American pious irrationality expands worldwide

I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn’t excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent attempts to create a legal justification for imprisoning and killing homosexuals in Uganda, a situation which, as it turns out, was fomented by American evangelical homophobes. This is not to excuse Ugandans, who were apparently primed to commit violence against gays already, but it was our preachers who sparked the flame.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

That’s pretty much standard anti-gay rhetoric here in the US; we’re inured to it, and unless you’re a victim of it, it’s fairly easy to ignore it — which is why the evangelical haters are still allowed to babble on the news. These wretched liars for Jesus have their audience that loves to hear their nonsense about gays as predators on young boys, being evil and hating heterosexual marriage, and all that other dishonest crap, including their bizarre touting of ‘cures’, but at least we in the US also have vocal proponents of equality and civil liberties. We just need more of them.

In Uganda, though, that rhetoric and false assumption of authority led to horrid abuses of civil rights, like the anti-homosexuality bill. At least now, though, we can get specific and name names for the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I’m sure they are trying to get away from the guilt…but the thing is, if you read the anti-gay literature here, that’s the direction they want to go in: the criminalization of sexual acts that they find repugnant, the encouragement of loathing of people who don’t love the people they approve. They want homosexuals to be despised, second-class citizens who don’t have all the rights of good Christian heterosexuals. The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.

And look who else is involved, President Obama’s friend:

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

First you associate them with evil, then you disenfranchise them, and only when they’re sufficiently dehumanized do you get to kill them. America’s Christian evangelists are on step one, and working hard on step two; Uganda’s problem is that they moved on to step three a little prematurely.

Brit Hume, yet another oblivious religious kook

Like the writers at Political Animal, I have regarded the sordid celebrity nonsense surrounding Tiger Woods with complete indifference. He’s rich, he has behaved stupidly, that’s the end of the story, despite all those lurid magazine covers in front of my face at the supermarket checkout line.

But this is something else. Brit Hume, who has always been mindless conservative drone, has crossed a line. Look what he said on Fox News:

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.’

Nothing surprising there: Fox News pundits clearly would like to see all of America converted to some form of right-wing Christianity.

I am surprised by one thing, though. Who knew all those other celebrities behaving badly on magazine covers and celebrity news were all non-Christian?

Cancer is a disease

Barbara Ehrenreich had breast cancer, and ugly and frightening as that disease is, she found something else that was almost as horrible: the ‘positive thinking’ approach to health care. People are stigmatized if they fail to regard their illness as anything other than an uplifting, positive life experience, an opportunity to examine their lives and identify what is most important to them…and also, most disturbingly, if they fail to appreciate that the attitude that they bring to the problem will determine whether they live or die. It’s the Oprah-zation of medicine.

In the most extreme characterisation, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance – it is a “gift”, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. One survivor writes in her book The Gift Of Cancer: A Call To Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live.” And if that is not enough to make you want to go out and get an injection of live cancer cells, she insists, “Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.”

Well, doesn’t that just make you all want to rush out and take a bath in some carcinogens? We healthy people are missing out on enlightenment!

We’re also missing out on an opportunity to be bilked. That’s what this is really all about: con artists who can’t really do anything to fight the cancer can at least tell you to smile, be cheerful, pray, buy my super-duper vitamin supplements, and pay the cashier my consulting fees on the way out … and if it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault. You’ve got a disease that’s ripping through your guts and causing pain, yet if you feel a moment’s doubt or worry, you’ve invalidated the charlatan’s prescription, and your relapse is all your fault.

This is where the feel-good phonies prosper. Look at how Deepak Chopra treats his ‘patients’.

Besides, it takes effort to maintain the upbeat demeanor expected by others – effort that can no longer be justified as a contribution to long-term survival. Consider the woman who wrote to Deepak Chopra that her breast cancer had spread to the bones and lungs: “Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise, and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps reoccurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.”

Chopra’s response: “As far as I can tell, you are doing all the right things to recover. You just have to continue doing them until the cancer is gone for good. I know it is discouraging to make great progress only to have it come back again, but sometimes cancer is simply very pernicious and requires the utmost diligence and persistence to eventually overcome it.”

The poor woman has a metastisizing cancer that has spread to her bones and lungs, and Chopra is telling her that diet, prayer, and not thinking ‘toxic’ thoughts will lead to a cure! I don’t know how that quack has avoided arrest.

I much prefer the honesty of Ehrenreich (I also like the connotations of her name). This is the truth:

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift”, was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.

I’m really in the wrong business

I told you yesterday that it was amazing that a religious crank could serve an adoring audience with 55 radio stations, all pumping out Grade A Prime lunacy. It was a bit depressing that all an old fool needs to do is babble about God and the Bible and people will throw money at him.

But then I’d also pointed out that another phony, Rick Warren, had suffered a major financial shortfall of almost a million dollars, and was begging for more donations. That makes you feel a little better, right? Stupidity is not a smooth road to riches, at least.

Despair some more, people. Warren put out his call, and his flock of sheep answered with donations adding up to $2.4 million over one weekend. And he’s bragging that most of these were small donations from many people, not the largesse of a few rich individuals, and calling it a “miracle”.

It’s a bit ironic that initially he’d said the shortfall was due to a poor economy and people having little to give. It’s revolting that he would then proceed to put the bite on the financially stressed members of his congregation, and that they’d then dredge up more of their money to hand over to the Saddleback simpleton. It wasn’t a miracle: a better word would be a fleecing.