Under the regime of the Shah of Iran, Iran rapidly modernized and embraced education and modernity. Critics called the Shah's regime brutal and America largely sat back as religious extremists swept into power ostensibly to bring more democracy and freedom - something, that, of course never materialized, and the Shah quickly appeared to be a gentle charity worker compared to those who took control of the country. Iran symbolizes how religion can drag a country back in time and revive Medieval mindsets. Here in America, evangelical Christians seek to do something similar as well as grant themselves special rights and privileges. Their agenda is to undermine the U.S. Constitution and, unfortunately, opportunists and political whores in the Republican Party are only too willing to cooperate as the true concept of religious freedom is under daily attack by the "godly folk" and their sycophants. A piece in Salon looks at how the problem of the far right is perhaps just beginning. Here are highlights:
By now, it’s clear that Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act was crafted to empower piously bigoted entrepreneurs and companies desirous of freelancing with their own “Jim Crow for gays” restrictions, and to let them cite as legal justification for doing so their precious religious sensibilities. The RFRA, said the original text, sought to give judicial succor to those who found that their “exercise of religion . . . has been substantially burdened,” or was just “likely to be substantially burdened” by performing services for people their faith’s sacred credos enjoin them to abhor (gays, in this case).
The danger, however, has by no means passed. RFRAs already exist in 21 other states (in three of which, bills are pending to fortify them), and three more are considering adopting similar measures. The RFRA just passed last week in Arkansas may allow faith-based discrimination; we now await a test case.
Yet the real menace to our priceless heritage of secular governance comes from the Supreme Court, which a year ago (in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby) ruled that corporations, on the basis of their religious convictions (yes, the Court decided corporations have those), can exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act’s relevant articles and refuse to pay for contraceptives in their employee health plans.
RFRAs don’t define religion or specify to which religion they pertain. But a lot hinges on how we define religion. Everyone knows what dictionaries say it is. We’re also all too familiar with another definition, one by which faith is an entirely spiritual affair, a matter of transcendental, miraculously elastic interpretation never to be held accountable for the witless antics, casual brutality and gross atrocities committed by its practitioners. . . . Both definitions lend an aura of dignity and gravitas to what is essentially sordid gibberish that we should dismiss out of hand, as we now do necromancy, phrenology or alchemy, or simply laugh off.
Yet religion is far too dangerous to our liberties to be laughed off or mischaracterized as harmless. In its Abrahamic strain, it is a triad of antiquated, largely pernicious ideologies of control and exclusion suffusing various “holy” books that detail a phony cosmogony, a fairy-tale version of humankind’s origins, and a plethora of strictures meant to regulate and restrict our behavior. . . . . A fictitious celestial tyrant superintends the almost ceaseless slaughter playing out in the Bronze-Age phantasmagoria of his alleged creation.
His pronouncements are regarded as binding on all humans. Hence, if the fictitious tyrant says, for instance, that gay sex is an abomination, it just is, and gays have to be abominated, like it or not. Nothing personal – it’s just what the magic book says.
[U]nknown humans came up with these magic books in a time before people knew what germs were, what gravity was, or that the earth orbited the sun, or that the earth was round. But the magic books, because they are magic, have to be believed. Why? Because the magic books say so. Failure to believe in said magic books is a great sin. Why? So the magic books themselves decree. According to one of the magic books, those who announce they’ve stopped believing in it deserve to die.
How would this restaurateur prove to a judge that he actually believes what’s written in his magic book? After all, most of it is pretty crazy stuff – talking snakes, burning bushes, suns standing still, virgin births, walking dead folk, and so on. A lawyer for the gay plaintiffs might challenge the restaurateur to present concrete evidence that he really does believe, and so has truly been “burdened.”
Given that RFRAs don’t specify to which religion they pertain, if they do legalize discrimination, they will do so ecumenically, offering adherents of all denominations a chance to bully both rationalists and believers of other cults. Presumably followers of the Torah, say, could deny service to those who have performed any of thirty-nine types of activity forbidden on the Sabbath. . . . Jews and Christians might wish to unite in denying service to Muslims, because, obviously, neither of their magic books recognizes the Islamic magic book.. . . .How long would it be before Christians revive the age-old charge of deicide against the Jews and halt all service to the “murderers of Christ?” Muslims, in turn, could deny service to Jews and Christians for having rejected the Prophet Muhammad.
Such are the farcical dilemmas and rank absurdities with which religion threatens to swamp us if it infests our judicial system and trumps secular law, as any RFRA legalizing faith-based discrimination would do. The ghastly morass to which RFRAs will one day probably lead speaks to nothing but the ahistorical ignorance of their drafters.
The Founding Fathers never meant for religion to play a role in our affairs of state. . . .
James Madison declared that “An alliance or coalition between Government and religion cannot be too carefully guarded against,” and thought that “Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.”
John Adams authored a treaty, signed by none other than George Washington, proclaiming that the United States was “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.“
Thomas Jefferson, one of the architects of the Constitution and the author of the “wall of separation between church and state,” had this un-Christian prediction to proffer about Christianity: “the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.“ The Book of Revelation he dismissed as “merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”
These days, sadly, with the godly on the legislative march, and the Roberts Court sitting in Washington ready to back them up, we find ourselves facing an unprecedented threat to what remains of our democracy.
Would religious folk, if they succeed in passing laws that empower them to use their faith as a bludgeon, prove restrained in invoking them?
In answer to the last question, one need look no farther than Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries where religion is joined with the supposed civil laws. It's ugly and down right dangerous for non-believers and those who embrace knowledge and science. Yet this is what the "godly folk" and the GOP want to bring to America. They must be stopped.
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