Fundamental Problems

With the death of the Reverend Jerry Falwell this week and having just taken a history exam with an essay about the rise of conservatism in America, I got to thinking about the current state of America. For all the political rhetoric saying otherwise, we live in a country so morally and culturally divided that we are either in, or rapidly approaching, a culture war. There are so many people in this country who feel that the government should be the moral arbiter and that we should become a Christian nation, it is truly sickening. The fact that people could look up to a man, such as Falwell, who blamed September 11th on homosexuals and single mothers, leads me to believe that maybe we do live in a nation of morons. Are people really so willing to believe others as a replacement for finding their own answers? Maybe Vladimir Putin was right when he compared Bush's foreign policy to that of the Third Reich. Fascism is allowed to flourish when people stop asking questions and blindly accept whatever a ruler says.

This is the problem with religious interest groups playing a bigger and bigger role in American politics. Fundamentalist Christians, Jews, Muslims are fundamentalist because they have stopped asking questions and started only to accept answers from Reverends, Rabbis, Imams. While this may be fine in believing mythology, this is not how a representative democracy can function. Just because a politician is a leader and has power does not mean he is always right. In next year's election, we should focus not on a candidate's faith, but his politics. How can a person who by the very definition of his job has to send young men to foreign lands to die reconcile that with any religion? Of course, policy is no longer a political issue anymore. People care more about bogus issues such as abortion, gay marriage and banning pornography than balancing the budget, reforming the criminal justice system or getting rid of standardized tests in elementary school. The former are issues of personal liberties of which the government has no right to make policy; the latter are. It is a far bigger problem that a vast majority of middle schools think that Martin Luther King's "dream" was to end slavery than the fact that they don't say the "Our Father" after the Pledge of Allegiance. The more religious this country becomes, the stupider it becomes. Democracy teaches us to question, religion teaches us to blindly accept. The two cannot be reconciled. Until we all realize this, we will become further split between the secular and the religious and when such a sharp divide occurs, well, just look at the Middle East.