New York Rep. Peter King thinks there are too many mosques in the US. I don't know whether that's true. I can only say that I've seen exactly one since I was old enough to know what a mosque was and I've been old enough for a long time. But Representative King is a Republican, a part of Guiliani's campaign and the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and so has a personal financial interest in the marketing of hysteria and the promotion of irrational sectarian hatred.
85% of them, however many of them there might be, are controlled by extremist leadership, says Representative King. 85% -- although that number is probably there because it sounds like statistics but would be impossible to confirm or deny -- and besides, extremism is a relative and thus easily invoked term. Extremism can, according to traditional Republican values, be good: "no vice" as that icon of Republican virtue and multiple felon Spiro Agnew once told us. All in all, it's not a good argument, just one of the few left at the bottom of the barrel of bullshit.
Of course I think there are far too many Churches in the US and 87.0736% of them are extremist in that they are promoting the restriction of civil rights according to the teachings they invent for the purpose of undermining democracy and liberty and justice for all. They've succeeded in requiring our children to acknowledge their pantheon of bizarre deities and to swear that magic beings are involved in the government of the US. They have succeeded in replacing our coinage with little copper and paper religious engravings and they are constantly telling us what we can read, see, say and investigate; whom we can spend our lives with, how we can define our families, what we can teach our children about science and mathematics.
They not only promote wars and violence, they teach us that religious wars and violence are good when done in defense of an almighty dictator and are happy to provide all the fictitious history you could ever want to benefit their crusades and their war against science, math, physics, history, law, logic, cosmology, geology, paleontology, meteorology, statistics, probabilities and the origin of species through natural selection.
They promote the kind of mental illness that would allow, for instance, Mitt Romney, a follower of one Joseph Smith: demonstrable liar, forger and sexual pervert, to elevate his campaign to deny civil rights to people his sexually perverted and somewhat unclean looking prophet didn't like. It allows extremist followers of a Roman Bishop like Rudolph Guiliani to close a public museum for Blasphemy because he didn't think we should have the right to view a painting of a magic virgin who has babies with invisible gods that didn't adhere to the precise iconography of his church.
Too many Starbucks, too many SUV's and burger joints and way too Goddamn many churches.
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I believe that anyone who criticizes my beliefs cannot be believed. This means I can ignore you, which is convenient when you make good points that I don't want to accept.
While I think the percentage of extremist churches you site might be too low, your description of their radicalness (?) is right on. Seriously, I think that most Americans believe exactly what they are told to believe, by parents, teachers, clergy or other authorities. And we are taught that these authorities are right - thats why they're authorities.
Its a powerful learning system. So powerful that it has succeeded in passing on misinformation for generations if not centuries.
I just did a post on Jena 6 concerning the passing down of racist believes from parent to child. The comments I got are both from obviously young, racist kids!
It's true, you can't argue with them. They ignore facts and elevate conjecture to law all according to what they've been taught to believe.
I've had some experience with just how racist kids can be and it's scary seeing as like it or not, it will soon be their planet, but kids are ignorant and sometimes outgrow it. Kids follow crazy doctrines simply because they're crazy and sometimes they outgrow that too, but although it could be the cranky old man talking here, I think they're getting more and more insular, ignorant and preprogrammed.
Think about how the education system works in this country and we shouldn't be surprised. Kids are taught to memorize a bunch of facts and regurgitate them. No thinking required or allowed. They are taught disembodied facts in history as if there is no connection between the facts.
So what do these kids do in the real world? They watch Fox and CNN and the rest of the tripe and they memorize the facts and regurgitate them back. They go to church, memorize what they are told and regurgitate it back. They watch ads for new wonder drugs and cars, memorize them and regurgitate them back.
These children didn't stand a chance.
I can't get that Pink Floyd song out of my head. . .
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