A Fine Mind for the 13th Century

I read that description of the Frothy One recently. Proof.

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America's preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

So, Ricky is scared of the bogeyman. Not that I'm surprised. It runs throughout much of the Religious Right. The Christianists as Andrew Sullivan dubbed them. (I think it was Andrew. That's where I picked up the term anyway.)

A commenter at Balloon Juice put in a quote from a commenter at Maddowblog without a link. I put it here as I found it at B-J because I think there's a lot to it. My emphasis.

One characteristic (out of many) of highly-authoritarian personalities like Santorum is a heightened sense of fear and anxiety. Think of it like this: you hear or see something unexpected, you don’t know what it is at first, and you feel a surge of fear as your body pumps in the adrenaline to prepare you for fight or flight. If the unexpected thing turns out to be nonthreatening, you relax. Crisis over.

But imagine if that sudden surge of fear never abates. Imagine that everything that you aren’t already comfortable with continues to be a threatening unknown no matter how long you are exposed to it. Imagine a fight-or-flight response that lasts a lifetime. Imagine that the crisis never, ever ends. That’s the world as people like Santorum experience it.

People like Santorum are looking for safety and security, but they’ll never find it because the threats they feel are inside of their own heads. They will never feel safe, and it would be possible to feel sorry for them except for the fact that they are willing to destroy the world in their hopeless quest to feel safe and secure.

It has been my experience when talking with highly religious people that the unknown is their bane. It's not that they won't accept it, it is that they cannot handle the answer, "No one knows." They have to grasp any answer that presents itself Religion presents (UNPROVED and UNPROVABLE) answers to the most unknowable of questions, "Where did we come from" and "Why are we here?"

Not every religious person I have known has the fight or flight response to the unknown. At least not as outwardly as Santorum is expressing in his speech. However, they reject many tenets of science. The two most often in the public domain are Evolution and Climate Change. I think the rejection of each has many roots but the basis for denying scientific knowledge is ingrained. Once they reject one set of scientific facts for whatever reason the rest fall to unreason quickly.

These are NOT the people that should be handed the levers of power. They should not be allowed any where near them. They shouldn't even know where the levers are located.