The Crazies Act Crazy -- and the Clueless are Surprised!

People are reeling from the shock of hearing yahoos, at Sarah Palin rallies, threaten members of the press and clamor for Senator Obama's murder. They may be surprised, but I'm not. And if they had any sense, they wouldn't be, either.

The nation has largely awakened to the fact that the Religious Right adheres to an ideology that is insane. McSame has backed himself into a trap, in which he must appease this crowd or lose the election -- but the rest of America has come to realize that the Religious Right is not as bad as the Taliban or Al Qaeda only because we the people will not allow them to go that far, and so he's going to lose the election anyway. If we did allow these fanatics to go as far as their Islamist brethren in the Middle East, they certainly would. Most of us know that now -- and I pray that we will never forget it.

Whenever you try to reason with these nuts, they tell you that the Bible condemns reason in favor of blind, "obedient" faith. Oh, they will try to reason with you as far as they can, but because they can only take their nonsense so far, at some point they have to stop there and resort to the "Because God said it in the Bible" argument, instead.

What they can never quite explain is just why God would have given us the power to reason in the first place, if "He" didn't intend for us to use it. Their quick-and-easy retreat to "biblical inerrancy" is -- truth be told -- not the result of a strong faith, but a weak faith. They quite simply, when they're alone in the dark, do not trust that their faith makes sense -- which is another way of saying that they don't really believe in it at all.

Fundamentalism -- ALL forms of it (including the Christian kind) -- is actually a very weak, cowardly and dishonest form of atheism. These people believe in absolutely nothing. They're like little children, hiding under the covers every time they hear a bump in the night.

True, muscular, vigorous faith certainly does admit there are limits to our finite ability to reason, but it follows God all the way to the edge of the Grand Canyon of unknowing that looms beyond what even the smartest of us can figure out for ourselves. It then stops at the edge of that gaping chasm and says, "You take it from here, God...this is as far as I can make it." To the degree that Scripture warns against trusting overmuch in our own powers of reason, THIS is the course that it counsels. To say that it forbids us to reason at all is not only absurd, but a downright blasphemy. It takes God's loving gift of reason -- and the responsibility that goes along with it -- and flings it right back into "His" face.

Let Sarah Palin do her Fuhrer routine for her screaming, lunatic base. The crazier they get (in other words, the more honestly themselves), the greater will be the reminder to the rest of us that we never dare trust these people, or even consider them benign, again. But let's hope that the Secret Service is doing a damned good job of protecting Barack Obama. Beyond the willingness of the rest of us to stand vigilant against their lunacy, the Religious Right really is no different than Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

I said it here. Mark my words -- and never, ever forget them.