Over on my Church of the Churchless weblog I wrote yesterday about how religion is bad for societal health. In this post I discussed a study which found that religious democracies exhibited substantially higher degrees of social dysfunction than societies with larger percentages of atheists and agnostics.
A Los Angeles Times editorial called this “The dark side of faith.” We’re seeing that side much more clearly now in the United States.
The forces of darkness, masquerading as fundamentalist Christianity, are trying to get us to deny realities revealed by science, treat homosexuals as second-class citizens, get government involved in private end of life decisions, and stack the Supreme Court with true believers.
Those who would make this country a theocracy have to be fought on each and every battleground where they seek to make their personal beliefs into public policy. I’m confident that the dark side of religion will be beaten back, because the citizens of this country eventually will recognize that they don’t want to be ruled by a Christian Taliban.
As part of this fight, hopefully Harriet Miers’ will come in for some tough questioning about her religious beliefs during her nomination hearings.
It’s disgusting how right-wingers are speaking out of both sides of their mouths: they simultaneously say that Miers’ religion is a private matter and can’t be investigated by Senators, while touting her evangelical (and, by implication, anti-abortion) credentials for serving on the Supreme Court.
I very much agree with this letter to the editor in today’s Portland Oregonian:
The general complaint [about Miers] is not so much about bringing religion into politics but to the bringing in of people who believe in a literal creation in six 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. It is a belief system that has bundled with it a very broad political agenda.Most of us readily accept people with religious beliefs different from our own who are active in politics and accept them as we expect them to accept us. The concern is that people with basic beliefs that are contradictory to facts of the real world may enact laws based on their beliefs that affect us in the real world.
--Duane Ray, Gresham
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