How the Liars Get Away With So Much, Part 3

Human history can be read as one long struggle away from superstition and toward scientific fact.

The creation myths of religion explained natural phenomena to primates who had evolved brains complex enough to ask why.

Tiny populations always on the brink of extinction from the next earthquake or attack by neighboring tribe needed to believe that supernatural help would ensure they survived.

Societies struggling to establish codes of conduct found that bribing with heaven and threatening with hell was an easier way to keep people in line than the slow, patient teaching of ethical behavior.

For thousands of years of recorded history, established religion has fought scientific discovery and humanistic ethics that exposed religious superstition as irrelevant at best and destructive at worst.

That today, 150 years after Darwin revealed the basic principles of evolution, the freakazoids still have the power to demand their young-earth creationism be taught in schools next to the scientific fact of evolution is an abomination.

But worse than an abomination, it establishes the principle that superstitious belief trumps fact and reality.

And that self-appointed spokesmen for that superstitious belief wield power greater than scientific or political authority.

It's no coincidence that over the past 40 years, the religious denominations that most prized rational thought and keeping religion separate from the public sphere - mainstream protestants, reform jews and liberal muslims - have lost members and influence to the freakazoids demanding a return to the Dark Ages.

Science is hard. Facts are unforgiving. School is boring. Figuring out the right thing to do on your own is complex and frightening.

So much easier to just let the man in the pulpit tell you how to behave. And such a small step from following his advice on behavior and morals to letting him tell you what to do. What to think. Who to vote for.

Religious leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who used his moral authority to demand and achieve political progress in civil rights, are fewer today and drowned out by the voices of hate.

Believers who think for themselves do still exist. But their very reliance on cold facts and membership in the reality-based community means they will always lose out to the fear-mongering, emotion-based freakazoids.

Which is why the greatest liars among our political "leaders" always couch their lies in appeals to superstition. Global warming is a hoax - only god can change the climate. Homosexuality is a sin - god says so. Men must protect women from their poor judgement - god decreed it. People are poor or sick or disabled because god made them that way.

For 400 years, since the beginning of the Enlightenment, scientists and other rational thinkers have tried to give religion the benefit of the doubt, even though religion has rarely returned the favor. Belief and fact can co-exist, the peacemakers said, as long as each keeps to its own realm.

But the freakazoids do not believe in coexistence of any kind. Science, fact and freethinking must surrender completely to superstition.

It's the same all-or-nothing mindset that drives repug obstruction in Congress, and justifies every lie.

Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....