freedom in America.”

Some in the Christian right straight up believe Obamacare portends the end times. Rick Phillips, writing for Christianity.com, hinted that Obamacare might be predicted in Revelations, though he held back from saying that was certain. Others are less cautious. On the right wing fundamentalist email underground, a conspiracy theory has arisen claiming that Obamacare will require all citizens to have a microchip implanted. While it’s completely untrue, many Christians believe that this means the “mark of the beast” predicted in Revelations that portends the return of Christ and the end of the world.

In other words, the Christian right has worked itself into a frenzy of believing that if this health care law is implemented fully, then we are, in fact, facing down either the end of American Christianity itself or quite possibly the end times themselves. In comparison, it’s hard to be too scared by the worldwide financial collapse that they’re promising to unleash if the Democrats don’t just give up their power and let Republicans do what they want. Sure, crashing stock markets, soaring unemployment, and worldwide economic depression sounds bad, but for the Christian right, the alternative is fire and brimstone and God unleashing all sorts of hell on the world.

This is a problem that extends beyond just the immediate manufactured crisis. The Christian right has become the primary vehicle in American politics for minimizing the problems of the real world while inventing imaginary problems as distractions. Witness, for instance, the way that fundamentalist Christianity has been harnessed to promote the notion that climate change isn’t a real problem. Average global temperatures are creeping up, but the majority of Christian conservatives are too worried about the supposed existential threats of abortion and gay rights to care.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that it’s easy for Christian conservatives to worry more about imaginary threats from Obamacare than it is for them to worry about the very real threat to worldwide economic stability if the go along with their harebrained scheme of forcing the government into default. To make it worse, many have convinced themselves that it’s their opponents who are deluded. Take right wing Christian Senator Tom Coburn, who celebrated the possibility of default back in January by saying it would be a “wonderful experiment”. Being able to blow past all the advice of experts just to make stuff up you want to believe isn’t a quality that is unique to fundamentalists, but as these budget negotiations are making clear, they do have a uniquely strong ability to lie to themselves about what is and isn’t a real danger to themselves and to the world.

Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist. She’s published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check and Slate’s Double X. More Amanda Marcotte.

Dispelling the myth of a ‘Christian nation’

Charles C. Haynes

Culture warriors, pseudo-historians and opportunistic politicians have spent the last several decades peddling the myth that America was founded as a “Christian nation.”

The propaganda appears to be working.

A majority of the American people (51%) believes that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the State of the First Amendment survey released last month by the First Amendment Center.

Because language about a Christian America has long been a staple of Religious Right rhetoric, it’s not surprising that acceptance of this patently false interpretation of the Constitution is strongest among evangelicals (71%) and conservatives (67%).

But even many non-evangelical Christians (47%) and liberals (33%) appear to believe the fiction of a constitutionally mandated Christian America is historical fact.

Forgive me for being snippy, but read the Constitution.

Nowhere will you find mention of God, Christ or any intention to found a Christian nation.

On the contrary, the only reference to religion in the Constitution – before the addition of the Bill of Rights – comes in Article VI:

“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

This means that political power in the United States may never be limited to people of one faith – a necessary condition for a “Christian nation” – but must be open to people of all faiths or none.

Barring a religious test for office sparked widespread outrage in 1787, especially in states with religious tests designed to make sure that only Protestants or Christians would ever be allowed to hold elected office.

But in their wisdom, the Framers in Philadelphia knew that the time had come to break from the precedents of history and bar any religious group from ever imposing itself on the nation using the engine of government.

Even this wasn’t good enough for Thomas Jefferson and other founders who wanted to prohibit any and all entanglement of government and religion in the new nation.

In 1791, the opening words of the First Amendment – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” – were added to the Constitution, further ensuring a fully secular state with a guarantee of religious freedom for all.

Of course, some of the founders (not unlike some Americans today) worried that “no establishment” might lead to a breakdown in Christian values in American culture. Alexander Hamilton, for example, contemplated the creation of a “Christian Constitutional Society” to promote Christian virtues and principles among the people.

But in spite of this anxiety, drafters of the Constitution took the radical step of founding the first nation in history with no established religion.

Truth be told, they had little choice.

Religious divisions among the many Protestant sects in 18th century America were deep and abiding. Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists and many others fought bitterly over what it meant to be “Christian” – although almost all could agree that “Papists” (Roman Catholics) were followers of the anti-Christ.

In other words, religious diversity at America’s founding made a necessity of religious freedom because no one group had the power or the numbers to impose its version of true faith – Christian or otherwise – on all others.

It is worth remembering, however, that principles as much as practical politics inspired many of our founders to define religious freedom as requiring no establishment of religion.

Roger Williams, to cite the earliest and best example, founded the colony of Rhode Island in 1636 out of his conviction that only by erecting a “wall or hedge of separation” between the “garden of the church” and “the wilderness of the world” would it be possible to protect liberty of conscience as required by God.

Religious freedom, Williams argued, is itself a Christian principle.

Any attempt to establish a Christian nation, therefore, always has been and always will be unjust, dangerous and profoundly un-Christian.

How do Secular Humanists develop their ethics? This is the most consistently repeated question about Secular Humanism. Theists, in particular, have difficulty with the notion that ethics need not come from a set of rules laid down in an ancient book. Even Secular Humanists, put on the spot, have some difficulty giving a clear and convincing answer. Often they are stuck saying, “Well, we just are moral.”

Secular Humanists actually develop ethics using three characteristics of human beings: a kind of ethical tripod, if you will.

The first of these characteristics is a trait that evolved in all vertebrate species, a long time ago. When primates do something positive for fellow primates, their brains get a little charge of dopamine. Apparently, this happens in all vertebrates, but for some reason seems more pronounced in primates. This chemical gives pleasure so ancient human ancestors tended to do positive things for each other because of this reward even though they did not understand it. Modern neurological research supports this idea in both human and non-human primates.

The effect of this trait for human beings is that they are social, preferring to work positively with others and to co-operate in positive social ways.

The second of these characteristics, tribalism, is also an evolved trait. It, too, is present throughout the primate family, although it seems somewhat diminished in bonobos. Tribalism is the tendency to form small groups or sets of primates that co-operate with members of the same tribe, but not so much with other tribes

Tribalism seems to be the result of finite limits to food resources for foragers and hunter-gatherers. Without the science of cultivation to enhance food production, ancient human ancestors needed a minimum area for foraging and, later hunter-gathering. This, combined with relatively limited ability to travel long distances, also tended to isolate social groups geographically. This tribalism continues in modern ape species. Chimpanzees, for example, are very tribal with well establish territories. Their tribes often get into serious conflict along the borders of adjoining territories. Sound familiar?

This trait, then, in its extreme form, is a negative characteristic that can cause real conflict between different tribes. In the modern world, human beings use different terms for tribes-nations, churches, clubs, and so on, but these entities retain most of the characteristics of tribes.

There are, then, two seemingly opposing instincts: dopamine addiction and tribalism. How can Secular Humanists claim to develop ethics or moral codes from that teeter-totter?

Enter the third, predominantly human, characteristic, reason. Human beings have the most highly developed ability to reason on the planet (until cetaceans mount a good lobby group). Sophisticated human language skills, including the tendency to think in word form as well as communicate with each other give human beings considerable control over the first two traits.

This third characteristic allows human beings to balance the two other characteristics. Yes, balance is necessary. One might think that human beings would be better off abandoning tribalism completely.

However, without it, dopamine pursuit would lead to gullibility and make human beings very vulnerable. Pulling a thorn out of a lion’s paw is a noble idea, but in a purely dopamine-driven psychology very dangerous without the due caution one would need to pull it off — sorry out.

Controlled tribalism serves a purpose. It makes human beings sufficiently wary of unknown people and circumstances to reduce their vulnerability. This is the basis of the street smarts that help a child resist helping the stranger to look for the puppy.

When reason fails, either dopamine pursuit or tribalism takes over. The result is that human beings become either victims or predators and ethics go out the window. That is essentially what happens if tribalism is strong enough to give someone a dopamine response from following a dogma without the balance of reason.

Secular Humanists use reason to develop ethical guidelines balancing the dopamine reflex and tribalism to make moral decisions. This isn’t necessarily easy and not always successful, but the technique works at least as well as the technique of following a fixed set of rules set down in the past, often with tribalism as the predominant consideration.

Secular Humanists do not rely on a dogma-based answer to an ethical question, but will take time to apply reason to make the best possible decision under the circumstances present.

April 2013

A chilling exposé of the well-funded, highly coordinated effort by Christian Nationalists to use public schools to advance a fundamentalist agenda

In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club, which is sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, bills itself as an after-school program of “Bible study.” But Stewart soon discovered that the Club’s real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity and encourage them to proselytize to their “unchurched” peers, all the while promoting the natural but false impression among the children that its activities are endorsed by the school.

Astonished to discover that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed this—and other forms of religious activity in public schools—legal, Stewart set off on an investigative journey to dozens of cities and towns across the nation to document the impact. In this book she demonstrates that there is more religion in America’s public schools today than there has been for the past 100 years. The movement driving this agenda is stealthy. It is aggressive. It has our children in its sights. And its ultimate aim is to destroy the system of public education as we know it.

Katherine Stewart has written for The New York Times, Reuters, andMarie Claire. She lives with her family in New York City.

December 31, 2012 at 3:45 pm
By Christine Ferretti
The Detroit News

The founder of Domino’s Pizza won’t be subject to a new federal healthcare law requiring contraception coverage while a lawsuit he filed challenging the new mandate is pending, a judge has ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff of the Eastern District of Michigan on Thursday granted an emergency motion by Tom Monaghan to temporarily halt the enforcement of the federal Health and Human Services mandate.

Monaghan, a devout Roman Catholic, and the Domino’s Farms Corp., sued the federal government alleging the law violates their rights and has asked the court to strike it down.

“It was the best case scenario for us,” said Erin Mersino of the Ann Arbor-based Thomas More Law Center, who is the lead attorney on Monaghan’s case. “It was a favorable opinion, and we are very happy for our clients.”

The lawsuit is among 11 others nationwide challenging the new mandate that became law in August.

Zatkoff’s ruling halts enforcement of the mandate against Monaghan and his company, of which he is the sole owner and shareholder.

Domino’s Farms Corp. manages an office complex owned by Monaghan and is not affiliated with Domino’s Pizza. Monaghan sold the pizza company in 1998.

Temporary restraining orders have been granted by federal judges in eight of the other pending cases, three other requests to halt implementation of the mandate have been denied. None of the cases have been resolved yet, Mersino said.

Monaghan in his Dec. 14 lawsuit says contraception isn’t health care but a “gravely immoral” practice.

Monaghan offers health insurance that excludes contraception and abortion for employees. The new federal law requires employers to offer insurance including contraception coverage or risk fines.

The federal government has said the contraception directive benefits women.

Mersino said the new law would have been effective for Monahan at the beginning of his company’s new plan year, which is Jan. 1.

Mersino added based on the reviewed discovery so far, the court has said there’s a likelihood of success in Monahan’s case based on its merits.

cferretti@detnews.com

(313) 222-2069

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20121231/BIZ/212310396#ixzz2Gsp1pP78