I seem to attract right-wing Christian ninnies to my blog like ants to a picnic. They enjoy harassing me because I dismiss their biblical literalism as hogwash. Each is a good Republican, of course. Jesus, they insist, would have led the preemptive invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had he been alive. Jesus would also have wanted tax cuts for the rich and would, in fact, now be fighting against universal health care. Ninnies with a capital 'N.'
They are a queer lot. Righteousness drips from their lips. On one fundamentalist christian blog I recently read a statement that reminded me of pigs wallowing in the mud, or that scene of the pharisee praying in the Temple. The three sows were decrying the 'unbelievers,' especially atheists, and one quipped, and I paraphrase her statement, "God, I thank You that I am not like other people..."
I am reminded of a line from Bishop John Shelby Spong's book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. He refers to fundamentalist bible study groups as 'the pooling of ignorance.' Thus my vision of swine mud-bathing.
It must be comforting, in a most queer sense of the word, to live in continual delusion, while being reinforced in that delusion by others. Comforting in that one is never curious about much of anything. There is a neatly locked box labeled, 'truths,' which remains tightly secured and stowed under the bed.
Surely not too many right-brained people can be counted in the ranks of the fundamentalists. Nor clever people. They left the fold long ago. Mostly dullards who wander through life in their untreated obsessive-compulsive state. It's a wonder that this breed didn't die out in prehistoric times given their lack of creativity and wonderment. Today they survive within the larger culture because the rest of us enable them. The rest of us do the heavy lifting, so to speak, while they muddle along in their 'gosh and golly' stupor. They probably were the 'leaches of society' in prehistoric times.
The Amish, a fundamentalist group, on the other hand, are content to remain 'of themselves' while living their 18th century life-style. If only the Pigs in the Mud would model this cloistered characteristic. But no. It seems that their perpetual state of denial and OCD-driven personalities demands that they fling their manure far, wide and often.
This surely is queer benevolence.
