The Fundies Will Never Stop, But It's Sort of Okay

This video has been making the rounds lately.



It's scary, sure, because it's a reminder for those who don't actually speak to these people on a daily basis (or who, like me, have lived among them for decades) just how committed to their ideology that the fundies can be. Amanda Marcotte talks a bit about that, and has this bit of positive commentary:

In this country, our theocrats have to contend with the fact that even when they’re winning, they’re losing. Eight years of Bush has crippled our economy and mired us in an unwinnable war, but it did not actually do a damn thing to make your kids quit fucking or make everyone convert immediately to fundamentalist Christianity. Atheists still published books and those books sold. Homosexuality not only didn’t disappear, it gained more social acceptance. Women have not en masse abandoned our desires for careers and self-actualization in favor of servitude to men. Fucking for pleasure instead of procreation remains as wildly popular as it has since they invented effective contraception, which is only slightly more popular than it was when people had to risk it. Stopping the tide of modernism isn’t going to be as easy as winning an election or even winning every election. Hollywood has to be toppled. People have to give up TV. Widespread literacy gets in the way. People have tasted secular humanism and don’t want to go back to the Dark Ages, full stop.

I think she's right on the money, as usual. The fruits of the Enlightenment, positive and negative, are like the denizens of Pandora's Box -- they don't go away very easily, if at all, because we as a society are so used to the amazing freedoms that they entail. (As much as even professional moron Vox Day harps on the evils of the Enlightenment, note that he still uses his computer and, as much as he might reject it, has a basically scientific way of seeing the world.) Sure, Iran was a pretty secularized society when the Ayatollahs took over (see Persepolis for a very nice portrait of that time period by someone who was there), so I'd never try to argue that It Can't Happen Here, but I'd like to believe that there are enough of us who support the side of reason and scientific inquiry and secular society that it can never really be stuck back in that box again.

Go read Amanda's commentary, it's first rate.