Fantastic Essay about Idiot America

[liz_marcs]

jblaque has reposted fantastic 2005 essay by Charles P Pierce that was published in Esquire about science vs. religion, intellect vs. gut, enlightenment vs. deliberate ignorance, and the loss of the American Dream to Idiot America called Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Fantastically long, but oh-so-worth-the-read, if only for the insightful punchline at

Comments

[jgracio]

But, yeah...trying to convince someone who uses their religious book as a weapon to put the book down and see reason (and that they don't actually have to throw away the book if they do) is a near impossibility these days.

It's not just these days, but always. Look, there's nothing you or anyone else can say that will convince a true, hardcore believer, because anything you might say can be easily refuted just by saying something like "Oh, that's just God testing our faith."

If a religious person doesn't want to, you'll never be able to reason with him/her. And when I mean religious, I mean religious about anything, I'm not just talking religion, sports, cars, computer languages, Buffy's love life, Spike ... :) Luckily, most subjects people get religious about are silly enough that people can agree to remaining civil, but not all of them.

Other than that, can't really comment on it, religion doesn't mix very well with politics over here, most people try and resist it when it happens, and for the most part religion is something not to be taken very seriously.

Might have something to do with the fact that when we Europeans have historically taken religion seriously large quantities of people died so nowadays we're less inclined to do it. Or maybe it's just that we're lucky that we haven't had leaders sucessfully tapping into that segment of the population. Dunno. But it's depressing to think that a country with such large stockpiles of nukular weapons is getting less rational.