"I wish you were smarter so you'd know how dumb you are." - Louis DePalma
Ah, the Tea Party never ceases to entertain, if nothing else. It's like a political reality show in its bald-faced righteousness, vague passions about imprecise words, and shameless contradictions. The kooks on the other side of the aisle are just as entertaining, but for now, I'm commenting on the latest clown to enter the political circus -- Christine O'Donnell.
The Tea Part is decentralized, which makes it less of the Tea Party and more of a Teflon Party. Whenever some Tea Party candidate turns out to be kookier than they expect, the hot-beverage party can shrug its collective shoulders and say "We didn't do it." Christine O'Donnell is going to be one of those candidates. Politically correct folks might call her "polarizing," but in fact, she's just a fool. A fool without sufficient sense to understand what everyone is laughing at.
The witchcraft thing, which I won't recount since it's been all over the news, is small potatoes. It really is rather insignificant -- but it smacks of the old Christian ploy of telling stories about how "bad I was" before finding the Jesus. "I was such a sinner," they say, "until I found the Lord. Praise Jesus." Yeah, yeah. Big sinner, I get it. Now, you're so much better than the rest of us. Christine even evokes "satanism" in her admission, as if every witch is a satanist; she clearly doesn't even know what a witch is, but is speaking to like-minding folks who believe modern witches are wearing black hats and taking part in blood sacrifices for their Dark Lord.
I'm not calling Christine a silly person simply because her brain is using vernacular from four hundred years ago; I'm calling her a silly person because she clearly isn't a critical thinker. "Evolution is a myth," is a much more damning statement, but it jives with the witchcraft thing. Both sentiments are hundreds of years old and both are terribly wrong and reveal the speaker to be uneducated, at best.
With O'Donnell being the voice of the Tea Party in Delaware, it reveals what I consider the absolute worst aspect of this movement -- willful, prideful ignorance. This party would be thriving four hundred years ago. Hell, it would even be an overwhelming majority. But times change. America is now beginning to have some growth pains as it enters into a new philosophical age and we now have the choice of moving forward or moving back; we can't teeter on this precipice for long.
What am I talking about? Well, my perception is probably affected by my own take on the world, but it appears the religious and the secular folks are butting heads more often in public circles because it's time to put away the primitive fairy tales and hoodoo of our forefathers. People like O'Donnell are instrumental in pushing us back again into the age of when the Earth was flat, the stars and sun orbited the Earth, and a giant snake encircled the world from beneath the ocean. These things were believed during the time the books of the Bible were written. If these are truly the "words of God," as true believers assert -- then God was an ignorant, Bronze Age peasant... a highly coincidental happenstance, considering those were the people credited with interpreting God's will and writing down the words.
Hey, if God had written one mathematical proof or dictated a known law of physics ("Thou shalt not exceed the speed of light"), I'd be on board with the faithful. There'd be something to this. But sadly, it seems the Creator of all things doesn't seem all that interested in the laws that hold this universe together. He was much more concerned with who had offended the Hebrew people, or maybe someone had gathered sticks on the Sabbath ("Put him to death," said God) or maybe some man's penis had found its way into another man's bodily orifice. Those things are clearly much more important than filling humans in on the marvelous structure of our universe. He could even have mentioned biology or natural selection when penning the creation story -- but that too is absent. It's really too bad because we lowly humans have figured that out; knowing this stuff a few thousand years ago would have been a really big help.
Let's not forget the last time religion took the political reigns. It was called the Dark Ages, and that's when people died young and had really bad teeth. Really bad. Dentistry is a science and came along after most folks figured out that praying for good teeth wasn't working out so well. In short, people were stupid for a really long time because of the dogma from religion.
The founders of America weren't religious zealots, they were secularists. In fact, at the time, America was the most secular country on Earth -- for good reason. The founders were big fans of the Enlightenment and realized that if you give religion more power than intended (making spooky things less spooky), bad shit happens. It happens because every religious person on the planet has a different, internal, idea of what the Invisible Man wants them to do and what He likes and dislikes. There is no objectivity in this view. There is no way for them to know how dumb they are because they judge things based on an internal voice and imagined big daddy in the sky.
O'Donnell is frighteningly similar in this regard. People of this caliber of ignorance will never be in short supply, after all, it's the easiest path to take in life. But we can keep them from getting into positions of power. If a rational Muppet ran against O'Donnell, I'd vote for it over her.
The Tea Part is decentralized, which makes it less of the Tea Party and more of a Teflon Party. Whenever some Tea Party candidate turns out to be kookier than they expect, the hot-beverage party can shrug its collective shoulders and say "We didn't do it." Christine O'Donnell is going to be one of those candidates. Politically correct folks might call her "polarizing," but in fact, she's just a fool. A fool without sufficient sense to understand what everyone is laughing at.
The witchcraft thing, which I won't recount since it's been all over the news, is small potatoes. It really is rather insignificant -- but it smacks of the old Christian ploy of telling stories about how "bad I was" before finding the Jesus. "I was such a sinner," they say, "until I found the Lord. Praise Jesus." Yeah, yeah. Big sinner, I get it. Now, you're so much better than the rest of us. Christine even evokes "satanism" in her admission, as if every witch is a satanist; she clearly doesn't even know what a witch is, but is speaking to like-minding folks who believe modern witches are wearing black hats and taking part in blood sacrifices for their Dark Lord.
I'm not calling Christine a silly person simply because her brain is using vernacular from four hundred years ago; I'm calling her a silly person because she clearly isn't a critical thinker. "Evolution is a myth," is a much more damning statement, but it jives with the witchcraft thing. Both sentiments are hundreds of years old and both are terribly wrong and reveal the speaker to be uneducated, at best.
With O'Donnell being the voice of the Tea Party in Delaware, it reveals what I consider the absolute worst aspect of this movement -- willful, prideful ignorance. This party would be thriving four hundred years ago. Hell, it would even be an overwhelming majority. But times change. America is now beginning to have some growth pains as it enters into a new philosophical age and we now have the choice of moving forward or moving back; we can't teeter on this precipice for long.
What am I talking about? Well, my perception is probably affected by my own take on the world, but it appears the religious and the secular folks are butting heads more often in public circles because it's time to put away the primitive fairy tales and hoodoo of our forefathers. People like O'Donnell are instrumental in pushing us back again into the age of when the Earth was flat, the stars and sun orbited the Earth, and a giant snake encircled the world from beneath the ocean. These things were believed during the time the books of the Bible were written. If these are truly the "words of God," as true believers assert -- then God was an ignorant, Bronze Age peasant... a highly coincidental happenstance, considering those were the people credited with interpreting God's will and writing down the words.
Hey, if God had written one mathematical proof or dictated a known law of physics ("Thou shalt not exceed the speed of light"), I'd be on board with the faithful. There'd be something to this. But sadly, it seems the Creator of all things doesn't seem all that interested in the laws that hold this universe together. He was much more concerned with who had offended the Hebrew people, or maybe someone had gathered sticks on the Sabbath ("Put him to death," said God) or maybe some man's penis had found its way into another man's bodily orifice. Those things are clearly much more important than filling humans in on the marvelous structure of our universe. He could even have mentioned biology or natural selection when penning the creation story -- but that too is absent. It's really too bad because we lowly humans have figured that out; knowing this stuff a few thousand years ago would have been a really big help.
Let's not forget the last time religion took the political reigns. It was called the Dark Ages, and that's when people died young and had really bad teeth. Really bad. Dentistry is a science and came along after most folks figured out that praying for good teeth wasn't working out so well. In short, people were stupid for a really long time because of the dogma from religion.
The founders of America weren't religious zealots, they were secularists. In fact, at the time, America was the most secular country on Earth -- for good reason. The founders were big fans of the Enlightenment and realized that if you give religion more power than intended (making spooky things less spooky), bad shit happens. It happens because every religious person on the planet has a different, internal, idea of what the Invisible Man wants them to do and what He likes and dislikes. There is no objectivity in this view. There is no way for them to know how dumb they are because they judge things based on an internal voice and imagined big daddy in the sky.
O'Donnell is frighteningly similar in this regard. People of this caliber of ignorance will never be in short supply, after all, it's the easiest path to take in life. But we can keep them from getting into positions of power. If a rational Muppet ran against O'Donnell, I'd vote for it over her.
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