It's Not Just Me

If I get passionate (alright, that's understating it quite a bit) about the issues of science, science education, and ideology, Pat again explains succinctly why these concerns are so important. This is about the continuation of our republic as a secular, religiously neutral, civil government without religious tests or compulsion.

The problem with this particular response to fundamentalist attacks on evolution is that it fails to grasp the fact that creationism is just one facet of a larger movement. The Discovery Institute, which presents itself to the public as an intelligent design advocacy group, is just one of the black pieces on the fundamentalist chess board -- science and scientists but opposing pawns.

The broad fundamentalist movement of which Discovery is a part is financed by Christian Reconstructionist Howard Ahmanson. The network of far right politicians, think tanks, and advocacy groups Ahmanson finances, work actively, if mostly under the radar, to replace America’s secular democracy with a Christian theocracy. It’s a movement former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges calls American fascism.

In many respects, Ahmanson’s Christian fundamentalism is a mirror image of the Islamic fundamentalism we saw at work in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Islamic fundamentalists fight to impose Sharia law. Their Christian fundamentalist counterparts demand imposition of Mosaic Law. Both dream of exacting the cruel justice of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

This has been in the works for a long, long time. I saw this coming when I was still young and I thought it had ended in late 1980s with the demise of "creation science" and the increasingly faint calls for the death penalty for gays, "rebellious" women and children, etc.

While the aims of Christian Reconstructionists may seem fantastic, they are nevertheless firmly held by adherents who work diligently to achieve them. Ahmanson has invested many millions from his large personal fortune to put these ideas into action.

One of those aims is the destruction of the religious neutrality required by diverse, secular, democratic societies like those found in the United States and Western Europe. Scientists, whether or not they’re conscious of it, are utterly dependent on this framework of religious neutrality to do their work. Serious science is inconceivable under fundamentalism in either of its Islamic or Christian incarnations.

There is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government, says Gary North the son-in-law of Ahmanson’s friend and mentor the Dominionist theologian Rousas Rushdoony.

So the next time I hear someone say, "Well, I'm a Christian and I'm not a fundamentalist," I'm going to ask that person "Well, I'm not a mail-order bride broker or a pedophile, either. Does that mean we should do nothing about these people? Given what the fundamentalists are actually trying to do to all of us, when does 'not being a fundamentalist' become complicity?"

(And to everyone who's worried about my hurt heart, let me tell you, I'm simply more honest and demonstrative and don't give a shit who I shock than the believers burying their hurt hearts deep inside because they think their religion mandates that they have to be joyful all the time.)

Shimmies to RedStateRabble.