The takers

What do you call people who are exempt from taxes, get big government handouts and have a hugely disproportionate influence on the way government spends and our representatives vote?  What do you call people who somehow seem to be able to tell schools what to teach and what not to teach without seeming to care about historical, mathematical and scientific truths or the methods that revealed them?

I call them takers.

No, I'm not talking about people who don't pay much or sometimes any Federal Income Tax.  Not the people the Tea Party Republicans like to portray as leeches even though most of them pay out as much taxes percentage wise as the wealthy do.  I'm talking about the Christian Right for the most part.  Those folks who get federal support and public respect for schools that teach lies, fallacies and disrespect for logical thought processes. Those folks who somehow escape punishment for shouting down nearly every intellectual achievement since Aristotle.

I'm not going to exempt other religious organizations that take school voucher and tax-credit scholarship program  money to teach paleolithic superstition rather than mathematics and science, but few can come close to matching America's Children's Crusade.

Raw Story quotes one school as asserting:

"Our understanding is not complete until we filter it through God’s Word,”

It's not so much that I despise liars, cheats, perverts, idiots and child molesters, although of course I do, but that I despise people who make me pay for it -- who make all of us pay for it more.  We pay not only some billion dollars in subsidies to religious lie factories, we pay for it with our declining educational standards, with a generation less and less prepared and less willing to live in the real world. As Liberals, we oppose factors that put minorities and the poor at a social and educational and legal disadvantage but we're strangely silent on one of the most sinister assaults on education and on freedom, truth, justice and what we fatuously describe as the American Way. Frankly if you're cowed by self-appointed authority, afraid of  what might happen if we're allowed to follow truth where it takes us, we're not anything like a Liberal and we're part of  the empire that has opposed Democracy and freedom of thought for millennia.  How many of the world's greatest evils were not sold as God's word?  No wonder we're not supposed to respect truth.

Whether or not God is a lie, everything you say about him/her/it is filtered through someone's words and someone's agenda and usually it's the desire for power, for control that lie behind the words, the exhortations, the threats, the prophecy.  The easiest to control are the ignorant, the outcast, the troubled and afraid and such marginal people are what Big Christianity wishes to produce by teaching fear and lies and promoting ignorance and poverty.

Anyone who quotes God's word is a liar, even if he's right and any nation that allows its children to be lied to and misled by the Pat Robertsons, Oral Roberts's and all the other greedy perverts and child molesters of America has a grim future.