The religious right in the US... (random thoughts)

Something that amazes me of the US (and it applies to many other countries) is the power of the religious right or the Evangelical movements. 

All this comes BTW from the current electoral environment in the US. It is very hard not to get emotional (and regardless of my beliefs, I grant I can also be irrational) around the issues discussed in the news and the political sphere. 

On the positive side, churches create a support network for its members, which in a society is always positive. On the other side, the fundamentalism of many of the evangelicals is beyond the borders of simple hysteria. {Ten points if you can find the reference to the "hysterical" masses; you will be surprised}

I think it comes from being a nation that tends to look inside itself and lives with a constant fear to anything outside its norms or control. On the movie "Bowling for Columbine" Michael Moore made an argument around this, although more centered on gun control issues.

I like a couple of comments from comedian Lewis Black: 

• He ponders on why he has never seen a Rabbi on Saturday night TV, interpreting the New Testament to his audience, and yet...
  
• What drives him crazy about creationists, is that they see the Flinstones as a documentary...
  

I also like the comment from Father George Coyne, the  retired head of the Vatican Observatory and former member of the Academy of Sciences: 

“There is no science in the Bible. Zero, none,” Coyne says. “The Bible was written in different times by different people. Some of the books are poetry, some of them are history, some are stories.”

Still, as I mentioned above I understand the "community" aspect churches provide, although as a rationalist humanist I wish that after 200, 000 years of evolution, we would be able to satisfy it just for being humans.

I need to add to my book list "The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore. Although I may not, I can get so passionate about reason (irony intended) that I will just add some stress I do not need and lose the humanism part I try to anchor in, and therefore becoming one more fundamentalist in the whole discussion. The danger of  fundamentalism can be simply summarized on the total lack of empathy for anything it is not like you. This is the definition of evil, no matter how rational or holy it presents itself.

Or as it has been said before:

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert (1946), assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals. 

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/4519/81