If anything I’ve said indicated I believed otherwise, please understand I agree with you 100% on this point. I think the thing that makes him a messianic figure to these people (at least in part) is what makes him different and uniquely dangerous. He doesn’t care about our system of government in the least and cares not even a bit about leaving behind a system that resembles the system we thought we had.
Couldn’t agree more.
I disagree. There is no human endeavor in history that would, at worst, have been exactly the same without religion, and at best, have been substantially improved. People like Rogers and King are outliers.
Look at the expression on the baby’s face though. “Holy shit, mom, we need to run!”
Would you go so far as to declare that Fred Rogers and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were “poisoned” by religion?
I could be coy, and say that I said “everything” and not “everyone”, but you have a point. I do not know how those two men would have been different without their religion. Maybe the good they did would not have happened. However, given what I have seen in my life, inside and outside religious organizations, I am comfortable with generalizing about the effects of religious thought on society. I believe a secular society will always treat its citizens better than a religious one.
Human history has shown that people will use whatever justification they need to do terrible things to one another, though, hasn’t it? Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot didn’t need a bible in their hand to inspire and preside over literally unimaginable horrors.
Please don’t misunderstand, there are plenty of examples of human misery being caused and/or rationalized by religious nonsense, but I think the flaws are in ourselves rather than “religion.”
They love Trump because he says publicly what they’re thinking behind the pious mask.
Some hold the State as their deity. I wouldn’t call those dictators non-religious. Their religion just took a different form. Maybe I should have rephrased Hitchens instead of quoting, and posit that it is zealotry in general that is the poison? Why won’t you let me have my facile generalities? 
Bedsides if one likes more the Old Testament God there’s another perfectly fine religion for it. They could start to wear a tallit, rest on Saturdays and stop to eat pork.
Yes. The trouble these folks have with that approach is that it comes with a lot of work, what with all the controlling the media and banks and imposing an alien agenda on America.
Jeeze. I hate to tell you but the ‘Mother Teresa side’ of Catholicism was “let them suffer; God willed it” This, of course, did not apply to her. She was no fucking saint.
Mother Teresa is quite literally a saint (at least in the Catholic church, in which her formal title is “Saint Teresa of Calcutta”). Whether you think that title is an honor or not is a different question.
It’s not like the Catholic Church is infallible or anything. /s
I always thought too: if issues like abortion and homosexuality are so important, don’t you wonder why Jesus never mentioned them?
I guess he was too busy trying to be nice. And, of course, whipping the money changers in the Temple.
Hateful Evangelicals are so devoted to their orange messiah that nothing is going to distract them from their goal of keeping Trump in office. There is even a Trump for 2024 campaign beginning with Huckabee in charge. We seriously need to get everyone out to vote in 2024. You can guarantee that the cult will be out in full force on election day.
The American Taliban needs to be stopped.
Key phrase here. Trying to place the fault outside of ourselves seems like trying to duck responsibility. The teachings of anyone, no matter how good and kind, are only as good as the person interpreting those teachings. And we (humans) seem to be exceptionally gifted at evil.
The article is valuable for the insider’s view, but it really skips over the main issue for these people, though admittedly it is much more in their unconscious than their conscious. Race. The article doesn’t contain the words “race” or “black” though there is one short paragraph that does have “African American” in it, and notes the origin of the Moral Majority from a guy named Weyrich who found a new topic to pretend to care about when they couldn’t fight for segregated religious schools any more:
The Real Origins of the Religious Right - POLITICO Magazine
The article pretends that Trump ever had to win them over, noting that Trump did not get a majority of evangelical voters during the primaries. It skips that he did get twice as many votes as anybody else from them - more votes than Cruz and Rubio put together. Cruz is the son of a pastor. You can’t find a hair-fine bit of daylight between Cruz and Trump on any religious issue. It was his racism, just as it was Reagan’s racism that won the evangelicals over from Democrat voting against Nixon, to 50/50 for Ford/Carter, to decisively Reagan in 1980 and ever since. They moved parties when Democrats stopped being racist and Reagan started dog-whistling.
Casting evangelical support for Trump as a religious decision is simply wrong. It has nothing to do with his support for Israel, against trans/gay, against abortion. Nothing. They can get all that from other GOP contenders, but flocked to the one with the really open racism.
It’s touching this guy is willing to call his old family and friends cultists, but not racists. No doubt because they don’t use the N-word, or make open insults, or whatever; they just support any policy that “keeps 'em down” and oppose any policy that might provide a more level playing field, so he can look the other way. Like everybody else does. Articles that cast evangelical support for Trump as a religious decision are just legion. Popular view in the Times and Post.
Now she’s a saint. But @beep54orama is right that she was no saint when she was alive, both technically and in the conversational sense that you wouldn’t want to rely on her for palliative care.
