The question was posed: “what is a religious person?” This question is meaningless to answer without first defining religiosity. A religious person can be said to be someone who remains intellectually honest in faithfulness to a codified system of conduct and metaphysical frame of reference. In this sense, I believe there are few authentically religious people living in modern Western civilization, as the people’s conduct and beliefs vary so drastically from the code they pretend to have knowledge of, especially in the case of the religious descendants of Abraham. The liberal dispositions of Western peoples, the majority of which claim to respect the opinions of others and call themselves Chirstians, contrasts sharply with the petty, vindictive, callous and murderous God of the desert. In the contemporary era people do not study the code and instead live by the presumptions of pop culture in understanding the religion they claim to be faithful to, thus failing to meet the definition of a “religious person.”
It is perhaps of benefit to humanity that the people of Western democratic cultures do not adhere more honestly to their own religious codes, lest the imperial grandstanding of tyrants such as HRH Bush II, a fundamentalist Christian carving up the world into realms of darkness and light at the expense of millions of innocent lives, would be more tolerated than it is in the present. Yet it is for this latter reason that we must be hostile to claims of religiosity: when governments are dominated by the magical thinking of the Bible, only dysfunction and the suffering of the innocent is the product. Healthy governments must operate in the domain of insight, logic, magnanimity and impartiality, and these virtues become vices in the face of religion, as evidence and chains of reasoning, components so crucial in sound policy making, are antagonistic to metaphysical claims.
The keen blade of reason is dulled to a butter knife by delusions of afterlives, divine intervention and burning bushes, allowing nonsense, fallacy and presumption to go unchecked in the face of inquiry, or perhaps even more disturbingly, being championed as goods of public devotion. In the past decade the advances of reason and science have been slowly eroded by the machinations of powerful Christian interest groups and a fundamentalist electorate, bringing about a paradigm in which belief and opinion are increasingly valued over knowledge and well-argued claims, reducing our political discourse to contests of deception and seduction. Beliefs and opinions may be tolerated in picking favorable flavors of ice cream or other inconsequential judgments, but they must be scrutinized in all affairs public and political. If we abandon this latter calling, by product of our own inability to cope with reality and to perceive the case of things as they are, we resign to being only a step away from condoning the ascension of an autocrat.
We stand now on the cusp of disaster as the American people are seriously considering electing such an individual into the highest seat of power, inevitably the product of their failure to perceive the world in a rational fashion. John McCain, no stranger to the absurdities of the Christian dogma, would bring with him an even more dangerous threat to the wellbeing of the republic in Sarah Palin, a woman that believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans once co-existed together[i]. When one considers the actuarial tables it can be estimated that Palin has a 27% chance of becoming the president by 2015:[ii] if one chooses to elect McCain, they are also condoning the presidency of an individual who would welcome the destruction of New York City with trembling open arms, as it might usher in the apocalypse and the coming of the Messiah. Should we entrust our national security to an individual who believes in such dangerous misconceptions about the case of things, who believes most fanatically in the not-so-noble lie of global terrorism and a world divided into darkness and light, unwilling to compromise in the face of reason and evidence, who holds that opinions are equally as valid as knowledge?
[i] Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-palinreligion28-2008sep28,0,3643718.story?track=rss
[ii] Palin: average isn’t good enough. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris3-2008sep03,0,5745350.story