Exclusive: Faith-healing: A Modest Proposal on Religious Fundamentalism

We start with a little something from Robin Morgan about "Religious Fundamentalists". My only comment is -- What took you so long to understand this? The very fact they ARE insane/deranged/unbalanced is one of the main reasons I fear them so much.

As you must know some people are willing to kill, or die, for Religion. Christians worship "the son of god", who "died for your sins". Books of Saints are filled with martyrs -- many of whom died is strange, perhaps bizarre ways. Among those same Saints there are also some seemingly sketchy folks. In any case, "faith" seems to be a state of delusion, a place where inhuman, horrific, acts can be "justified" on the basis of one or another "sky daddy", "daddies", or "mommies and daddies" -- all residing SOMEWHERE, or even EVERYWHERE.

It appears to be insane -- think about it.

The following is an excerpt of an article posted on "The Women's Media Center", written by Robin Morgan -- follow link to view the complete article
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Exclusive: Faith-healing: A Modest Proposal on Religious Fundamentalism

For years, I’ve been barking up the wrong steeple, confronting the misogyny that defines all religious fundamentalists: Islamists (the only ones most people bother to hate), ultra-Orthodox Jews, Christian Bible-thumpers, Hindu militants, even Buddhist and Shinto extremists. “Take back the law!” I cried, citing the UN Charter and Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which disallow any religious law being the source for or impediment to international rights. “Just feed them all!” I pleaded, when I thought economics drove the phenomenon. “It’s really cultural!” I argued, trying to be reasonable.

And back when I believed we were facing willful ignorance (because affirmed stupidity seems all the rage), I produced Fighting Words: A Tool Kit for Combating the Religious Right (Nation Books). It offers “verbal karate” for arguing, facts and Founders’ quotes like “Question with boldness even the existence of a god” (Jefferson ). Stuff like that.

Now I see this crisis is worse than willful ignorance. Religious fundamentalists are blatantly, commitment-to-the-funny-farm-ready, lunatic, cuckoo wingnuts. Serious people suffering from cognitive or emotional distress have everything to gain by getting help. But religious fundamentalists have everything to lose by becoming healthy, so they’ve embraced willful madness.

It has an epidemiological range from petty crazy (ubiquitous dating-service TV ads vowing to “find God’s match for you”) to scary psychoses (our home-grown Taliban exerting wildly disproportionate influence on our political system).

Fundamentalists have their fundaments—the Koran, the Shuras, the Pentateuch, the Bible. This last, for instance, has texts handy for justifying Inquisitions, Crusades, lynchings, apartheid, indentured servitude, racism, poverty, polygamy, war, wife battery, child marriage/abuse/murder, homophobia, and other holy terrors—plus some exquisite 17th century English poetry in the King James Version. An important new book, Fatal Self Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (Cambridge University Press), exposes “family based Christian enslavement” as the cornerstone of the institution of slavery. It quotes Joseph Wilson (a 19th century Southern Presbyterian clergyman and, incidentally, father of President Woodrow Wilson) on how his deity devised slavery as an organizing element in the family so it could serve as the model for the state, emphasizing that a household under the gospel must “contain all the grades of authority and obedience, from that of husband and wife, down through that of father and son, to that of master and servant.” .....................