Another scary article

From my friend Domenic:

"It keeps getting scarier when you read how much religion there is in politics now. I have a hard time seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Although I do feel if more people knew how much power these religious extremists had, they would be more pissed off. The ultimate fight against this radical power has to be the battle to stop "scare" and"manipulation". People really fall victim to the whole "you aren't a patriot if you aren't with us", and "if you believe in Jesus you better vote for people who want the Baptist Council Chief to have a Cabinet level appointment". Obviously this concern over manipulation and scare isn't a new one, but every once a while its got to hit you: this battle is REALLY hard to fight. Calling into question peoples patriotism and faith is a low low move, but it does work really well. How do we get around it? It gets really frustrating to me."

Besides donating to the opposistion, reading and passing on the truth about these nutcases and the GOP/Christo-fascist agenda, and volunteering your time to help rational, sane, reality-based people win elections, I don't know how to get around it. I have conversations with two people in my office that are just as fundamentally insane as Brownback is and our conversations would frighten you. Example: We actually had a conversation about Noah's Ark not actually happening and the frustration level of the person I was trying to talk sensibly to rose to a level of steam coming out of her ears. "How did he feed the animals?" "How big was the Ark?" "It must have been huge, where did they get the wood or labor force to put it together?" "What did he feed the animals?" "What about the animals that eat other animals?" "How did he maintain healthy conditions for the two (assumed already healthy) picks of every animal on planet Earth during a forty day voyage through nonstop rain?" Not able to answer any of these questions with any logic, facts, etc, she ended up leaving the room in disgust. That was not my goal, my goal was to say "Listen, you are a critical thinker in every other aspect of your life. So why are you a follower in this case, putting your brain on autopilot to be filled with such fantasy?"

Another example is the evolution "debate" that I had with another co-worker, who not only did not believe that we did not evolve, but refused to accept scientific evidence that we did because "The Bible says we are made in God's image and we are not monkeys." Ahhh... Que? Didn't God also create monkeys? Have you personally seen God? What does he look like?

Yeah "really hard" and "frustrating" are only the beginning to describe what this is like.