Off topic (maybe): Why are they giving Dick Cheney a microphone when he should likely be in jail?

Though I have to say I think the people who are not religious know quite well how important religion is to the Right–how could we not? Just look at Proposition 8 out in California for one example–people rabid about taking away someone else’s rights because of religious reasons. Or all the fights about prayers in public buildings. It’s endless. Even my own personal incident about the secretary of the horse club telling me I’m not welcome in the club because of my article, “How Sarah Palin Turned Me off Religion.” Believe me, we KNOW how strongly religious people feel. And it’s causing some people to feel defensive. Which doesn’t help the cause.

http://www.GreenerPastures–ACityGirlGoesCountry.blogspot.com

“The radical Christian right has no religious legitimacy. It is a mass political movement. It is interchangeable, in many ways, with other traditional political movements ranging from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty. It also embraces a world of miracles and signs and makes war on rational, reality-based thought. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy. It places a premium on action. It dismisses those who do not bow down before its god—and the leaders who claim to speak for God—as heretics and traitors. This movement shares with corporatists, who are busy cannibalizing our society for profit, the belief that there are a chosen few who know the truth and therefore have the right to impose it. The citizen, the individual, no longer has any legitimacy in this new world. All legitimacy is assumed by groups, whether they are corporate groups herding us over the cliff of globalization or religious groups that give popular vent to corporate-generated despair through faith in the Christian utopia. In this paradigm—corporate and religious—we become disempowered, afraid, passive and easily manipulated.”

I think the most important sentence in this snippet of Hedges’ essay are these: “The radical Christian right has no religious legitimacy.” I doubt very much that Hedges has made or would make a negative comment about Christianity – he is speaking here of a mass movement that does not think and endorses a course of dangerous action. While I don’t doubt that the people you know who you guess you would call followers of the Religious Right philosophy are fine people, so were many of the followers of Hitler, Jim Jones, David Duke, Joe McCarthy, Father Coughlin, Huey Long, George Wallace, and hundreds of other demagogues who would so blithely oppress and victimize those who they deem enemies. When people don’t think critically and follow demagogues of the left or right, there is trouble ahead. It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with uncritically following a leader. You must be very clear in understanding that any movement is composed of its members. You cannot absolve a movement of its guilt by excusing the actions of its members.