Friday, August 7, 2009

Crazy for God

I immediately thought of that small knot of fundamentalists whom I irritate on a regular basis with my blog postings. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviewed the author of the book, Crazy for God, Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer is the son of a famous evangelical Calvinist preacher but today the son has rejected all of the evangelical nonsense that was fed to him in his formative years.

Maddow asked him about the recent staged town hall demonstrations and the references to Nazism and Schaeffer went off in a strong condemnation of this rabble-rousing tactic. He is worried that this current spate of hate speech, and the words 'Nazi and Nazism,' are code words that are well understood by the far-right wing to be a license for disruption of the democratic process and, in the extreme, a license to kill. He fears greatly for the lives of some congressmen as well as the President. As a former Right-to-Lifer, Schaeffer said that he learned this coded language and the outcome that it hoped to achieve while he was in the evangelical movement. A few months ago he apologized for those years when he may have incited the murders of abortion doctors and other health care workers.

I especially focus on the 'crazy'of his book title quite often on this blog. I am convinced that many far-right evangelicals and fundamentalists suffer from, at the least, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and other, more serious maladies. Although I am not a psychologist, I can literally 'see' their OCD symptoms in their blog posts and comments. It is not normal to attempt to move through modern-day life guided by a 4000-year-old document written by a wandering Semitic tribe. Nor to heap sin and abomination onto people who do not fit the shape of this ancient tribe. Other people who think like this are endlessly pacing the halls of mental institutions.

Not only all of this, but they are anti-American as well. They dislike the U.S. Constitution are actively work to change it to fit their 4000-year-old set of laws. They would remake America democracy into a theocracy, not unlike Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Crazy for God could be written about the Taliban, al Qaeda, Zionists, and other extreme religious movements. It doesn't matter the dogma of the religion. Crazy is crazy.

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