Religious Right Lives With Lies

Go ahead and watch it. I know the Republicans won’t, because winning is more important that being truthful and honest.

I’d call it ironic, but when people move to dogma and away from unbridled speculation, abilities to interpret external data dwindle to literalist interpretations. Which is to say, no interpretation at all.

Words are blunt tools and lack any kind of precision when taken literally. Words strung together are interdependent entities that are only slightly less blunt. Words strung together into sentences strung together and delivered by savvy agency convey more over-precise meanings such that degrees of freedom in interpretation outnumber those listening!

Of course not all of those interpretations are correct, honest, or even anywhere near truth, but that’s more about the notion of Truth than the falsehoods the interpreters are hoping will gain traction.

What does it all come down to? Flaubertian entanglement: people tend to search for truth in how the speaker matches the spoken instead of searching ideation against fact, word or deed. Dogma is borne of such entanglements.

When approaching an audience immersed in and subjugated to any religion (Christian or Muslim), there remains only a single option in swaying those spiritually enslaved: be at the ready with a new and better (as perceived by the intended audience) religion to replace the religion that currently wags them to and fro.

In other words, logic and science and reason alone will have no effect on the entrenched. None whatsoever.

This means is one thing, and one thing only: do not attempt to dissipate or shatter such a religion because you’ll leave the “faithful” with no identity to speak of.

This is where you fashion a new “religion” and do a better of job it than those who fashioned the existing religion, wherein ‘better’ means one that’s suited to your own aims (even if—especially if!—your aims are based on logic and/or science and/of reason) and make it appear more attractive to the religious.

You can send the YouTube video above to ten friends as the publisher suggests and you can pass along a gentle (or fierce) reminder of the Eighth (by Roman Catholic reconnoitering) Commandment as well. Expect the religious to fall upon their own swords and beg for forgiveness for breaching the word of God and your expectations won’t be met, not in the slightest.

“Lying is in the eye of the beholder” will be their response, even as they employ the other sides of their mouths in preaching to the world that Truth is an Absolute and only the “Liberals and their Liberal Media” accept contextual or ever-evolving truth and thatsswhytheyaregoingtohell. (Bonus points for discovering the lie in the latter argument!)

Do you really expect the dogmatic to play the video against the absolute background grid thrown up by the Eighth Commandment and realize the sin of it?

I’m really sorry if you do, because you toil in the service of simplistic nonsense and will end up frustrated.

It’s not that the dogmatic (in this case, the Christian right-wingers who march, lockstep fashion, impelling their own version of the [lying] Truth) are championing The Lie, it’s just that through the prism of their tightly-controlled religion, it’s not really a lie! It’s Propagation of the Faith! (did you think the Romans’ PR agency had a copyright on that name?)

They need a new religion, is what it comes down to. They need to transfer the identity of spiritual enslavement to a new Master because it’s not in their nature to live without one.

Those Liberal Dogmatics who’ve made an ersatz religion out of “truthiness” must stop trying to tear down and erase a competing religion, and make their own religion more palatable to the competition’s followers.

Only in the longer-term view is the vanquishment of religious “followship” (thanks, 30 Rock!) among individuals possible, and McCain in all of his moral vicissitude isn’t giving a single thought to the longer term: he’s got two months to complete the transition to Bush’s Third Term by turning himself into something he can only end up despising.

The old McCain is gone, folks, only to be replaced by an OLD McCain who can only see Today, who can only abide the future by wrangling it into an ever-present Present.