The foul wind of the desert has reached the USA
This week, again, we saw a few examples of one of those Jane Austen-like universal truths - namely that fundamentalist Christians have much in common with fundamentalist Muslims.
Both Islamic writers and certain Christian teachers deny evolution.
Both islamic imams and Christian pastors blame women for most of society’s evils.
It’s not surprising that this is so, of course. Both holy books were written by old men, whose half-senile brains and envious hearts were baked by an unforgiving desert sun.
Theirs is a religion of excess - of excessive angers, intolerance, meanness and loathing. Its joys are of a psychotic nature: war, ritual killings and genital mutilation. Its arts are the arts of torture and the burning of heretics, the burning of witches, the burning of books.
There have been many mad, bad and dangerous religions throughout history. There have not been many emancipatory, secular movements which have actively tried to counter them.
The founding fathers of the USA tried. Jefferson wrote the following:
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
That was then. This is now. There’s a born-again president in the White House and his potential successors are running around the country, cap in hand, trying to woe the evangelical equivalent of mad mullahs.
No wonder the Jefferson memorial is sinking.
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