A U.S. Science and Education Repression/Regression Theory
First Posted on Medium.
When science and education are held back by dogmatic and despotic ideas, we forfeit a better future. Others will pass us by as we cling to yesteryear perspectives, and built on sand falsehoods. Fear of change, and the slow-roll of new knowledge has been the bane of our advancement. Our guardrails may seem wide spread and favorable, but insinuating forces are making strides to narrow our growth, and disallow much flex to a newer, better society.
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My science and education repression and regression theory is based on how the American political process and government incorporates its religious, economic, and historical mythos. The United States has many idiosyncratic religious, economic, historical, and political variances. While not all are totally unique to our nation, the twists, turns, schisms, and divisions produced are not easily compared to another, or revealed in one simplistic illustration. My goal is to bring the collaborators together beneath one plausible, and dryly understood umbrella.
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Disclaimer: A non-scientist writing about science is risky. My writing here resembles that dilemma. However, if I stay out of the deep end, there can be value in an amateur science sleuth explaining to others who want to understand the basic characteristics of science. I hope my perspective hits a proper place between an overwhelming, jargon filled peer-reviewed article, and getting mostly bad information from your wing nut uncle Bob. “Sorry Bob. Nothing personal.… Possibly.” In addition, the main reason for my short, science explainers is to provide a clearer reference for the repression and regression caused by religion infused government. And F.Y.I, I am not too fond of religion in science or in public schools, which should be the main schooling for America’s children. In this essay, I explain why. Hopefully it will not seem like I am trashing religion. Though being forthright will tend to push it into that region.
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Below, I explain how religion has stalled, and in some major ways, held our nation back, especially in science and education. The purposely undefined, and too often covertly implemented, faith based philosophy is unhelpfully intertwined in our government structures and decisions. Many other governmental interactions are also constitutionally suspect.
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After the introduction, I get to my science explainers. I explore why some popular science concepts are often misunderstood, and how those misunderstandings are abused to deny the value of science in certain instances, areas of life, and government. After the explainers, I dig into various science and education related social issues.
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The mixing of religion and science education is very problematic. There are two levels where it has an impact. In the classroom is the most obvious, but our political environment has made it a national problem. Whereas the conflict between church and state may be less pronounced locally due to familiarity. If an American lives in a community where one religion plays at least a semi-dominate role, concerns about its influence may be reduced, and the citizen’s objectivity is diminished, due to generations of inculcation.
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We are constantly bombarded with farcical and harmful canards with many being wrapped in a religious dogma that creates the glue for them to stick tight as well as the fundamentalist mob incite. This kind of religiously entwined propaganda undermines how we approach policies and investments in scientific research, and education of all kinds.
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Additionally, other disciplines like medicine, economics, history, and social science get ground into the same sticky glue and gum gun. Conservatives wrap as many disciplines and policies as possible into the religious sticky wicket, wacko thicket. By forcing church into state, they desire to enflame the populous. No advanced, and future-oriented democracy can survive, let alone thrive as a religious themed state.
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It begs the question, what kind of secularist infidel, Sunni, Shia, christian, and Yazidi fatalist faction contraption are conservatives looking to gin up? Are we to do the shock and awful done by our imperialistic military complex in the indefensible war against Iraqis? Instead of bringing us closer together as a nation of diverse peoples, christian nationalists are regularly setting off factional I.E.D. disunion detonations, and national suicide disinvestments to disrupt our march towards an ever more welcoming, and knowledge widening society.
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Also calling the secular society a religion has been the conservatives, especially the christian nationalists, approach to demeaning the value of a secular space, thereby dismissing it outright. Yet, the secularism as religion scare tactic trope is an ironic way to lambaste liberals, and dissuade us from promoting the term, or the ideas of secular society; does it mean all religions are now scary? Maybe every religion is no different than any other concept, so religion is redundant or pointless. Basically, this reducing of every asymmetric societal structure to a religion is undermining the very idea of a faith in god. Though I digress…
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While expecting a utopia any time soon is Catatonia Dreaming, driving us towards disunion by demanding we accept a specific faction, or sect of christianity as our Dear Leaders is plain wrong. It is subversive to the basic understanding of a free society. Resting on general morals, coinciding with religious ideas is a fine national value system; being squeezed into someone’s dogma food-can brand is not.
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I see absolutely no freedom under someone else’s religious dogmas. Unless it is my cannibal cult that the nation must worship… Start with the last bite rites, which includes… Blessed are the rite spices, and the classic, Adam’s rib sauce. After stuffing with headcheese, give to Caesar what is a dressing baste, lodge an apple in the mouth, and add a laurel wreath garnish… I digress again…
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The exaggerated scenario above makes clear why christianity, or any other religion cannot be forced into our teaching of science, and public education. It just cooks up a mixed up disruptive and distasteful oral, visual, written, and societal presentation. Your god does not run schools, humans do, which means your expression of god. “Your” god is no more qualified than mine to run schools or do science. We should keep our gods in our churches, and the works of our churches, not in OUR public schools, meaning anywhere in the U.S., or in science classes specifically.
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Religious Mixology Fosters Pseudoscience.
Will some believers continue to mix science with religion far into the future? Probably. Is it unconstitutional in all cases? No. Yet, except for ethics and morals, mixing in religion is too often a cruelly exercised interference, or done to muck up the works as a political expedient, not to honor god. For example, abortion may be morally objectionable from your religious perspective, but lying about the science is anti-the-god-of-the-bible, anti-reality, and a despicable way to influence the public.
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How do you develop, discover, or even freely discuss new ideas, science or otherwise, when someone’s religion controls society, and it already knows all the answers, or has ultimate parameters where considering must end? Church and state mixologist apologists fear this kind of freedom. If that is not the case, why is a secular society bad? Secular does not mean eradication of religion; it means please keep your oil out of my water.
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Those who want to force oil and water to mix, fear their own mind space. The sectarian zealots, who point out scary instances where secularism supposedly went wrong, forget religion has had its own similar instances of the very scary. Most of the worst instances date back a ways because of the positive and transformational influences, over time, of a secular democratic, pluralistic, diverse society. Remember that few colonies, later states, welcomed catholics until after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, while hate of the papists continued throughout the nation until five or six decades ago. The Mormons were also violently persecuted early on.
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Church and state mixing it up apologists must over-rage at the machine, and undermine science, education, and other secular concepts to keep the ground under and around Americans uncomfortably and constantly undulating. These measures pushed by anti-secular, disunionist, religious zealots insure our separation as a nation. How does confusing Americans about what is true, and making nearly half of us angry at the state, in every way possible, allow and help us to figure out our way forward? It does not. It is a treacherous attack on the future of our union.
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We find the problem of education repression and regression in scientific studies, which effects our understanding of gender, race, religion, and associated norms and policies. Since a big role of science is the educational narrative of physical discoveries, it has come up against many religious faiths in a number of ways, and at various times. Some contradictions caused by new discoveries are pushed aside quickly by theologians, others slowly build their defiant structures, and a few raise an out-of-proportion ire immediately.
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The duo of Copernicus, and Galileo, hold the earliest most famous, or infamous position of church confrontation, back around 1600. The idea attacked was for removing earth, and humankind from the center of things in the solar system. Darwin’s Natural Selection theory is a couple centuries more recent in 1859. Even though the theory of evolution still has many anti-science detractors, human-caused climate change, or global warming, is our own era’s religiously disputed theory.
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Any Science Presenter or Presentation Can Mislead.
The challenge with many scientific theories –– that can lead to great gobs of misinterpretation –– include us not fully knowing the initial beginnings of the science, or the improvements or corrections made over time by the same, or different scientists. Religious apologists will often run with inaccurate, or overblown representations of these misinterpretations, or historical gaps in scientific discoveries.
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For example, Darwin’s ideas took decades to sink in, before future scientists took up the concepts, and used his foundation to make the theory more sound, and specific. This means if you only look at Darwin’s work, you have just a partial understanding of a very robust evolution theory. These historical gaps are used by others to misrepresent evolution and other scientific ideas.
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Just one element, or one sentence in a book explaining the theory, in either area, can be inflamed out of proportion to the theory itself. In Descent of Man Darwin made some terrible statements about race and class related to his reading of Malthus, known for his ideas on overpopulation. Yet scientists are human most of their lives, and are not always as good at knowing the science other scientists pursue. Maybe what Malthus meant was misinterpreted by critics who had an ax to grind. We must be careful in our consumption of positive and critical reviewers, that includes me. In addition, statements made by a scientist who was instrumental in creating a theory can be true or false, and exactly what the critics say they said, but the value of any theory is not necessarily connected to those statements whether they are accurate or inaccurate, or inflammatory or not. Science transcends individuals.
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Imagine I am the worst individual on the planet today, but my theories are the main reason for curing every form of cancer one hundred years from now. Future historians may never want to promote my name, but my theories would be studied in every science class, and by every medical student until the end of time.
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So anytime you see or hear someone disparage science by what one scientist said or wrote, realize they are creating bad science at that moment. The science of anything is not one individual, the errant comment of a scientist related to a theory, nor the scientist who came up with it. Guilt by association only makes the scientist who is associated with going off the deep end guilty, not the science. Only other good, honest, aggressively peer reviewed, science has the potential to make older theories guilty of incorrectness.
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Next, religious groups inappropriately mix up things when they politicize terms like Darwinism, trying to turn the science of evolution into a bugaboo or epithet. These juvenile responses to, and reductive narratives about, scientific discoveries and theories are a terrible form of civic interaction. Furthermore, evolutionary science is not about one scientist. No science is one person.
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Yes, Darwin’s ideas were a major juncture in the understanding of specie origins and developments, but there were at least three major eras of advancement after his death, and more than a dozen important refinements. That said, the basic core of his natural selection theory survives to this day.
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Pundits, pastors, and politicians who consider science a religion create a disingenuous transmutation, and then use this flimflam to con their audiences or followers. Falsely saying science, and secular ideas are religion is a modern form of blasphemy done to pit people against new knowledge.
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These con-artists prey on christian Americans. They want them to imagine futuristic, secularist Druids dancing around with their Stonehenge® app in the year 2999. That is because these secularists are preparing the way for the coming of the multicultural and all-genders Alpaca-Lips Kissing Contest, or some such fear mongering grog. BTW: The Stonehenge® App is Xmas approved.
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Evolution is biology. Biology is medicine. Medicine, in some form, is what most all of us will require, particularly as we age. Therefore, how many Americans will be against evolution in another generation? I am guessing a few cave dwelling clans will be the last holdouts.
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Another dumbing down tactic is to connect real science with non-science, or associate it with the bad things people do using fake science. It also may be tangentially related to real science. For example, eugenics is a pseudoscience that was rhetorically grafted on, then inflated for a bad social engineering concept, by Francis Galton, who was inspired by Origin Of Species, a.k.a. Darwin’s contribution to the Theory of Evolution.
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Think of a skin graft being placed over my eyes, and the graft successfully stays there as the science of grafting proved it would. However, I actually wanted to continue seeing. So what does that mean: one right and one wrong makes the theory all wrong? No. Skin grafting requires good science, but even good science can be used incorrectly.
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Hating the –– proved over and over again –– skin grafting theory developed by Dr. Somebody because my dermatologist made a surgical mistake, does not make any sense. Yet, cranks who want you to deny real science will use every Orwellian inspired conflation, fabrication and conjuration to cough up clutter, and kindle confusion.
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We also confuse scientific studies with the complete knowledge of a subject. For example: The butter is good for you this year, bad for you the next year studies. While theory and hypothesis are considered synonyms in general conversation, think of one science study, as a hypothesis when it is from limited evidence, and as a theory when it is from significant evidence-supported science. That is my way of keeping a new, one-off study, and substantially confirmed science, separate in my mind. (My theory and hypothesis definitions may not be exact dictionary versions.)
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Remember these new studies are usually being related to us by the general media, which means the hype is likely greater, or the focus is different, than the reality any one study suggests. Specifically beware of headlines, they can take the most extreme angle, sometimes going way beyond the validated limits of the study. These stories may not be purposely misleading, but a desire to increase viewership and/or sloppy technical writing by the part time, or novice science writer.
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The idea of a consensus in science is not scientific per se, but for the general public it means a theory that has been thoroughly investigated by all or most scientists in a field of study; the theory also has predictive capacity, and has not been legitimately falsified.
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That brings me to my final point about our science understanding. Science is a constant building block of knowledge. Science can seem complete, and not be. Gravity is a perfect example. Most of us know there is a force called gravity, and most probably did an experiment in school to prove the general presence, and workings of gravity. However, scientists do not know what gravity “is”, only how it behaves.
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Scientists can know almost everything about a subject, yet may still present the evidence in a way that seems like they are not sure. Why is that?
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Think of a meteorologist saying there is a 100% chance of rain in your town today, and no rain occurs near your house all day. It did rain in town, and your house is in town. Was that weatherperson wrong? No. They just did not qualify exactly what in town meant. When talking theory, scientists are more cautious.
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Scientists are less likely to make such a broad statement, like the meteorologist above, without qualifying the parameters of a forecast, or prediction based on a theory. Qualifying prevails in climate science to avoid overstating the case. Yet in certain settings the public will hear an edited soundbite, or live online statements, from scientists themselves that may offer broad or very specific claims, without qualifiers because of time limits. Or as I noted before, inaccurately, or sloppily, reported science by the media will cause confusion.
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Mistakes, out-of-context comments, and one-off studies by “scientists” who pursue only contrarian tangents as foils of legitimate science, are the most regrettable form of science noise. They breed all kinds of conspiracies; email-climate gate of 2009 is just one instance of the out-of-context, overblown log-roll ride conspiracy. If there are still people who believe we did not go to the moon, or the earth is flat, it is no wonder Americans continue to push back on more complex ideas like human-caused climate change and evolution.
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Remember that thousands of scientists are studying the climate realities, building computer models, and writing reports. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that some studies, models or reports will contain incorrect data, or projections. This mistake or incorrect projection will get turned into a theory ending problem by a denier of consensus climate science. Someone will also get caught being sarcastic, and someone will not get the sarcasm, then manipulate the sarcasm into something real. Beware of the science faker.
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One of the most foundational and sound reasons why we know climate is changing, due to human causes, has been understood for over a century. Scientists have studied the properties of CO2 every which way. Simply, producing more of it warms the planet. Fossil fuels are the only reason we generate more and more carbon into the atmosphere each year. Nothing else can explain the year after year additional CO2 spewing.
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Religion is not where you go to find specific answers about the world today:
CO2 science is not in the bible, even Tragic Mike Leviticus did not bring it up, and he hated everything. A hotter planet due to a rise in CO2 was never mentioned in sermon on the mount. Egyptian hieroglyphics was silent on global warming science. Shintō was an island unto itself as far as rising sea levels concerned scientists then. Pilgrimages to Mecca never involved talks on climatology. After leaving the burning bush, Moses stone tableted nothing about oceans warming. Vishnu did not decree against bovine flatulence. Because they fueled him with anger, Buddha could not meditate on fossil fools. Conversely, Confucius may have stayed neutral in his word usage about carbon basted and fried lifeforms.
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The only real big unknowns are how fast will global warming cause the worst climate damage, and where and when exactly will it happen. The forecasting is improving constantly. Will scientists any time soon know exactly how it will affect you personally, your town or state, and when? No. That type of forecasting requires many qualifiers today. Waiting for enough specifics to prove to everyone the science is perfect is very problematic.
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Perfect clarity is not possible; science is not all about 2 plus 2 equals…. Rather scientific theories are qualified. I will compare climate change theory via an analogy of a medication commercial, using the disclaimer with all the dire warnings (qualifiers) at the advertisement’s end. While a ‘theory’ med may be 99.999985% effective, the drug company cannot know what it will do to you personally, in your own location. Think of a disclaimer like the following: “may cause massive bloating, and flooding, rashes with storm surges, boils on scorched earth, shortness of breath under rising oceans, and if nothing major is done, humanity’s death.” If we wait for the climate scientist drug company to determine your specific, personal, local warnings, it will be too late to reverse the rising seas and temperatures.
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Word Usage Rule Intermission: Science is not a belief, though religious and non-religious people may use the word in reference to science, yet may, or may not mean believe. Nevertheless, avoid using the words belief and believe when discussing science with others because those words can continue confusing, or insinuating, religion with or into science. Rather use phrases and words like science tells us that… What I have learned is sound and logical. I think climate science gets it right because it has multiple forms of physical, flora, fauna, measurement data from everywhere on the planet and above it. Evolution is consistent with other sciences, fossil records, and methodical thinking.
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Science Goalpost Moving Shakedown And Shakeout.
How do we teach everyone effectively if we are never on the same science page? Using bad science, or interpreting science out of context, to scare people about others is also very problematic. Science is not here to make religion wrong. Religious apologists get in trouble when they make something in science in the seen, distant, or quantum universe contingent on their religion being valid.
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Once someone says, “Because science does not understand this thing here…, that means god is still valid and preeminent,” the believer has trapped themselves. The promotional zeal of creation theory believers today by some christians is a response to science figuring out the age of the earth. This group of christians make the age of the earth an immovable goalpost. Bad move.
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Analogy: Moving the religious-validity goalpost to a theory of gravity position, and saying god lives behind what we do not know yet about gravity, would be another trap. We all may die before anything new is discovered about what gravity “is”, but future science and religious mixing apologists will again need to move the goalpost, probably at night to avoid immediate public embarrassment.
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Religion should not make god dependent on an end to further scientific discoveries in certain sensitive areas, no matter how much we do not know today. Bluntly, goalpost moving is illogical, and embarrassing. Using a fabricated concept, as scientific anything, like young earth creation, an exaggerated extrapolation from the Genesis bible story, or the most recent and wholly unscientific unintelligible design, are just sad, inarticulate, and ineffective attempts to end the goalpost moving charade.
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The antievolution “science”, called I.D., also plays into the lying some christian groups do to protect their ideas from criticism, or what they call persecution. Unintelligible “sans intelligent” Design is god directed creationism, not science. When you must lie about something to get others to accept it, are you a christian? Or might you be a redneck, asks Jeff Foxworthy?
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U.S. Christians Are Lion About Persecution.
The difference between falsely perceived persecution, and actual persecution is fairly easy to spot. Yet a large group of christians think they are being persecuted by secularism, which is supposedly pushing them out of society in detrimental ways. Whatever the “bad” is actually happening to them is not protected by the U.S. Constitution. The myth they are relying on here, to prove they are being persecuted, is a powerful, and deserved only by them, perch in society. But there is nothing there, there, to give them the unlimited, or priority, entry into, or control over, areas they believe there is. It is wistful, wishful thinking.
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Generally every American is allowed everywhere all other Americans are allowed. No matter if you are wearing a skull cap, catholic doily, or a head scarf, you get in. Everyone can voice their opinions and ideas, religious or not. That said, agreeing with religious ideas of any faith are not made mandatory by the Constitution, for judeo-christian edicts anymore than muslim shariah.
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If Americans exclude one, or all religious ideas from public policies, places, actions, or activities, there is not necessarily any persecution taking place. Selectively excluding people, or from practicing their practices is another thing, but keeping the specific ideas, norms, and rules of a religion in our head space, or law space is not protected, or mandatory. Our Constitution was not developed for, or by pastors, rabbis, priests, imams, popes, or today’s pulpit pundits, but by, and for, citizens of a democracy who cannot vote in their god, or its religion.
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Let us say we changed from southern baptist shariah influenced laws that are unconstitutionally enforced today, and moved to having no shariah laws of any kind. Still, no persecution would be taking place. In that case Southern baptist shariahism would lose its remaining power over our nation. But hey, c’est la vie!
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Religion can always be adjacent to the body politic, and within the citizen. The problem is the zealot’s desire for an insinuating encroachment of religious dogma into science, and education-related policy. The church-in-state zealot’s gist is, religion must be able to overwhelm the body politic because it is their religion, which is better than all others. But whose religious sect ends up having the most power, the biggest faith-based bully on the block, or the best religion?
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Using states’ rights to pepper and insinuate religion into science curriculum is reprehensible. Yet that is what the trajectory and goal has been for some since our inception, destroying the whole to give fundamentalism a firm hold on the states, especially in the South. Call it the Jim Crow of science policies. Students also have at least two types of American histories because of that union splintering experiment called states’ rights. No wonder we have always had a dramatic variation in school performance with southern states usually on the bottom of the educational rankings.
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In 2020, anti-intellectualism does not have a complete hold on the South, Republicans, conservatives, or christian nationalists. However, the elite whites of the Jim Crow and Antebellum South were steeped in anti-intellectualism, mostly by providing little to no education to poor whites, who made up a great majority of the white population. That meant blacks were going to get even less education, equaling as little as possible to none initially.
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Anti-intellectualism is still present today, which is encouraged by the denial of scientific discoveries. This strange mix within the white nationalist, conservative christian movement fits in a Talibanification of education drawer. Today’s christian conservatives come at it differently, but much of the flavor is present. It is not only seen in the areas of science.
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The lack of concern for education of anyone not able to buy it, is legion. Republican school funding, often in states they control, is ramshackle and dilapidated. While funding levels do not always mean a better education, the aggregate value for the dollar shows it counts for a lot. Not investing enough in every kid means the loss of much potential. How long do we thrive, let alone lead the world, with such a huge educational trapdoor?
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Some History Of Repressive Science.
Six years after Darwin published Origin…, a monk near Prague wrote a paper about dominate (D) and regressive (r) traits in various plants. Gregor Mendel found that dominate traits show up in “DD”, “Dr”, and “rD” plants, or three of four; regressive traits only show up in “rr” plants, or one in four. He spoke to his fellow monks about his discoveries, and sent out 40 reprints of his paper to various scientists or researchers he had cause to know.
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However, nothing came of his ideas for 34 years, that is 1899. While some people may say Mendel is another example of why the church is, and was so important in the development of science, his story actually explains why religion-in-science is an artifact of a repressive and regressive societal structure. First, it took over three decades before his research filtered out to the nearby science community. Better dissemination would have cut off the oxygen quicker to bogus evolution theories. Second, monks for centuries had been the only learned people except for some portion of nobles. The church had half the money of most European nations at least until the end of the 18th century; the nobles had the other half.
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Third, monks had time to do research because they received tithes from parishioners, or worked communally to sustain their group. And they had no marriage-related children to care for. Darwin was also financed by his father’s wealth to a large extent. The many servants in his household made it possible for Darwin to focus on research. Lastly, the other scientists of the day were stuck on religious interpretations of nature sciences. Their beliefs, the repressive and regressive power of the church on new ideas, and its other believers pressed, and squeezed their science into irrelevance for many decades after Darwin published Origin.
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The attributes and life situations both Darwin and Mendel possessed and experienced show how it is often not genetics, financial success in life, or social status that determines who will achieve the next scientific advancement, but money, educational opportunities, and enough free time to discover them. In a lot of ways, expected of our supposed merit based society today, Darwin and Mendel were lazy and unsuccessful, but their determination and love of figuring out things gave them the insight to discover mind blowing breakthroughs. Neither corporations that work-to-death employees, or the pious, secluded institutions, own or owned this kind of ingenuity.
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The diminishing returns, and stultifying confusion, of putting god in science can be explained in five sentences. Below are “sciencey theories” of where god is in our origin story, or not, what god has done, or not, and what god is, or is not doing, based on the judeo-but-mostly-christian model:
1) God is here near us all the time, hears our prayers, decides when to help us, created everything in all its individuality, including 33.61 million-billion-trillion (or some huge number of) species since birthing earth, either no big bang and 6,000 years ago, (or god did do the Big Bang 4.5 billion years ago). God caused 5 mass extinctions, all natural disasters, even caused our fossil fuel usage, so god is the cause of CO2 climate change, and humans are off the hook, says the serpent in Eden. God knows our future, guides the creation, had a son for us, allows the good and bad for our benefit.
2) God created the universe, (no big bang), Adam and Eve, a few hundred animal species 6,000 years ago. And, god is here to hear when we pray.
3) God started the Big Bang, then let everything happen on its own, but is around us in some form.
4) God started the Big Bang, and left the rest to chance. Did not hang around.
5) God had no influence in creating the universe, including earth, except is available for us in various ways, also had a son for us.
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Obviously, there are, and can be, many other variations in the “how the universe began, and everything after” theme. That being said, by now you may notice one of the biggest problems caused by mixing religion into anything science related. None of the above “theories” can be proved, or likely any theory ever developed about god that provides consistent mathematical, observable, or physical evidence. Furthermore, nobody can perform, or replicate double-blind experiments that offer consistent, and verifiable by others evidence. Lastly, there are too many versions, and sects, all conflicting in some manner. So what is the true, actual, real, convincing truth?
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Additionally, the goalpost moving in the five sentences above create another profound dilemma. Maybe the young earthers have it right with their stuck in dogma doo-doo theory. Just stop the show, and keep believing you can push back the tide. Because when science discovers god is not behind the Big Bang, where do churches move the goalpost after that discovery?
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The various theories about how the universe began, and god’s presence in it, show that there is no straight line to science truth, and the christian religion has no unified or definite black and white take on it. Such science inconsistencies plague the whole concept of one religion or sect having any direct line to science truth in most other instances. Human interpretation of god texts, and most other in between-the-lines deciphering reduces the reality any one religion should rule, or have much sway, over a democratic nation.
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Will churches continue to fall somewhere in the current spectrum, and another step farther back before the Big Bang, or do most churches quit basing their religion on what science knows, or does not know? I am not sure why that has not been the case for at least the last quarter century.
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God so far has not been found “behind” anything. Quantum physics shows us how the limits of science should not, and likely cannot be tethered to our current perceptions. How much farther will science need to go before most believers realize god is “nowhere” from a human science standpoint?
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What all this means is science is not religion, and religion does not and cannot influence actual and practical science. God is not before, after, or during science, or hidden anywhere, as to being scientifically relevant. The approach I think one should take is to believe in god like this; god is god not a scientific discoverable entity, not an atom, a quantum particle, or the “is” in gravity theory. God is parallel to science, not seen or touched by it, or involved in it. Of course, believing in god is optional in a secular, diverse, pluralistic democracy.
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The Outsized Role Of Religion In Society.
Again, I am not eliminating god. The problematic god issue has to do with insistence that religion, science, or our democracy are joined at the hip. Are their tangential issues of morality that coincide with the practice of science, or the technology it develops? Sure. But the influence of religion should not have any more effect on government policy, or societal norms than any citizen, whether a believer or not.
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The outsize influence restrictive fundamentalist religion, and religious associated actors still have on education, and science as well as history and government policy is overly restrictive in a fast advancing era. We began with a transition from state religions through the Articles of Confederation until after the Constitution was ratified. At that point slavery religion rose up to take center stage, with a small reduction of religious influence during expansion westward after the Civil War, except in the Jim Crow South.
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Then during the hyperbolic communist scares of the 1920s until our weak knees stiffened in the early 1990s, religion got some of its national influence mojo back. That religious era had its heyday, when the weak kneed fanatics placed “under god” into our pledge in 1951. You will notice fanatical fear is often a precursor to the rise in religious power. Americans do not deal well with the fears of damnation so deeply ensconced in our brains due to two centuries of religious influenced rule.
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You must realize that this is where our government by religious influence is most problematic. If for example, religious faith was a deeply private affair yet as much public discussion as desired with faith practiced in the public space as a direct service to the community and such, just not so inbred and poured hot into politics, government, and public education, we could be more reasoned and consistently logical in our decisions, and the policies that came from them. When do we stop the bloodletting, and aether corpuscles studying we are still doing today with religion, and move towards better?
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To some extent, our wars on everything including terror, are an ugly remnant and product of this confluence of religion and policy. Imagine how many fewer wars of every kind there might be without christianity baked into slavery. Just the hate generated from that racial conflation and conflagration makes it easier to war on those not like us. We have not thoroughly disentangled our religious beliefs — that engender prejudices, and an ignorance of others — from shameful activities, and eras of our “history” including slavery, Jim Crow, the drug war, Chinese Exclusion Act, Mexican-American ‘repatriation’, internment of Japanese, banning muslims, and others.
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Understand that if slavery was successful in incorporating christianity, there is every chance that dangerous religious ideas can seep into any other part of society and government. Therefore, it is a good idea to expand the idea of belief beyond religion to show how the mind can work belief into any shape.
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Consider all of the belief systems below that have come into play since the founding of our nation. Some are religions, or religious in nature on a spectrum to others that I call conspiratorial communes or covens. They include a deeply committed following who have a general agreement on the belief system. Those who followed or follow, or are followers of: QAnon, Jim Jones, the KKK, neo-Nazis, John Birchers, Scientology, Mormonism, Nation of Islam.
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Obviously, there are many and major differences in the above groups. However, none can be considered as never having serious flaws or negative pasts, as with all religions ever created, at least in how they carried out their beliefs at one point in time. Their main similarity is their believers believed or believe things many of us do not and never will. How do we reconcile this with our belief that science, education, and government should all mix with christianity in any profound, continuous, or insinuated mode at all?
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Remember christianity was directly inculcated into, and validated, horrible forms of government-sanctioned racism for at least our nation’s first 190 years. The war on drugs, and crime, as well as its progeny, mass incarceration, brings the inculcation and validation up to this day. Religion approved the slaughter of a great percentage of the native population. In Indian boarding schools catholics savagely forced them to cut their hair, and drop “their” savage ways. Jim Jones was a very extreme version of belief, but America sanctions war, torture, and executions via our religious influences on government. Plus the only true god, always and only follows us, the most righteous, into battle, right? Some other god of better truth help us!
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Protestant and catholic christians are not, and were not, the worst of the worst. However, where the trouble builds up is the fallacy they hold onto of a benignly true perspective, and always fair, and honest treatment of reality. May christians have some special traits that are necessary to a well functioning nation? Maybe. Yet this will never be sufficient to what the remainder of the nation’s citizens offer. Having greater political power merely because of some supposedly righteous person’s, supposed faith is wholly illogical within the frame of false and dangerous beliefs noted previously.
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If I am not mistaken, hubris or pride was a main theme in the text of what some christians call their bible. Neither progressive or conservative christians, or the sect of any other religion has a lock on truth, honesty or fairness, even if some prideful chests puff up more annoyingly than others. If everyone in the ruling sect was forever as perfect as their choice of a perfect being, then maybe no one would object to religion being in charge, but that is unmistakably not the case.
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Religion in a pluralistic, diverse, and secular society is restricted from making your god’s views and rules separately paramount, or more enforceable than the rights derived from citizens. While it is possible for a sect to engineer an electoral college win, individual rights must never be controlled by an entrenched minority, or majority voting block.
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Women’s suffrage is a perfect example of why voting must not be the case for individual rights. Men controlled this outcome for a long time, especially white, wealthy men, and their spouses who were privileged by this exclusion, and had the influence and power to push back. Therefore, women could have been excluded from suffrage for another decade, century or more. Such rights should have always been self evident and inalienable. Alas we must continue to work backwards in too many areas.
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Religion has been used in various instances to avoid giving rights to various non-majority groups, slavery was our major worst instance of it. There are two general areas of where religious faith still plays an outsize and destructive role: LGBT rights and the legal system. Religion is not irrelevant, but one religion having too much influence in a democratic society is primed for abuse. To understand how we can stop making this a problem, is to consider each situation without religious texts being any kind of constitutional reference point.
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Basic morality was developed via evolution, with family and culture — of which religion is a component — doing updates, demanding changes, and carefully refining. To pin morality development on religion, is too simplistic, and circular in logic. For example, whether we needed god to decide if murder was wrong or not was dealt with by Plato, 2500 years ago. That one Middle East religion is the wellspring of what human morality is, or should be, is even more unlikely.
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All Americans have not fully accepted same-sex marriage since it was legalized nationwide by a 2015 Supreme Court decision. These rifts in society over an issue that reduced the rights of a minority of citizens disrupt our progress in many other ways. Without a religious test, the rights issue could be sussed out very easily. Instead we had judges employing their religious bias to harm others. As Congress did with DOMA, a law that curtailed individual rights. Such bills should never get passed a committee, let alone into court.
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The anti-same-sex marriage justices would have been on the side of Roger B. Taney in his Dred Scott decision with a few words being changed. The laws against blacks and whites having sex or marrying were fueled by “christian” morals. There was an elaborately false structure of theology created to justify those “immoral” acts as well as slavery. The disgust many have with the related sex acts, influenced by the theology, made justices and voters predisposed to fabricating extralegal reasons not to allow black Americans, or same-sex couples into the mainstream.
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Mixed race and same-sex marriage or sexual activities may be considered different in profound ways by many believers. However, the basis for excluding either group from the rights afforded white on white sex, or the female and male get together, is from a mixed bag of theological rules and perspectives. Do the laws from Leviticus matter more than slave theology? Maybe Scientologists should get the final word, or whoever has the newest theology? Or Mormonism, since it is the first new religion in America?
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Morals our what we say they are as a nation, as long as they are not different merely for the color of someone’s skin, or gender, etc., or who they want to be with. Having your religion determine what our morals are today, and another religion determines them tomorrow, makes no sense. And why would I accept your christian nationalist morals, because your ancestral faith was here first, and it devised that insidious and sadistic slave theology? Please. What if my, somewhat satirical, greasy, cannibal, gettin’ queasy yet, theology set up its table here first? Those are eating-away-at-me words, pal!
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The legal system is another way conservative religious ideas dominate our perspective, policies, and punishments. Retribution has grown in its prominence in the last forty or fifty years. Our prison system has deteriorated, made a profit seeking venture, like the Jim Crow South after slavery was abolished, and it still wanted a cheap workforce. Instead now corporations own the prisons. This is where the Republican Party of business benefits through its hookup with conservative christians in the late 1970s. Corporate white christians, who now own the big money and the religious high ground. A cabal that keeps on giving us more draconian laws, and a worsening Uber gig economy a.k.a. Dickensian.
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Abortion is murder but the state fearing christian nationalist conservatives are fine with black Americans being harassed, over policed, brutalized, and shot by cops, arrested, imprisoned, and executed by the state at much higher rates? Notice how black Americans are also poorer, and have drastically less wealth on average than white christian conservatives and other Republicans? This is not a coincidence. Gutting every program to help the poor in the last four decades is what such a cabal does. Their mix of retributive religious ideas, racism, states’ rights abuses, and wealth gluttony make black Americans pay over and over again.
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The fundamentalist religious working so closely with the wealthiest individuals in politics is a modern version of the papist state. The nobles and church excommunicate all competition, do not educate the masses, will under nourish the rabble, will employ most in drudgery workhouses, and do throw the infidel, foreigner, mentally ill, destitute, and homeless in prison. That means the current Galileos, and the greater serf populous like myself, must be on our guard, and ready our pitchforks and torches.
Our Economics Religion.
It makes little sense to write this section for those on the far sides of the economic thought spectrum since changing minds in that group is unlikely. Probably for citizens who communicate with those on the fence, or in the fog, or those struggling to understand our economic system. No matter, economics is another powerful, faith-driven enterprise, at least partially, so I must deal with it here to some extent.
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I pooh pooh socialism, capitalism, “free” markets, and collectives. My acceptance of Adam Smith, Marx, Hayek, Keynes, Friedman, and Krugman economics is lukewarm. Like scientists and people, what economists write, think, develop, or say is never perfect. Neither are the theories they alone came up with whether or not they won a Nobel Prize. While good science builds on itself, economics floats in a much wider berth of subjective goo.
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Therefore, economics is more susceptible to faith-based dragooning and ballooning. Mostly I am talking about faith not connected with a formal religious institution. Like there are people on both sides who are antivaxxers, economic faith crosses over more than traditional religious belief, especially older established forms.
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Our strains of economic belief range from deep die hard socialists, to democratic issue socialists, and centrist “free” market types with some propensity for regulations, to laissez faire “free” marketers to libertarian, Ayn Rand dog-eating survivalists. My view comes in as whatever actually, truly works best. Alas, reality check, a centrist or pragmatic view provides little emotional value, which is very much needed in the human world where even the most rational and reasoned approach is unlikely to get noticed, and more unlikely, win out.
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The United States mixture of religious absolutism, billionaire worship, conspiracy covens, and faith-based ideas about economics, and how wealth or income should be made, is a very difficult space to attract support for ideas like whatever works best. Again, this is not just a conservative problem. Liberals may not empathize enough to get around those factors, or may be caught up in some themselves, which hamper their ability to make any headway towards a consistent solution in their direction.
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Placing the emotional aspects of faith in whatever form, and faction creating in a separate bin from solving problems may be the only way to do things in the short term. I have consumed a number of books and articles that suggest a slow steady pace to a transformation like true populism in the 1890s to FDR’s policies in the 1940s. Labor unions did a similar transformation over a longer period into the 1970s, until it was rubbed out by conservatives. Doing what the Republicans did over the last fifty years, gradually, incrementally, dogmatically in some ways, and pragmatically with a liberal agenda.
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The societal and economic transformations noted above required one or two generations to achieve a significant switch. While many economic successes occurred for liberals and progressives, particularly in the years before Nixon, we also had many failures, including in the Reagan and Bush, and now Trump administrations. If it requires another 20 to 30 years, more major reversals and other failures in future, does that not call for a different strategy? And one that may fit the times, our diverse, anti-lockstep coalition, and does not forecast the undulating wave of high emotions, with much unproductive activity, on all sides? We The People obviously need a stronger advocacy network, and solution prosecutor that is a polarized politics workaround.
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We still do not educate our children equally after nearly 250 years. As an advanced nation, we are also reducing funding in science to spur universal innovation, and not supporting people with some equality so they get a real opportunity to thrive. Instead we are blindly willing to wait until a faith-based “free” market magically lifts fifty million working people into health care, food security, and housing? If this is true, we think tens of millions of Americans are irresponsible. What kind of christian makes that kind of assumption?
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Rather many Ayn Rand christians say give nothing to a We The People elected government in the 21st century to improve the lives of the meek. All because of a dictator’s coin mentioned in an ancient text, or maybe you prefer a convoluted, and out of touch with current reality, interpretation. Either way, most any human interpretation is untruth worship; just like stoning was until Jesus ended that punishment, another untruth devised by human defect and failure. Those who believe they know best what Jesus thinks about anything, let alone a modern democracy taxing with representation, can flip the first coin in a wishful-thinking well.
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The Religious Made Empty Suit Empire.
These arguments against religious influence can seem overblown to some Americans. “Religious power is not that evident or prevalent. You are an overreacting liberal; the kind of secularist we should be worried about!” This may be true in some specific instances. My concern and focus, however, are the cumulative and aggregate effects of religious zealotry in politics, science, and education. Being zealous for your religion is fine, but the nation, and all states are no one person’s, or group of persons’ religion.
Hardly ever coming together, and always standing on different ground, does not bode well for a long term United States. Our economic philosophies swing wildly from…
Supposedly totalitarian collectives of inaction and gulags to…
Hard work, good education, and real competitiveness to…
Our way is the right way, even though few make a lot (monopolies, billionaires), as many fall onto the trash heap (zero safety nets), while being blind, uncaring oafs about any resulting harms (slavery consecrated christian nationalists, socialism fear mongering Ayn Rand libertarians).
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Due to the above unwieldy and counterproductive clashing practices, our empire status as the best economy has always been challenged and curtailed. Today, China, the E.U. even India are on a trajectory to outstrip us. While my competitive spirit is not necessarily aroused by this, the conservative’s is. Religious and “free” market conservatives, which are the same in many cases, both see us as always being great. Well, when we are under Republican rule, that is. Of course, when those nations do supersede us, we will not be, whether the scales fall from the conservatives’ eyes or not.
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I approve of almost none of our past, or current, imperialistic actions, but being the best economy is a fine goal, as long as it is not wasteful or polluting, and generously spreads around its benefits. However, we have often squandered our lead by leaving much of it up to luck, and by abusing people, and despoiling the environment. The first one hundred plus years we relied on slavery, evicting native peoples and stealing their land, and scraping resources from the soil, and gouging them out of the ground. Cotton not only ruined the slave laborers; how its growth was pursued, ruined the land.
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Then in the 20th century our isolation, and abundance of people and environmental resources, made WWII mostly a way to overfill our coffers without much planning for the future. As other nations caught up or surpassed us in various niches, like Middle East oil nations, Japan in manufacturing, and Germany in high quality work, we slumped. The only remaining strategy for us to pursue was to Chainsaw Al rip off, and strip out the economy to its plumpest and most piggish profit margin; workers be damned. And they were, and are.
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Anti-intellectualism resurfaced prominently in the 20th century after 1950, from whites fighting against new laws to open up education to black Americans. Yes, there was resistance throughout the nation to integrate, but the South harbored and aggressively nursed states’ rights, a subverted and perverted virus of separation, and coveted separation the most. “Free” market conservatives and libertarians were also seduced by this divide and separate us virus because it would help kill off unions. From that assortment of ideologies the current social (Dixiecrats and pro-life catholics), and fiscal conservative (libertarian infused) Republican Party was born. Although Trump has complicated this merger in the last few years.
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This wholly unholy conflation of racist, white christian nationalist separatists, and catholic one-issue voters, my parents among them, were now joined at the hip, beginning in 1980. The fiscal conservatives were locked in as well, yet many were not excited about joining the anti-abortion and anti-science cadres, or about the religious fervor in the new conglomeration. The benefits that locked them in were the gaining of a somewhat larger cohort in the reconfigured party, and with that an increase in political power.
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Fiscal conservatives, particularly the strong libertarian voices, laissez faire about abortion, faith, and economics, were few in number since they represented mostly the top 5% of incomes. Yet they were fine with the extra voting power available from the new coalition. Where fiscal conservatives may have conflicted on social issues with their christian sidekicks, opposing those policies would not be a high priority, as long as taxes, programs, and regulations got the top to bottom, full body guillotine. So the pact with the laissez faire, capitalist devil was signed in the blood of the lamb.
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While many Americans were in more than one of the three groups above, or four, if libertarians are their own category, at least one of the characteristics noted are expressed in near 100% of the voters in those groups. Those categories include “independents” who moved inside and outside both parties at one time or another over the last 40 years. Both parties gain independent voters, depending on how pertinent the top tier of issues are in play at election time, especially the economy.
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Rather than think of that group as individuals voting, it is important to focus on the overall results of each election. Democrats also have many “big” issues they want to put forward. However, only a few big issues will stay on the movable-to-the-finish-line chart. One is usually unknowable before the election, for example a war, a market crash, or a pandemic. That leaves two others. Another will be gridlocked by the opposition party. The third will be fought over for two maybe three years to a final senate battle, like a tax cut or the wealthy, or government health insurance.
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Abortion and science are the constant losers in our national battles. Science funding is reduced more, and abortion moves to the Supreme Court. The antiabortion cadre was never going to win big in Congress; abortion is a cudgel fiscal conservatives never want to “lose”, or be without. Being a small percent of the party, high wealth libertarians need their social issue cudgel. Science research funding is the current scapegoat for Republicans since they have nearly eviscerated funding for public broadcasting, and the arts.
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The social issue cudgel makes religious conservative Republicans bondservants of the party. They must accept the economic depravation of the very poor, and working poor, condemn thousands to death each year due to their inability to afford health insurance, and support the entire government is a bad theory to have a chance to pass their main social issue. Clearly, the Republican Congress has done little to end abortions in 40 years, until McConnell’s sacking of Merrick Garland. They even lost the gay marriage contest less than a year before that. Then having to elect a totally debauched candidate, and in his Federalist puppet role, select two more pliable fundamentalist christian justices, merely due to deaths.
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If the Republican Congress was any more efficient at doing something positive for their side, hell may have frozen over if it were not for climate change. In that onslaught to get almost nothing positive done for their party except tax cuts for the wealthiest, and war for defense cronies, their slash and burn activities have placed most other Americans on the precipice of economic irrelevance. As the stock market rises beyond the 30,000 mark, the pandemic may drive another 15 million Americans into food insecurity by year’s end.
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Such shocks in the economic system, from war to market crash, to hurricane, wildfire, etc., and pandemic, make every American not in the bottom 60 to 80% in constant danger of falling into destitution, or worse. How does this happen? War ballooned the debt, making debt reduction a priority for Republicans. Market crashes, disease, and disasters divert attention from the every day terrors, eat up the resources, and diminish the flexibility and capacity of a conservative “small” government. This penny pinching patchwork of political expediency produces a never ending spiral into instability for over half the US population.
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Ironically, and horribly for that majority, Republican policies were instrumental in all the four horses of their destruction: war, market crash, pandemic, and CO2 fossil fueled inflation, worsened disasters. Not only are Republicans much responsible for those messes, they take no responsibility in cleaning them up. They cannot fulfill either their christian duty, do no harm, nor be a true Mises, Hillsdale College, Cato, Heritage libertarian by being personally responsible.
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Of course, their anti-science tendencies give them an out in disasters. Hate blind warring on-non-whites and against kissing-cousin fundamentalists provides cover there. Making allowances for selfish-gene science, helps them abdicate any fault in market crashes. They must believe all of Trump’s pandemic lies because they believe the lies in all the abortion arguments. Good christians must rally without masks around a party like that.
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With their culture wars, drug wars, crime wars, terror wars, economic wars, wars against women, health, science, facts, truth, the poor, farcical wars on xmas, and “real” wars, it is no wonder we cannot focus on education and science. Where in all of this do we have time to be the best economy? We sure as hell have no money left, or political energy remaining.
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In addition, we will lose the best economy of the future because the health of Americans in general is not in the top ten of advanced nations. The education of every citizen is uneven to the extreme. It has little to do with curriculum or methods of teaching per se, but in how we fund, encourage, and support education and students, and yes teachers.
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No other nation funds as we do: state by state, city by city, district by district, taxing zone by taxing zone, redlined by not redlined, by racial group by racial group…. In disunited mathematics that equals American exceptionalism still spiraling into idiocy. The cause is clearly from a theft of the common good by an anti-United States, pro-racist states’ rights separatist, and individualist fetishizing financialism merged with an aberrant, slave holder birthed and re-birthed religion.
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Even if the laissez faire, “free” market is the best kind of economic system, where does that leave our nation when fewer and fewer Americans are educated at high levels than in China, The E.U., and India? How do further disinvestments in basic science help us improve our position in the next level of advances? Does a private sector enterprise develop a universal technology like the internet? Would America have been as free with all private roads?
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The road we are currently travel on is getting narrower and narrower. As we write off the education Americans attainment of more and more Americans at the bottom end, the advancements of the future will include them less and less. Yes, not everyone wants to go to, or will benefit from going to, college, and further, but leaving people behind merely because they were born near a shorter or flimsier ladder is wrong and harmful for many reasons. Climbing up is never just about someone’s gumption or tenacity.
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Leaving everything up to chance makes no sense. Other nations are investing great gobs of time and money into making sure chance is eliminated to the nth degree possible. If we spent twice as much as we do now on primary and secondary education, and tripled or more scientific research, the return on investment would be huge. Just the income of America’s top one tenth of one percent would cover the increase, or $1.12 trillion. While I am not suggesting using all their income or even that much, we do not have a money problem. We have a responsibility problem, a responsibility to the future.
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Imagine if we had spent a hundred billion dollars per year in today’s dollars investing in solar panels for the last quarter century instead of on a falsely engaged war. And we had solar panels that worked like the best solar panels today only at a lower cost than standard tar shingles. What would the worldwide outlook be today? No more wars for oil, or tangentially about oil.
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Thousands of people not dead from bombs, I.E.Ds., with 90+% less PTSD, not dying from heat waves, asthma, and home cook stoves. Maybe half the terrorist attacks, or none at all after 9–11, thousands more American and Iraqi children still with parents, and parents with children. A better worldwide police force and legal system against terrorism rather than extrajudicial drone killings directed by workers in cubicles in Nevada. A less bloated DHS. Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein still gone, and so on. No frivolous wars, and more science into renewables is a serious pro-life agenda.
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Unfortunately, we continue to fight without a foundation to solve these problems, as if all our political opponents will disappear tomorrow. Conservative christians see abortion as a straight-line between right-and-wrong issue. But in reality there are few clearly defined issues. Bringing god texts interpretations into the equation makes it impossible to solve an issue in a democratic nation. In a theocracy we might be able to facilitate that perspective. Still we would need to settle on supposedly one interpretation of supposedly one text. What religion gets to make that determination; then every determination after it?
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Now we are back to the Big Bang by god or not, etc. Either we have a common understanding of enacting laws, or we will struggle to move ahead, creating coalitions of immovability. Realize that just one issue like abortion can forever trap us in the vice grip we are in today. Examples include…Climate change is trapped in this religious paradigm. Republicans who understand the dangers of CO2 climate change will never see a resolution, only a worsening. Educating everyone as equally as possible is trapped. Rioting and looting never leave when we abuse communities with higher pollution, over-policing, mass incarceration, and underfunded and under teacher resourced schools.
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Notice how the last example is trapped by the second and third, and the second and third are trapped by the climate issue. Climate change concerned Republicans accomplish little. Education is marooned by the religious constructed, slavery influenced states’ rights, anti-specific-history voter. Black Americans are thwarted by the religious constructed, anti-specific-science and anti-specific-history voters to gain appreciable empowerment. Citizens being anti-only when it does not fit their religious paradigm is problematic for a democratic government and society. With fallible humans directly involved, religious texts are always interpretative, and will have multiple interpretations, so never the twain shall meet on common solutions without a common, pluralistic, secular platform with common rules.
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Nothing gets done, or worse, when we isolate each other by unresolvable issues. They are unresolvable when turned into an all, or nothing fight. That leaves us with what looks like a binary choice: they win, doom, we win, it all smoothly goes our way. However, we could choose to take a more pragmatic if less wholly satisfying path. As to the abortion issue for example, we could come up with a pro-life policy that achieves as much life as possible, including much fewer abortions. Yet many southern christian conservatives originally came to the abortion fight because it helped with their states’ rights views. If still true, we may be gridlocked again.
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After 40 years, most Southern christians may now be fully committed to the antiabortion cause. However, states’ rights will likely keep them from making progress on other pro-life issues like the death penalty, and universal health insurance as well as housing, jobs, childcare, and education so more can buy bootstraps, and pull them up consistently. States’ rights is a christianized, white supremacy perversion that has pursued individual rights nullification. As to the catholic hierarchy, it will not likely approve of increased contraceptive usage. War approval, extrajudicial violence by cops acceptance, and lax gun laws are prominent in conservative political theology.
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The escape velocity to solve any major issue is not found in the conservative christian political structure. In many cases, they blame the lack of personal responsibility for the struggles of tens of millions of Americans, who either are not making a livable wage, and/or cannot afford decent health insurance coverage. This ideology guarantees that 95% of these people will never overcome the hurdles to better their lives. Personal-responsibility magical thinking is confused, farcical, and harmful to millions of Americans.
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At least 95% of the above 95% have the requisite personal responsibility, but will still not make it. What they do not have is the early education through high school investment, proper housing and health, homes not in polluted areas, or the wealth to overcome one major hardship that the snooty, nose turned up, billionaire Republican does. Its cousins, the damning everyone not like them christian bullies, smite anyone who needs more investment and societal reworking than any phalanx of charities was ever set up to handle.
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Conclusion.
The story I have told up to this point may have had some of my own exaggerations. That said, comparing today’s Republican Party with the nobles and the church of the Early Middle Ages is not one of them. The circumstances are different and the symbiotic relationship is more tentatively attached, but the power differential they strive to have over the remainder of society is similar.
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Employees (serfs) are to have little power as to their work structure, and citizens (supplicants) must exclusively worship various societal norms and edicts. Tying fundamentalist religious strictures to the wealth-power structure will tend to grow into an undemocratic effort. Expansion of rights for workers or citizens is unlikely because it threatens these power structures. As these forces are allied in a modern society, repression and then regression of science and education occur.
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Though many Republicans are not anti-intellectualists, they end up aligning with that philosophy with the support of uneven investment in education, which also affects many non-voters and liberal Democrats. Anti-intellectualism is not what leadership seeks for itself, but like the nobles and catholics of the Early Middle Ages, it does not invest in it for all, only the faithful and deserving. The catholics were not energized to proliferate science knowledge at that time like fundamentalist christians are not energized today.
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Like the fall of the Roman Empire, muslim nations took over the science and math advancing process, as the catholics submerged into a hiding and hoarding darkness as well as a land and power grab fest with nobles. Then muslims did what the catholics did, went dark and left advancement to others. Catholicism broke into a religious faction cat fight like Iraq of today with many protestant sects. Out of that feline friar Tuck fracas came the European and American Enlightenment. Now, the repression and regression of science, society, and education has reemerged in the United States.
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Our American Century transitions into a millennial-long spiral of denial-downfall, unless an advanced turnaround is infused into this continual rise and fall trap of great civilizations. While fiscal conservatives, states’ rights zealots, and libertarians see government as the problem, it is just as likely that what kills civilizations is the insidious parasite of church power and aristocratic power winnowing into governments. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Wealth and religion are very successful corrupting influences, if there were ever any.
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Fundamentalist religion killed science and democracy in muslim nations. Slavery and its relationship to religion slowed down our national evolution. Jim Crow, the KKK and states’ rights all infused with religious zealotry greatly impeded our national advancement by harming people, education, and science. The communist scares were hyper infused with fear due to religious influences associating even labor unions and safety regulations in the same breath. Climate change and the scientists researching it are considered socialist because of these out of control, fundamentalist, slave-holder christian connections.
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It is ironic that when the Roman Empire fell, catholics took the reign, and whipped the people down into damnation with its new reins. The democratic structure of government, and laws to protect and give voice to the people developed by the Greeks and Romans, were completely swept under the rug. Yet the popes and catholics of The Enlightenment, or before and after, really supported those new ideas like they supposedly have science through the centuries. Huh.
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What I am trying to get across, with a bit of sarcasm sometimes, is that all religions are flawed, like the human beings who created them. God may exist in some form, but the religious traditions developed, and interpretations of texts likely written, by fallible humans, are all over the place, without rhyme or reason. So how do we determine whose religion is the truest for America?
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You or I could jump up and down, and scream about which of our religions is more righteous. However, we are still imperfect proponents with who knows how many prejudices, and weaselly agenda items hidden, even from ourselves. The only way to overcome and coordinate this hodgepodge of beliefs that include great ideas, potential inaccuracies, wonderful life strategies, subversion tactics, or other negative and positive attributes, is to vet and smooth out every public concept and thing through a large diverse group of Americans, a.k.a. We The People.
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My goal here was not to convince the fully entrenched, or scold the deeply religious, from any part of the political, social, economic, or religious spectrum. I hope that more Americans will see how belief systems can work at cross purposes, and get so tangled up that the outcomes are harmful to the whole. Since We The People have no-line issue veto, strongly supporting our side on one issue, or half the issues — but not fully, or at all the others — damns all those issues to the solution graveyard.
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Our political system does not allow us to solve problems; it mostly gives us the ability to harangue and howl about them. We merely raise the temperatures on our arguments, and blood pressure as sea levels, and the world temperature average rises. We The People must wrest control from the current power brokers, which is formed around a cabal of religious and financial fundamentalists. It is not that they are completely bad, but that they are not completely good for everyone.
Religion may solve one group of problems, but we cannot tell when the human part is misdirecting. Our human imperfections must not be used as scapegoats and foils for the human imperfections built into religion. “How am I a sinner, if you, an imperfect person is the one actually interpreting that?” Disgust and hate directed at people, who we have been taught for thousands of years to feel contempt for, or see as beneath our respect when it was often hearsay, misinterpretation, or ignorance pushing it all forward, must be carefully considered and reconsidered. Secular society is the human check on inflexibly ancient, and dangerously vague, incorrectly seen as self evident Constitutional truth, religious ideas and practices.
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We are not living in the worst times of nobles and papist indulgences, nor have we fallen like muslim society by the 16th century, but every second we continue in a religious infused muddle, our ability to advance like other nations is threatened. On the other hand, religion is not threatened by a secular democracy. The feelings of persecution are only evident when a religious group wants more power than We The People. No religion should intrude into places where other religions do not have the same authority.
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Giving any religion authority over We The People is too much authority. This includes a specific religion having sole or special inclusion in local, state and federal government structures, financial and physical. Acting as quasi-public entities where a religious institution receives tax dollars, while simultaneously paying no taxes, infringes on We The People as well. Religious buildings, faith based schools and media paid for by believers, and the public square provide enough capacity for outreach.
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A secular democracy allows every religious person to practice their religion, but no religion is allowed to be the government, or be “established” within it, and not in any special form.
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Repression and regression in science, education and other areas of a free society do not necessarily occur because of specific religious beliefs. Like god and science, if they are forced like water and oil to mix, that struggle itself is enough to slow a society in ways not easily perceptible by humans. We have a short, wide awareness-stage of life, averaging maybe 25 years; much less if our outlook is deeply submerged in a religious frame. That means the wasting-of-time struggle is not noticed, or appreciated by most. Religion is not a waste of time, anymore than nature hiking, or playing with your kids. What is a waste is struggling in the wrong spaces and places. Moving to a near parallel relationship is required with religion and the running of society.
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Finally, the secular space or concept is a platform, and foundation for a democratic, pluralistic, diverse society. While almost anything can become a quasi-religion with the components of belief, fervor, and followers, secularism only becomes a “religion” when a monotheistic group losing its power requires an opponent to provide political cover, as it seeks to monopolize the secular platform. Like social safety nets are turned into totalitarian socialism by conservatives to hide the vulgarity and terrible side effects of unregulated, laissez faire “free” markets.
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Merely because you say it so, does not make it that way. Besides individual rights, We The People must be able to decide what is what. Myth regurgitating, lie-filled propaganda, and fear mongering evident in the current religious fervor fevers require a secular platform. My religion is likely the best with a slight possibility yours is, but neither religion should be in the nation’s driver seat, or even a backseat driver. We The People people the vehicle, period.
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by Richard The Chwalek.
Formerly in an Irish catholic and Polish catholic irreconcilable relationship, now still Irish and Polish with protestant tendencies.
Solution: I have come up with an advanced structure to achieve a line “issue” veto, or redesign, in ways not possible before. Done mostly without changing the current political structure, consider it a workaround and adjunct that is a powerful counterbalance to the wealthy and the status quo. Get my ebook, Our Democracy Requires An Update: A Transformational We The People System.
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