Ladies and gentlemen, let's do an anatomy of a religious fanatic.
First and foremost, a religious fanatic (e.g., America's "religious right" and the Armageddon air heads) have a literally psychotic relationship with nature. Let's look very carefully at this relationship (or lack thereof) and examine the suicidal consequences to human civilization.
Let's take an example. How about Sarah? Well, if Sarah Palin is true to her word and actually "believes" those fundamentalist doctrines, she is part of a mindless herd of human beings who think nature is just a "motel" they are passing through on their way to salvation or damnation.
Now, it's really hard to take in that kind of mental buffoonery, since the majority of the human race, in varying degrees and varying ways knows in their bones that ultimate realness is where we already are. In fact, that's a kind of ultimate IQ test for our species, which you pass only if you know This is It.
However, if, like Sarah Palin, you think the universe (why stop with the Earth?) is a Motel 6 we're "just passing through", then the infinity of such arrogance is matched only by an equivalent infinity of stupidity.
There's a million ways to stick holes into such fanaticism. For example, if Mother Nature (to put it poetically) is a temporal blip that Palin-type fundamentalists are condemned to hang out in for a time, then you gotta admit, this is some hell of a motel. In such a motel, quasars are reduced to (what?) "wall paper" and quantum mechanics is sort of poking around in the rug.
Perhaps we should take pity on the fundies and not even talk about the theory of evolution (which by the way, is NOT a “theory” in the speculation sense, but only as a superb intellectual explanation of certain processes of nature). But since such talk jiggles fundamentalists to creationist free associations, let’s move on.
And what to do, what to do with Einstein's special (much less general) relativity? Are time, space, and simultaneity really relative? And what does that have to do with "going to heaven or hell" anyway? After all, the thumbs up or thumbs down business is the only thing that ultimately counts to a religious fanatic, so physics, schmiscs. Anyway, Einstein didn't have much good to say about fanatics (he once described a parade of marching Nazis as being able to function with their spinal cords). Nope, no matter how you stretch it, there is NEVER any way you're going to turn Albert Einstein into an Armaggdonite (i.e., the Earth is going to go boom any day now).
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