Blindness: The Face of Fundamentalism

Rarely, I find myself writing a comment to a blog post elsewhere that also finds its way in here. This is the case today: I left the following remarks at Norm Jenson's outstanding blog, onegoodmove.org, to a post featuring a goofy born-again actor appearing on Joe Scarborough's show. So click the graphic and watch the moron do his zombie impression (it's under a minute long); what follows are my comments thereto.

What troubles me most about such demonstrations of fundamentalism is not so much that there is no evidence of thought as that there is no feeling. Fundamentalism freezes the heart, so that feeling becomes alien and impossible. This is why fundamentalists and their elected stooges of death are capable of violence on so vast and hideous a scale as would give a commited mass murderer pause.

There is truly no human force as dangerous as the self-righteous and black-hearted believer, no matter his choice of creed or the flavor of his faith. Remember, as innocent as this vapid actor may seem in his stupidity, he represents the force that brought us the carnage in Iraq and New Orleans.

And as I mentioned Saturday, fundamentalist belief is also associated with most of the thievery, arrogance, corruption, laziness, and perversion that you find in the Ney/DeLay/Cunningham/Foley/Abramoff crowd. I suspect that we have only seen the tip of this iceberg of depravity and crime. When the final history of American government in the years 2000-2008 is truly and thoroughly written, it will rival any of the tales of depredations told by Tacitus or Suetonius.