Oh, and Shirley MacLaine…oh never mind.

Or if it is, do you now also contend that states more prone to believe federal spending should shrink — as surveys suggest those states do — are the cause of increased federal spending? If so, it’s time for you to repudiate not only the religious right but your own (and my) libertarianism — and, since we live in a universe _that_ paradoxical, perhaps time to start saying black is white and up is down while you’re at it.

Unless all this is somehow meant to show that Shirley MacLaine really hails from Atlantis, I’m done with this thread of the conversation.

But in terms of the claims of the adult, I think you just imagine fundamentalists to be far more anti-state than they really are, by and large. There are certainly some who just want the gov’t to leave them alone to do as they see fit by their children, etc., but it seems the vast majority would much rather use the state for their own ends. In fact many of them feel they have a moral responsibility to use the state (and any other power they have) to force others to behave a certain way (and as you know, red states and their politicians tend to suck far more off the governmental teat than do blue states). I know YOUR heart and mind are in the right place and when the time comes I will come to you to build my clone army, but I think you are mistaken about whether Christian conservatives are really your ally. They love their god a lot more than they love your freedom, science, and reason. Both the elves and the dwarves (not “dwarfs” if we’re talking about Middle Earth, but I should be the last person to ever correct someone’s spelling!) knew that when it came down to it they both hated Sauron more than they hated each other. The fundies hate scientific atheists more than they hate the state, which is just another tool they’d be happy to use if given the chance.

Nonetheless, I do devote about eight hours a day to promoting science (including defenses of cloning, not too popular with the religious right), and there’s only so much one man can do.

Indeed. And those same school boards have created a sufficiently threatening atmosphere in large portions of the country that high school bio teachers simply don’t teach anything about evolution to avoid “controversy” and the possibility of losing their jobs. This doesn’t get a lot of press as it doesn’t make as good a story as the more actively insane teaching of creationism, but there have been a few very troubling articles about the trend in the last couple of years. I think this and similar attitudes are far greater threats than any influence of New Agers. Most of the people pushing, for example, an increased emphasis on environmentalism, are not New Agers in any meaningful sense. And I’ve not heard of anyone saying the history curriculum should be completely revised to account for Atlantis. I’m going to have to agree with Jacob on this one, I’ve always found Todd’s feelings that the fundies are more of less harmless to be mystifying (so to speak). Even if one wants to attack environmentalism as somehow part of a New Age movement, we’re still talking about ideas that legitimate scientists have real disagreement about. And while I’m sympathetic to many of the same ideas about climate change that Todd is, I will also admit that a lot of the scientific community is on the other side. There is, of course, absolutely no legitimate scientific disagreement about evolution, which has clearly become one of the 3 big issues for conservative Christians (with abortion and gay marriage/sex/cartoons/anything else).

As an atheist, I find it alarming in every form from Christianity to New Age to Hinduism, make no mistake. One fight at a time.

Christianity isn’t part of the “native culture” of many, many Americans. So, it can’t be “safely ignored as white noise” by those of us to whom it represents a novel, unscientific set of claims. Many of us are much more accustomed to ignoring Eastern mysticism as background noise because it’s part of OUR native cultures. I personally don’t find a guy on TV promoting turmeric as a digestive aid nearly as dangerous as the local school board denouncing my grandparents’ religion as witchcraft.

The idea that Christian fundamentalism is something innocuous that politicians only pay “lip service” to is bull shit, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’m from the South. People there are seriously and actively trying to teach “Creationism” as science, to prosecute people for having certain kinds of consensual sex, and to ban birth control and sex education and interracial marriage (yes, really) — all based on their particular brand of Christianity.

New Age — which I suppose really has had some political effect in so far as it, like the hippie aesthetic, has made some people more inclined to Earth-worshiping environmentalism — was/is more prone to make lots of specific (un)scientific claims about things like quartz crystals having healing powers, our emotions being explicable as “memories” from Atlantis, belief actively reshaping reality, etc., etc.

As I’ve said before, I think people can be forgiven for passively accepting — and safely ignoring — the white noise of their native culture, but introducing some novel set of blatantly false claims and fanning the flames of unreason anew should always be troubling to us.

Luckily, no politician of any prominence pushed an explicitly New Age program (something that couldn’t be easily predicted circa 1987) — but keep in mind that over $100 million (no small sum) of our tax dollars here in the U.S. now go to crackpot research at the National Council on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, due largely to the popularity back then of back-to-nature mysticism — and on a purely electoral note, the New Agers did nearly take over the Reform Party (via the Natural Law Party’s infiltration of it), following the philosophy of none other than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who I worried about in a prior Retro-Journal entry.

His followers are very active in your homeland of Canada, too, so watch out.

And this has always been one of the sources of our difficulties! Somehow in your heart you can bring yourself to take New Agism seriously as a threat to reason that must be fought against, but conservative Christianity remains hidden in a SEP field as far as your field of vision is concerned. Whereas I was from the boonies (relatively speaking), at the time still thought I’d move back there, and saw the then-nascent Christian Coalition as the real threat…

Oh, come on. I used to bullseye wamp rats in my T-16 back home, and they’re not much bigger than 2 meters…

(We were all thinking it! I just had to post it…)