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  • MOORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE

    Filed at 3:58 pm under by dcobranchi

    The Christian Right is imploding. So says none other than Exodus Mandate’s E. Raymond Moore:

    “It’s hard to admit defeat, but this one was self-inflicted,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Yes, Dr. Dobson and the pro-family or Christian right political movement is a failure; it would have made me sad to say this in the past, but they have done it to themselves.”

    20 Responses to “MOORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE”


    Comment by
    Nance Confer
    April 4th, 2009
    at 4:23 pm

    Truly good news.

    Nance


    Comment by
    JJ Ross
    April 4th, 2009
    at 5:27 pm

    DUnno if it’s actually news or not, but I sure agree with the last part:

    “My beef with the Christian Right has always been their desire to use the state to enforce their Biblical instruction and with the conflation of religion and patriotism which made any dissension against religion or the flag into both heresy and treason. If they are now taking the private over the public road, then we can all get along just fine.


    Comment by
    COD
    April 4th, 2009
    at 8:55 pm

    They may decide to lay low for a while, but I have no doubt they’ll be back in a big way supporting Palin 2012. One scary thing about people who think God is on their side…they never give up.


    Comment by
    Rob
    April 5th, 2009
    at 11:23 am

    You mean as opposed to all those whose minds have become concluded through non-religious means?


    Comment by
    JJ Ross
    April 5th, 2009
    at 5:55 pm

    Yes. Take Sarah Palin as an example — not just an ordinarily determined politician but one who believes god is controlling her singular destiny and plans for her to WIN at everything from basketball to world dominion one way or another. You don’t mean there’s no difference in the psychology of believing you’ve been divinely chosen versus ordinary ambition?


    Comment by
    JJ Ross
    April 5th, 2009
    at 6:30 pm

    Living in a Material World? If You’re Smart. . .”
    My first attempt at a Human Reality Intelligence Test


    Comment by
    Forest Crump
    April 6th, 2009
    at 6:25 am

    I like to ask them—Does God make mistakes?
    “Of course not, He is infallible,” they respond.
    “Then why did He have to have the flood? Seems to me He was erasing a mistake.”


    Comment by
    Rob
    April 6th, 2009
    at 9:30 am

    “You don’t mean there’s no difference in the psychology of believing you’ve been divinely chosen versus ordinary ambition?”

    I’m not talking about ordinary ambition. Are you saying the only way people become unassailable zealots about something is through a religious belief system? If you need an unthreatening example or two, think sociopaths and Nazi camp directors.

    Keep in mind I’m responding to COD’s statement: “One scary thing about people who think God is on their side…they never give up.”

    It seems to me, it’s not a “people who think God is on their side” thing, it’s an “extreme fringe thinkers who elevate their beliefs to places they oughtn’t”. In other words, it’s not a faith problem, it’s an extreme fringe thinker problem.

    “I like to ask them—Does God make mistakes?”
    Cool – I’m “them” – let’s see if I have a good answer.

    I figure a perfect being doesn’t make mistakes. Why the flood? Because this particular perfect being’s kids are not perfect, and He’s not about to force perfection on us – He figures that his kids get more out of living through their own mistakes and making their own choices. Sometimes, the kids make such an awful mess of things, He’s got to haul them screaming into their beds for a time out while he resets the playing field.


    Comment by
    dcobranchi
    April 6th, 2009
    at 10:13 am

    Or we could just go the simple route and say that the Flood (and God) are myths.


    Comment by
    Nance Confer
    April 6th, 2009
    at 10:28 am

    Rob:Are you saying the only way people become unassailable zealots about something is through a religious belief system?

    I didn’t read the initial comment that way. I read it to mean that even in the face of irrefutable evidence, the religious keep on coming. The fringe religious if that makes you feel better. But then you throw out fairy tales about arks…

    2012 and a regrouping around Palin — if that’s the best the Rs can come up with, it will be an easy win for the Ds. No matter how much the RR ideas are pushed, we can’t possibly forget all the damage that has been done from that direction so quickly. Can we?

    Nance


    Comment by
    COD
    April 6th, 2009
    at 11:47 am

    Exactly Nance. In 2004 I thought Bush was a better choice for Pres than Kerry. I was most likely wrong. However, if you believed that God wanted you to vote for Bush in 2004, there is no way you’ll ever even consider that you might have been wrong.


    Comment by
    Rob
    April 6th, 2009
    at 1:22 pm

    “I read it to mean that even in the face of irrefutable evidence, the religious keep on coming.”

    Right – and I’m wondering aloud two things:
    1) Are all religious folks that way?
    2) Is being religious the only path to such mindless zeal?

    I’m thinking the answer to both are ‘no’, making the original statement sorta silly. I guess if you want to focus your lens on the religious sub-group of mindless zealots, and ignore all the others, that’s fine. Seems like a waste of righteous indignation though…


    Comment by
    JJ Ross
    April 6th, 2009
    at 2:05 pm

    Rob, I think that’s why they call it “apologia.”

    COD, I did the same thing and have the same doubts now, well actually I’m pretty sure I voted wrong. Interestingly, I understand why I voted against Kerry — for the same reason I despised Bill Clinton in his later years, exploitative disregard and disrespect of women living their own lives in their own way. For Bill it was Monica et al, for Kerry it was that gratuitoud debate crack about “Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter.” Apparently as Rob says, I have my own strongly held views but as COD says, they are fully human, not magic forces from interstellar beings.

    (Interstellar being is a phrase picked up from Sam’s blog today, so cock of the snook to him.) 😀


    Comment by
    Nance Confer
    April 6th, 2009
    at 5:54 pm

    “I read it to mean that even in the face of irrefutable evidence, the religious keep on coming.”

    Right – and I’m wondering aloud two things:
    1) Are all religious folks that way?
    2) Is being religious the only path to such mindless zeal?

    ***********

    No and no.

    We have, though, been subjected to the particular flavor of RR “thinking” that gives us license to be indignant. The entire country is still in recovery — if we have started yet — from 8 years of the mindless God-okayed destruction of a wide swath of American life. From science to Wall St to healthcare to needless wars to education to tax laws, etc. — everything great and small that could be manipulated by the RR was. The results of the evil inflicted by the RR, and everyone who went along with the craziest, are still with us.

    You must find it in your Christian heart to forgive the heathens who need a bit more time to vent and are slower to find fault with left-wing zealots as we dig out from under the rubble created by the right-wing kind.

    You may wave your arms and sputter that there are crazies on all sides but we will not be swayed yet. Be patient with us.

    At some point we will all come to agree that, surely, there are sane and wonderful religious people. Just as we will all join you in agreeing that sometimes left-leaning people have a hard time changing our minds, even when we should. Even when we have been given proof, sometimes we do not live up to the ideal of changing our minds to fit the facts rather than ignoring inconvenient facts.

    Then we can discuss the difference between this human failing and the religious ideal of denying reality and clinging to myths in the face of all evidence to the contrary. How one view of the world rejects mindlessness, and sometimes falls short, and the other embraces it, demands it, is based on it.

    I think we’re all going to need a bit longer in the recovery room though before we can be as discerning as you might like in drawing these fine distinctions.

    Nance


    Comment by
    dcobranchi
    April 6th, 2009
    at 6:31 pm

    At some point we will all come to agree that, surely, there are sane and wonderful religious people.

    I’ll buy the “wonderful” bit. Sane? Nope.

    The wackos on the right are all aghast today because Obama said that America is not a Christian nation. It’s as if these lunatics had never heard of the Treaty of Tripoli.


    Comment by
    JJ Ross
    April 6th, 2009
    at 6:41 pm

    Nance, that’s up there with your best work. 😀


    Comment by
    Rob
    April 7th, 2009
    at 10:19 am

    I’d have to agree. In the spirit of supporting y’all as you vent, I’ll tell a story of the first right-wing zealot I encountered.

    He owned a candy store in SLC. Emptying trash there was my first high-school job, which lasted 8 years and saw me eventually managing the production department. Here are some random experiences with this fairly nice John Birch-following Commie-conspiracy-seeing certified loon:

    * He’d throw work parties where he’d spring for lunch – and he’d call upon an employee to open with a standard LDS prayer. (Very awkward for the Catholics and athiests)

    * He instructed the cashiers to make sure the cash in the register was all arranged the same way – “facing the temple”. (Probably joking, but again, this was the backdrop of our worklives)

    * He was all for hiring illegals and paying them squat, but he took strong issue with a black kid in the production area. His words are still etched into my brain as something I never thought I’d hear another human being seriously say in the 1990’s: “I just gotta make sure we don’t have chimba the chimp back here.”

    * When his idiot out of control kids (in their mid-20’s) started using the work phone to call sex chat lines (to the tune of $1000’s/mo), he bullied the scruffy looking non-lds shipping guy into taking a lie detector test. And when he passed, boss bullied him into taking another. Poor guy eventually had to go barf in the dumpster.

    * Family-owned fun: The gay son hitting on me (at 17) in the restroom. The scumbag son hitting on the underage teen girls, claiming his wife had ok’d the behavior, because “we’ve got an open marriage”. The wife (eventually exwife) in complete denial about her gay son’s gayness, even as he lie in her house withering away of AIDS.

    * The day the Russian treaty inspectors visited the store. It took all we had not to bust a gut laughing, as the boss stumbled all over himself as he tried to denounce communism and be a polite host in the same breath. And did both very, very badly.

    * The boss’s good LDS friend, after working with him for a year, getting so utterly fed up with his shenannigans, washing his hands of him, saying ‘if you don’t clean up your act, you’ll lose your family, you’ll lose your friends, you’ll lose your business, and you’ll die alone.

    * Hearing a few years ago, that he lost his business, and when he died, a few work associates showed at the funeral, but dang little in the way of family/friends.


    Comment by
    dcobranchi
    April 7th, 2009
    at 11:23 am

    Gays and blacks, I think, don’t fare too well with hard right LDS folks.


    Comment by
    JJ Ross
    April 7th, 2009
    at 11:30 am

    Don’t forget the girls and wimmenfolk —


    Comment by
    Nance Confer
    April 7th, 2009
    at 3:23 pm

    Thanks for sharing, Rob. I think. 🙂 Your ex-boss is the sort of loon that gives any religion a bad name.

    When he and his ilk stop thinking they will be in charge again and we have set things right as a country, we’ll all look back on this and laugh. Right? 🙂

    Nance