Revelations

Anyone who follows progressive thought knows Bill Moyers, who, until recently, hosted a weekly series called "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. He's a great journo and thinker, which causes me to be even more freaked out by this recent article, called "There Is No Tomorrow".

It's a commentary on the rise of Christian fundamentalists in the halls of American power, and asks some sobering questions about where our country is headed.

Here's a couple representative graphs:

"Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the
facts.

[snip]

"Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought."

I'm not going to lie, this stuff freaks me out. As a rational secularist, I can't fathom tying my future expectations to the sort of religious/philosophical viewpoint Moyers describes, much less see my democracy become a theocracy. To discount scientific evidence in favor of biblical prediction/explanation (hello evolution v. creationism) strikes me as not only intellectually dishonest, but also willfully ignorant. The Christian evangelicals who espouse this line of thought are great threats to our Democracy and real threats to the progressive legacy of this country. In my mind, their Armageddon/Doomsday philosophy is not too far from that of the Muslim radicals who attacked us on 9/11. They go blindly forward, casting stones and passing judgement (often in direct contradiction with the teachings of Jesus himself), eager to see those who disagree fall burning into hell as they ascend righteously into the presence of the Lord.

Is that too shrill? I can never tell...