Irrational Behavior

That I spend a ridiculous amount of my time commenting on right-wing sites could be attributed to two things. One, I am a masochist. The other, I am trying to figure out just what the hell makes these folks tick. After months of such 'research' I have found out what makes many of them tick and it ain't good; religion. And not just the old-time religion of my Republican parents--the kind that let you live and let live--oh no. Many, too many, use Biblical injunction as evidence for their reasoning on matters as significant as reproduction rights to economics. The result is that when pushed to supply "evidence" backing their opinions, they resort to everything from quoting scripture, to quoting winger ideologues (whose reasoning also includes scripture or other ideologues) to personal attacks. In short, nothing useful to a rational person is backing up most of their opinions.

In fact, these folks live to vote so their irrational prattle will be codified, creating self-justifing evidence for their opinions. Already their favorite evidence of being "right" is having won the White House, Senate and Congress and although not an argument proving their beliefs are sound (and some of us are still out on just whether they 'won' the White House or not) it creates a hard point to dismiss.

Today Alternet has published an article on a similar topic. Although their piece goes more to the matter of White House backing of Intelligent Design in combination with the science community's silence on the same, they reiterate what I am finding myself--those influences are contributing to a "fourteenth century" atmosphere in America and its developing policies. I've snipped the points I find most chilling below:

According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution.

As the President is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance.

Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma.

More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States -- in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

and most importantly this...

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.