Religion Under a 'False Flag'

by Len Hart,
The Existentialist Cowboy

During the Bush regime, a GOP constituency of religious fanatics, fundamentalists, and deniers of science mounted a full-court press against the principles of Democracy and the enlightenment. They put forward a dark age agenda: 'Intelligent Design', a stealth religious ideology cooked up by right wing focus groups --not scientists. It is religion under a false flag.

The body of evidence supporting evolution is overwhelming though ignored, misstated and rationalized by those having a political agenda. There is evidence that it was concocted, full-cloth, by a right wing focus group. To be expected, scientific evolution, indeed, science in general, is opposed and mis-characterized by advocates of bigotry, superstition and faux science. Like Relativity, theories of evolution challenge common prejudices regarding humankind's place in the universe. Unlike Relativity --often abstract and impersonal --evolution challenges the individual's self-esteem but only in those cases in which that 'self-esteem' is dependent upon a 'personal relationship' with 'God'.

It is impossible to date the historical resistance of religious authority to reason, logic or science. Authority seems always to have resorted to propaganda, fallacy and force in defense of lies, shibboleth, and baseless theology. Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens, sentenced to drink hemlock, and thus became a martyr for the cause of free inquiry. The Catholic Church utilized the Holy Inquisition to "persuade" heretics and forced Galileo to 'recant' a position in which it was posited that the Earth 'moved' about the sun. Though they opposed the authority of Rome, Protestant reformers were no more friendly to scientific inquiry. John Calvin in Geneva and Martin Luther in Wittenberg were no more disposed to science than was Rome. Today, there are statistical correlations between religious belief and an alarming, rising number of "hate" crimes. I dare say that every lynching down south was done by 'God-fearin'' Christians who would have claimed that they were doing 'God's work'.

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