I remember the apparently genuine concern within the student body at my university over the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. There was even a big write-up in the school newspaper which was meant to allay the students’ fears. Now granted, the majority of the students weren’t concerned, but there were still far too many who were, in my opinion.
(I didn’t know that Terrence McKenna was so popular among the youth these days.)
It’s so true. Reading about it can’t give a sense of what it’s like when you’re experiencing it first hand. I’d guess that if you weren’t ever exposed to those stores in the mall that catered to the religious that feature a wall of Rapture paintings (the ones with cars flying off the freeways were my faves - we had one in our house), gotten the streams of pamphlets/comics/fake $20 bills/etc., were given heaps of Rapture lit./comics as kids, and been proselytized to and hung out with Church people, you aren’t going to have a sense of what religiosity in the US is really like. There’s an intellectual tradition since the 1800s predicting the imminent end of religion. I think we’ll be waiting for that in the US for as long as we’re waiting for the Rapture.
Not my experience, although it may be biased by my bioscience background.
“Did you have any run-ins with the religious loonies?” would be a fairly standard question to ask someone returning from a conference in the US.
Religious extremism and superstitious nuttery is an intrinsic part of the US’s global image.
That’s because Orange Hitler’s enemy isn’t the Jews, it’s the Muslims. That’s why Bibi wouldn’t mind Trump’s rhetoric so much.
It isn’t real when you only experience it secondhand.
Look, I dated a Mennonite for a while. Members of her family - very nice people - literally wondered if as a Jew I had hoofs instead of feet. This was within an hour of a major East Coast city. You have no idea.
My wife works with various congregations and every few years she"ll encounter a new pastor who politely tells her there’s no possibly way he can work with her, because she is literally the Antichrist.
It’s also not unheard of for members of the congregations to not actually know what a Jew is. There are over a million residents in our county. This is not the rural heartland.
You just nailed it in a nutshell what the problem is for much of the world; unless they experience it for themselves personally, nothing is actually real to them.
That’s where that idiotic saying “shit just got real” came from; people who live in a constant state of unawareness until something forcibly removes the blinders.
That’s what I liked about the article you posted in another thread, written by someone raised in Ohio: it’s the people in the heartland who have never met anyone not like themselves who have no respect for the majority of people in this country, because they’re literally not real to them.
Totally.
I’m from Ohio, dude;
I read it and knew exactly what he meant, on so many levels.
The divide is real, and I can’t begin to fathom how to bridge it.
I think the use of the term “goosestep” just might imply a tiny bit of irony intended in the phrase “nice, safe.”
I have actually posted elsewhere, and it’s true, that my experience of the US doesn’t only include the coasts but also rural Kentucky, NC, Illinois and Indiana. I am well aware of the level of (uncritical and conformist) support for religion in the US, which is why I find it so funny when American commentators remark on the theocracy in Iran.
However, my question has been about something different - the extent to what, for the rest of the world, is marginally sane views, would actually turn into action.
edit - Pew also has this extremely interesting study. It does not go into why Republicans have a high regard for Jews, but it does show the enormous extent to which views of other religions are shades of grey, and to which personal contact is import. I’m posting it here because it is a little more encouraging than some might expect. The headline is correct but a little sensationalist.
I have to mention that a former colleague who had been chief engineering officer on a nuclear sub expressed amazement that they had crew who:
(1)Understood radioactive decay and knew the half life of, say, U235
(2)Understood that the end result of the decay chains was lead
(3)Were YECs
(4)Therefore had to swallow the idea that at the Creation, the isotopic ratio had to be established on Earth so as to give the completely misleading impression that all the different decay products of the radioactive series had to be planted in exactly the right way to give the impression that the Earth was several billion years old. Why go to such inordinate length to mislead future scientists?
The usual excuse is as a test of faith. To have such faith in god that they will disbelieve their own lying eyes for telling them something other than the Bibles tells them is true.
My usual description for people like this is “The Sky Is Green” from a discussion that I had once.
My usual description of them is “Cultural Christians who don’t actually know any Christian theology.”
They have to assume that their deity is capable of deliberate deceit, which is contrary to just about every strand of actual Christian theology. As distinct from “Bible study” conducted in English. In the days when I foolishly thought that people’s minds could be changed by scholarship and logic, I used to go to a few of these classes locally armed with both my Greek Testaments - the critical edition with variants and sources, and the more approachable Oxford one which was easier to read. I was, I admit, a disgusting smartass, but I rapidly realised that saying “Very interesting, but now let’s see what the New Testament actually says” did not make friends. And then one day I just woke up and realised that it was a tissue of make-believe from alpha to omega, and the interesting question was why people wanted to believe it in the first place, and how they used it to carve out their own private belief systems.
The lies people tell themselves about their religious beliefs - whether out of psychological need or the need to conform to their social group - are like the lies drug addicts tell themselves to avoid the need for change, or the lies people tell themselves about the latest political Messiah. And people think that Buddhism, with its insistence that the belief structures we create around ourselves are just maya - illusion - is some sort of exotic philosophy. Rambling, time for early bed.
That’s pretty much how all politicians look at their electorates these days. You could even argue that what destroys democracy is psychology. The rise of the mass media permitted mass manipulation - it’s just that since it was Hitler and the radio, cinema and mass rallies, the tools have got progressively better (and, with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, more targeted.)
On a older bulletin board I used to frequent, there was a guy who claimed:
“If you’ve ever kept pet fish, you’ll know about pre-aging the water, God pre-aged the earth to make it more suitable for human habitation.”
The thing is, and the difficulty will be that the liberal folk willing to speak up against the tRumpkins for others are probably also those least likely to take up arms.
The fact is that protesting works when others aren’t being subjected to violence etc…
At some point it becomes a fight, and active resistance is needed.
Because the other side won’t worry about the “whining liberals” etc…
Hopefully it won’t come to it, but protest and speaking out is great when you’re dealing with oppressive regulations etc… When innocent people are being subjected to worse than that, it’s up to all decent people to be willing to risk themselves for the rights of others.
Don’t be so sure about that.
Well, I do live in California. Most of the folks I know are dyed in the blue liberals. I’m also one of the few non-republican firearm owners that I know. There’s a huge cultural divide (at least here in CA) between those that are weapons proficient and those that aren’t. Guns/knives/anything weapon related is often seen as “rednecky” and disdained by a lot of the folks here.
If things ever come to any sort of active resistance, people need to be trained. You don’t just pick up any piece of technology and become proficient with it instantly.
Hmm… I wonder if my very awesome Muslim neighbors would like to take a trip to the range with me…?
Considering the ring of fire around the Pacific, the deposits of heavy metals, flooding, forest fires and too many other natural phenomena to list, that would be blasphemously asserting that his Deity did a pretty crap job.
