Atheism 101-Part One

 



 

 

 

  As you may have gathered from my earlier posts, I am indeed an atheist. This declaration did not come easy. The journey from Roman Catholic Christian indoctrination to understanding that the God concept is completely illogical is fraught with peril. My purpose for writing this series is to help anyone who may be struggling with their faith. I believe that there are many atheists out there who are closeted. You may use words like agnostic, secular and spiritual to describe yourself when asked what faith you belong to. You may use the term "Higher Power" to avoid using the God word. You feel uncomfortable when people around you say Grace before a meal or when a friend asks you to pray for someone who may be sick or going through a difficult time. Ultimately, you feel increasingly disconnected from people whom you've known your entire life because their religious faith has strengthened and yours has evaporated. I have felt that disconnect. I have been shunned by the parents of children on my son's baseball team when they discovered my lack of faith. I have sensed the coldness and distrust of people that at one time liked me. I tried to stay quiet about my atheism and keep my opinions to myself while others around me blather on about how religion is important and "Praise Jesus" for this and "Thank God" for that. Well ladies and gents.........Fuck That.

 

                                                            Crisis Of Faith

 

  I love this term. Crisis of Faith. It infers that one's faith in God is in question. Many times this will occur through tragic circumstances such as a sudden death of a loved one or a terrible illness that worsens. The doubt begins to seep in because praying to a God for help or simply having faith that this entity will intervene does not work. Multiple studies on Intercessory prayer were performed and guess what they found out? Prayer doesn't work. Say it again and say it out loud so you can hear yourself. Prayer does not work.

  So then what does a person do? Most people go right back to the religion for guidance and answers. They schedule a little sit down with their local Priest or religious representative for a little pep talk. I liken this to a person with a drinking problem going to his drunken buddy for alcoholism advice. I can tell you that the outcome of these conversations are always the same. Firstly, the burden that you are carrying is your inability to accept that the crap that we are telling you is absolute and secondly, stop asking questions and accept the crap that we are telling you is absolute. Now go say ten Our Fathers, twenty Hail Marys and stop touching yourself so much.

 

   I was never a deeply religious young person. I was like many fair weather Irish Roman Catholics with the institutions and rites of the faith deeply embedded into my person. Confession, Holy Communion, Confirmation, Stations of the Cross, pretending to give shit up for Lent....I did it all and I also had a twelve year Catholic school education. My crisis of faith wasn't as much a crisis as a decades long erosion. I found that as I learned more about the world, educated myself and met more diverse people, religion became less and less viable. The day I finally had my epiphany, I was at church attending a friend's wedding and found myself completely distracted by the bullshit around me and the fact that I had accepted this ridiculous mythology for most of my life. I was Neo in the "The Matrix" and I took the red pill. The kneeling and the chanting and the blood drinking and flesh eating felt all at once ludicrous and I almost started laughing and crying at the same time. My faith ended there forever.

 

                                                      Fear Of Burning In Hell

 

  As an atheist we understand that Hell is not real but that does not mean that we should diminish the fear of hell when talking to people who are having a faith crisis and are making the leap into religious skepticism. Hell was created by Christianity (and most religions in some form) for a reason. FEAR. Just as you will be rewarded with Heaven and eternal bliss for believing all the crazy nonsense, you in turn shall be punished for not believing. And by punished they mean burning in a pit of fire for eternity while demons stab you in the crotch. This concept is driven into our brains very early and it can be a very real fear to even educated adults. As of the writing of this blog entry there was an item in the news stating that the Vatican has clarified that atheists  - they believe - are still going to hell. It's 2013 and the Catholic church still preaches this concept!!! As a Christian you need to ask yourself a serious question. Do you believe that there is an all loving, powerful entity who cares for us and loves us and wants us to be forgiving of each others flaws? Then, how can you believe that this gentle, tender loving God would toss you into a pit of fire if you disobeyed him? You see? It doesn't make any sense. None of it does.  

  Here's the facts. Hell or Hades or whatever you would like to call it is a concept used in every religion that ever existed since humans have been on this planet. It does not exist. It never did and it never will. It is another concept created by ancient cultures who did not understand how things in the natural world function. It was used by elders and the leaders of ancient cultures to keep their followers in line.  Hell does not exist. Say it again and say it out loud so you can hear yourself. Hell does not exist.....

 

To be continued: Part II

 

 

The GOP And The Tea Party Go The Way Of The Whigs

Throughout the past year I had developed a fascination with reading facebook pages and blog sites with names like "Tea Party Patriots" and "Obama is a Terrorist". Luckily for me, I don't have to "Like" these pages in order to post on them. I decided that I wanted to get into the dialogue. My plan was not to troll these sites and belittle them but to ask questions and attempt to understand why they feel the way that they do. Needless to say this was an unbelievable waste of time. My hours would have been better spent throwing large stones in the air and attempting to catch them with my face.

Here are some facts that I have extrapolated from my experience.

It doesn't matter how many real facts that you provide to support your argument, they will never accept it. For example in the case of questioning their reluctance to accept man-made climate change I presented a fairly well thought out argument with links to NASA, The Intergovernmental Panel on Science Change, The National Academy of Science and others. They claim that NASA was taken over by the Obama administration, defunded and filled with European style communists bent on destroying America. All of the other Scientific studies were debunked because FOX News had a show about a guy who found e-mails from another scientist guy who said all the climate change studies were wrong. They presented this link as undeniable proof.  http://www.friendsofscience.org

They all think that they are constitutional experts when in fact none have them have any real grasp on the document or The Bill of Rights. In one instance I was trying to make the point that all free speech is protected even in the cases of flag burning and the KKK. I said that however distasteful we find this form of speech, we must protect their right to do it and the ACLU is there to help in these cases. The response was unbelievable. The threats and the name calling was incredible!! After being threatened with violence and asked to leave the country, I had given up on that subject, which leads me to the next point.

Tea Party followers and ultra right wing conservatives are socially paranoid and religiously  schizophrenic, almost to the point of being delusional. I have had the most venomous vitriol thrown at me by people who claim to be Christians. And believe me when I tell you that at no point did I ever name call or belittle anyone on these sites. All I did was ask for clarification on statements they would post. If I had a dollar for every time that I was called a Marxist or a socialist or a libratard I could probably put a bid on that authentic Lenin autographed Ushanka hat I saw on EBAY.

But the icing on the cake was their complete insistence that Romney would win this election. They would always talk about November 6th when Obama loses the election and how glorious it would be.
I would point out in the final weeks of the election that Romney will lose New York, California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Jersey right off the bat. That's 145 votes and the election hasn't even started yet!!! Math doesn't matter. Early exit polls didn't matter. Romney was down by 10 points in Ohio a week before the election by all accounts! Nothing mattered except for the flow of disinformation being regurgitated in the right wing snow bubble.

When the election went to Obama there was utter shock and disbelief. 332 to 206. Romney wasn't just beaten, he was ass raped. And this was a case of legitimate rape. Romney spent 25K on victory fireworks and had not even written a concession speech. This guy was so arrogant that he didn't even consider that he may lose and that he should be prepared for it. He was running for president of the United States for fuck sake!! By all counts, history tells us that he should have won. Presidential elections that take place during times of  recessions always lead to an incumbent being replaced. The difference here was that the majority of America wasn't buying the bullshit that Romney was shoveling. The Fox News watching Tea Party dimwits were so deafened by their own party's propaganda that didn't hear the sound of the Obama reelection locomotive bearing down on them.

What we are now left with is a bunch of angry tea party wackos who now believe that secession is the only answer. These people refuse to accept the fact that the country is getting more ethnically diverse, more progressive and more secular. They claim that the America that they loved is gone and it is the beginning of the end for the United States. The fact is that they are the ones who will soon be gone. America will move forward and change just like it always has. America will fight for the rights of immigrants like Latinos and Asians and Muslims just like we did for Germans and Irish 100 years ago.  Americans will fight for sexual equality for gays just like we did for women during the suffrage movement and for African Americans when we abolished slavery. We will fight for health care and fair pay and worker's rights just like we did in the 30's with The New Deal. What they don't understand is that they represent the people who were on the losing sides of those battles and they will be on the wrong side of history. Our children and their children will look back with scorn on the people who fought to stop Gay marriage, Gays in our military, Healthcare for all, The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, The new G.I Bill, The 9-11 first responders bill and a hundred other good progressive pieces of legislation. The Tea Party and the GOP will be castigated by future generations as small minded people out to destroy our form of government in an effort to disgrace our first African American leader.

Listen up conservatives. You lost this election because you were crushed by the African American vote, the Latino vote, the Gay vote, Young women, People under 40, atheists and Catholics. And guess what? It's only going to get worse, so keep up the crazy talk. Keep calling the president a Marxist. Keep trying to stop gay people from having marital rights. Keep trying to pass ridiculous personhood bills and denying women their reproductive rights. In four more years you will have another 20 million voters coming of age and they ain't buying your bullshit either. Keep being the opposition party because that is what you will face until you have gone the way of the Whigs.

Our Country Is Not America Inc.

One thing that I have taken away from the last few months of puerile jabbering (otherwise known as the Republican debates) is that conservatives believe that a good CEO will make a great President. The GOP with the assistance of Fox News and nit-wit AM radio douchebags like Rush Limbaugh  have repeatedly smashed this idea into the heads of their viewers and listeners. This talking point is like most GOP talking points...complete bullshit.

A country is not a big corporation!

The majority of Republican voters think that an individual who has amassed great personal wealth is going to somehow balance the budget, create jobs and make America prosperous. This is the furthermost thing from the reality of Corporate America. CEO's make money for the investor class. They do not care if their labor force is from this country or from Laos or Cambodia as long as it is cheap. Since the beginning of the 20th century, 21 men have served as President of the United States. Only 5 of them had real business experience. Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and both of the Bushes. This not exactly an overwhelming boost in the arm for this ridiculous theory and let's note here that 2 of these presidents (Hoover and W.) led us into the great depression and the bank collapse of 2007.

What the conservatives actually want to do is privatize all the services that our taxes have been paying for over the last 100 years. Since Reagan, they have been slowly chipping away at social services like Medicare, Social Security and the Postal Service. They have been underfunding and sometimes defunding Public Education, Health and Human Services and letting our nations highways and infrastructure crumble. They run on platforms of how government doesn't work, and once they are elected they continue to sabotage the process even further to prove the point. They continue to lower the tax rates so less money is coming in to pay for these services and then bark that the government is overspending all while calling themselves conservative.

We have now reached a very important point in our nation's history. It is the point where we the American people either elect a president who can lead a country based on the needs of it's citizens or we elect a corporatist who will ultimately lead us into fascist state. This new conservative leader will not represent us, but the corporate oligarchy. We are almost there now. The newspapers and media are completely owned by a few of these giant, bloated conglomerates. If you seriously believe that Newscorp and Fox News are not the KY jellied fist rammed up the GOP puppet's ass making it move then you are fucking delusional. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and all the other network news programming is just a 24 hour a day psychotic merry-go-round of right wing and left wing hacks barking at each other while the moderator nods and smiles. These supposed news channels can barely present a 30 second report about the war in Syria and bloodbaths in Rwanda, but can spend brain numbing hours on a story about Mel Gibson throwing his own feces at a hotel maid.

They have learned that by utilizing Christianity, they can can subvert the constitution by denying basic human rights to gays and lesbians, woman and minorities. They wave a bible and accuse these groups of people of being evil,  lazy and morally corrupt to glean votes from frightened white people.
The outrageous fact is that many of these people who are suckered into voting for these neo-conservative scumbags are the very people who will lose their medicare, social security and public assistance if they get elected!

The United States is not a Company.  It cannot be run like one. You cannot fire American citizens. Our democracy does not need to be monetary profitable. Our democracy needs to work for it's  citizens. All of it's citizens. We are the investors and the consumers. The rich need to pony up more because they have thrived in this country and they need to give something back. The poor need to be helped so they can climb out of poverty. Our elderly must be taken care of. We need health care for all because this is America for fucks sake! People should not be dying of curable ailments because they cannot pay for it. That's not supposed to happen here. We have all forgotten about the public good. We all need to pay attention in November because if the Republicans get the White House we will become America Inc. and believe me there will be pink slips for all.

The Madhouse That Is The G.O.P

You would never know it from reading my blog, but I voted for Ronald Reagan and George Bush I.  I was a twenty-something white kid with a limited world view who didn't read the papers. I was Catholic who never experienced real poverty and hardship. In other words, I was the perfect GOP demographic. I grew up on Long Island and was only about a 40 minute ride on the LIRR into Manhattan. In my world you were either Jewish or Roman Catholic and the only real poor people that you saw were the brown faces begging for quarters at Penn Station.

When Ronald Reagan came into office, the Iran hostage crisis ended almost simultaneously and it seemed like America was coming back. The whole country was waking up and we were getting our "fuck you" shit going again. It was easy to vote for for Ronnie because we were blowin shit up, telling the Russians to go fuck themselves and everybody was working for the weekend. Iran-Contra was too confusing for my politically complacent brain and even though deep down I knew something fucked was happening I felt that the American ship would eventually right itself. Voting for Georgie the first was easy too because it was just  an extension of Ronnie's second term anyway. It wasn't until Clinton came along that I started morphing into the filthy liberal scum that stands before you today, but that is a tale for another day. The point that I am making is that it was easy for ill-informed, politically lazy white males to vote Republican back then.

What a difference 20 years makes, huh? That form of Reagan Republicanism that conservatives continually extol and weep for is practically Marxism compared to the drivel that this current crop of crazed lunatics preach. The fanatical right wing of the party has officially taken over. It does not matter what over the top, coo coo for cocoa puffs, neo-con crap they spew out! Can you imagine Ronald Reagan saying this?

"The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong." Rick Santorum

What? College education is bad? Improving one's situation by educating oneself so they can be better citizens is wrong? It is bad enough that these cross-eyed, knuckle draggers have the sheer audacity to even utter this venom, but it is one thousand times worse for a group of citizens to push a lever and vote for these fuckers!!! This current crop of GOP stooges seem to be trying to out-stupid themselves everyday. First they were against the health care bill calling it socialism. That's right, how dare someone with a life threatening illness want to get better without going into indentured servitude for the rest of their lives. But now they are against women's health services and publicly funded breast exams and contraception!!! Fucking Contraception??!!! Didn't we really get this all figured out 40 years ago for Christ's sake? These pious, holier than thou motherfuckers preach all this shit about less government and how we need to spend less, and then create larger government by mandating that that women have ultrasounds and their vagina's probed before having an abortion that is legally their right!!

These neanderthal fucktards talk about how their is so much waste in the system and how we need to cut social programs when by far the biggest return on investment would come from expanding access to family planning through Medicaid, something made possibly through the 2010 Affordable Care Act. A $235 million investment there would lower taxpayer costs of $1.32 billion by preventing unintended pregnancies. 1.32 Billion motherfucking dollars!!!!

Rick Scott, our fucking piece of shit governor down hear in Florida wanted to make sure that people receiving welfare weren't taking drugs. Because every republican right wing asshole understands that all poor people are drug addicts right? Wrong again!!! They set up a government program to preform blood tests on welfare recipients to make sure they weren't using the money to buy drugs. So far only 2% of those tested have come up positive, the Tampa Tribune reports, with 96% testing clean and 2% declining to complete the application process. The result was an intrusive government program that ended up costing the taxpayer more money!!! How much you ask? The state spent $40,000.00 implementing the program and saved $5000.00 a month in denied welfare payments. I say to you then, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON???

Here's what's going on. These Republican assholes have nothing. They have no jobs bill. No plan for alternative energies. No foreign policy except to release democracy drones and drop freedom bombs on third world countries. They feel that Americans workers forming Labor Unions are Marxists bent on destroying America, but rich investors have the God given right to form corporations to protect their interests. They ship American jobs overseas and pay Indonesian children 50 cents a day then complain that American workers are selfish and don't understand how to be competitive in the world market. They are all of these things and in a normal, rational, free thinking society these fat cat oligarchists would be run out of town. But they have Jesus. And they use him to distract the rabid mob away from the stinking pile of shit that is the Republican platform.

I have no doubt that Obama will be the 45th president of the united states. The ultra-conservative right wing of the Republican party have alienated minorites, women, atheists, anyone who is not Christian and LBGT. I think that they have earned the right to alienate the 18-30 white male demographic.

Why the OWS and the Tea Party should hold hands and make nice nice...

I remember back not too long ago that the Tea Party was this new Pseudo-Libertarian, pro civil liberties, anti-tax group that exploded when Bush and congress passed The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. They practically rioted in the streets with the thought of 700 billion tax dollars going to bail out Wall Street and the banks. I ask you know, where is the Tea Party support for the Occupy Wall Street group who are rallying to the same call?  Surely we can put aside our differences so that we can unify and fight the greatest threat that our nation has faced since the civil war? All that we hear from the Tea Party is how American citizens have lost their voice and how lobbyists have taken over the government and how we need a revolution to restore our democracy! Well Tea Party Patriots.....Join us and we can truly change the way things are done in Washington. If we are united then we will make them listen and we will make our country a more fair prosperous place for our children! Are you with us Tea Party Patriots? Ready........CHARGE!!!

Unfortunately, this is a rally call that will fall on deaf ears. That is because the Tea Party is not about civil liberties and tax fairness. It's not about getting lobbyists and corporate dollars out of government. It is not about less government and power to the working class. Their fight is getting Obama out of the White House. Period. Once that is accomplished than the fat and the stupid will roll up their flags, pack up their lawn chairs and go home. The problem is that their home is in foreclosure and they've just received a pink slip because the company they've worked for for thirty years just "downsized" and shipped his job to Ethiopia. This of course results in him losing his health benefits increasing his heart medication cost to $250.00 monthly instead of his normal $10.00 copay.

These Fox News, brainwashed morons perceive the Occupy Wall Street crowd as some subversive cult looking to destroy American values when in fact they are the ones with the most to lose. The young people in this country see whats coming down the road. They don't give a fuck about abortion or family values Christian conservatism. They don't give a shit if homosexuals marry and they certainly are getting pissed that they have college loans the size of your average 30 mortgage. They are moving back in with their parents because they can't find a fucking job and then have to listen to richest 10% complain that their marginal tax rate may go up 3%.

Of course when unemployed, hungry people get pissed and start making noise the media calls it "class warfare". Of course when Wall Street and the banks bring the world economy to the brink of collapse resulting in millions of people losing their homes, their retirement money and investment savings they will never refer to that as class warfare. And they shouldn't because what they did was a fucking blitzkrieg!! Wall Street was the greed Luftwaffe reigning down misery and despair upon the populace with not bombs and artillery but credit default swaps derivatives and decades of reckless speculation. And just when we are at the brink, these shit beetles crawl out from under their golden toilets and demand that we give them a fucking trillion dollars claiming that they were the only people smart enough to fix it.

Well it's three years later and unemployment is unchanged, wages are stagnant, there is a war on organized labor and it seems like half the country is one fucking paycheck from the poorhouse. But where are the Tea Party? The Tea Party was taken over by the Koch Bros. and other corporate scumbags who hypnotized an entire segment of  angry, white, Christian robots into thinking that the banking disaster was caused by fucking NPR and Planned Parenthood. These scumbags with the assistance of Fox News, have gotten these poor saps to blame the stock market collapse and the failure of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch on the African American president who wasn't even in office yet. These elitist Wall Street bloated maggots have convinced this group of middle class zombies that the poor are to blame and that we should go back to the days when Churches set up poor houses and leper colonies as a viable health care option. These bloody cantankerous shit stools prop up right wing Barbie and Ken doll politicians who blabber on and on in a third grade vernacular about God and country and how liberals and progressives are the anti-Christ while they raid your grandmothers social security and medicare. And all the while this group of fat middle class douche bags sit in front of their televisions watching Fox news, eating mayonaise sandwiches and drooling on their Hank Williams Jr. T-shirts.

The fact is that if things don't change soon we are all fucked. We all have different political views and we can certainly fight about anything and come to terms with it so we can all live reasonably with the outcome. That is what we have always done as Americans. But we must all come together to realize that what is destroying our country right now is not gay marriage, abortion and public radio. It's not welfare or the deficit. It's unbridled corporate greed. They own the politicians, they own the country, they own us. They have divided us with bullshit issues like school prayer and a woman's right to choose while they destroy our economy, squander our natural resources and pilfer our reserves. You say that I sound angry? Fucking A I'm angry. I'm angry at them, but I am more angry at us for allowing them to divide and conquer us so easily. Don't dismiss this OWS movement as some dirty hippie movement. Don't let the media manipulate you when they show you the drumlines and weirdness that goes on. They're young people for Chrissakes!!! They haven't been jaded and life slapped enough to become as cynical and critical as you and I have. They are smart and articulate and college educated. They want jobs and they want to feel like their government hears them. They saw what Wall St. did to their grandparent's and parent's retirement funds. They see how the banks and Wall Street and the media manipulate the system. They are watching how these bastards are fucking this country and they now if they don't blow the rape whistle now, it will be their turn next. 

The Fear Of Seeming Inconsequential

I recently watched a documentary on the Hubble space telescope. The information and science they are gathering on the universe is truly staggering. The enormity of the cosmos is incomprehensible to most of us without an MIT degree in astrophysics. At on point in the film, the scientists had decided to point the telescope to an area in space that seemed utterly empty. An area that was the comparable to the size of a grain of sand if you were to look up at the night sky. It was the only spot in the sky devoid of any planets, stars or galaxies. When the processed the photos and information, what they discovered was incredible. The scientists counted 3000 galaxies and each one of them contained hundreds of billions of stars. This was discovered in deep space in an area of the sky smaller than a pinhead.

When processing this information it's hard not to feel a little temporary and small. As a matter of fact our individual lives are rather insignificant when applying it to the sheer vastness of space and time. A lot of people equate this to the hand of God. They believe that only a supreme creator could have made a universe so vast and that studying it only creates quandaries and paradoxes. Why seek truth and knowledge when it is just easier to believe God. When talking to most religious folks about des choses de nature philosophique they will often come back with quips like give it up to God. It's God's will. God only knows. I think that they are just plain scared.

Now being the nerd that I am, I always find solace in humor. I believe that Monty Python offers more answers than the Roman Catholic Church or any other world religion for that matter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY Please watch video and tell me you don't feel a whole lot better about being a speck of microscopic dust traveling on another slightly larger speck of microscopic dust that is swirling around with 100 trillion other specks of dust in an area the size of Arizona that is constantly expanding.

Finished?
Felling Better, right? I told you.

Religious people who don't get the humor in the song are the ones who are the most insecure. And I believe people with deep seated insecurities can be the most dangerous. Why they are insecure is sort of baffling though. If one is so sure that they will go to heaven and live in Shangrala in the afterlife then why would they give a rat's ass about whether I believe it or not? Well I think that I know why. It's because they can't know for sure. All they have is faith based on unsubstantiated fact and myth and they get angry when I tell them that I don't believe it. This goes against everything that they were raised to believe. The fear of Hell and being tortured for eternity is a real fear. I know! I had this fear as anyone raised a Christian did. That's why the church created it. The Church of tolerance and forgiveness where an all knowing spiritual being looks down upon us and loves all of us equally can also throw you into a pit of fire for eternity if you don't do what it says.

You can have faith. You can believe in God and that you're going to heaven. That is totally fine and cool. But don't tell me that it is a fact and that it should be taught in public schools as science.  It is a perpetration that is destroying our country and our society. We are becoming a joke in the eyes of the world. We are getting our asses kicked in math and science. The rest of the world is moving away from us because we are not inquisitive and problem solvers anymore. We deny climate change. We are not moving away from fossil fuels. We are not taking an active role in bettering our society. We are not looking through the Hubble telescope with wonder and awe. We are burying our nose in an ancient book of stories written by primitives 2000 years ago and trying to teach our children that it's true. It's okay to feel inconsequential. It's alright to admit that you don't understand what is going to happen to you when you die. It's alright to be scared.

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Liberal? or Fear Of Obamafacismarxocommunimuslimism

I keep being told how dangerous Liberals and progressives are. I myself am actually shocked at how menacing I could be. Here are some of the things that I hear:


"So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. ... Eugenics. In case you don't know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. ... The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening." Glenn Beck.

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots." Ann Coulter.

"Our fiscal ruin and resulting loss of world leadership will, in [liberals'] eyes, be not a tragic event but a desirable one." - Mitch Daniels.

"The objective of the liberals is to destroy this country." - Herman Cain.

"That is [liberalism's] goal — to destroy the family… [liberals] just made up this gay marriage thing… gays are natural conservatives." - Ann Coulter (again)

I had no idea that I was an anti-American Marxist out to destroy this country. Well I guess the only thing left to do is to round us up and put us somewhere where we can't topple our democracy. I know! A camp!! But not a nice sleep away camp, it's got to be someplace where they can isolate us and concentrate our numbers down so they can properly deal with us. I am not sure what we'll call this place, but it will come to me.

If liberal and progressive thought is so destructive and dangerous, then who are all the dangerous Liberal leaders and henchman? Who are these radical men and woman who are making conservatives in this country want to arm themselves to the teeth and prepare for revolution? What radical Marxist social ideology are they teaching our young people to turn them into brainwashed Maoist puppet people? Well the answer is even more insidious then you could ever imagine. Here are 3 of the nastiest elitist progressive voices conservatives fear:

Jimmy Carter- Mr. Carter is an evil anti-Semite who loves terrorists. He is the cause of all the problems in the Middle East. Conservatives believe that the unrest in the region began in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. They will also tell you that it took two terms for Ronald Reagan to undo all the damage that was done by Carter. Of course they completely forget about the recession that he inherited and the terrible apathy the country was in after the Watergate scandal. Conservatives even blamed Carter for the current fiscal crisis!! They claim the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 was the cause of the bank meltdown in 2008. Wow! That Jimmy Carter was really evil. Passing legislation that would bring down the economy 31 years later. You have to hand it to conservatives, they eat this bullshit up.

Al Gore- Nothing gets a conservatives blood boiling with fear and loathing more than even the mention of Al Gore's name. Right off the top he believes climate change is a real phenomenon that will have devastating consequences to the environment if left unchecked. Of course this all a left wing, liberal conspiracy bent on destroying god fearing, American capitalism. Everyone knows that the U.S of A runs on oil and the blood of our sweet lord Jesus. Solar and wind power are just fantasies that have no place in a creationist...oops, I mean intelligently designed world. Oil was injected into the earth’s crust by God the same way a baker squeezes sweet jelly into a luscious donut for us to enjoy. The earth warming is a good thing as it will create more sunny beaches and happiness!! Mr Gore and those elitist scientists don't understand God's simple plan. Jesus loves Americans and he will always protect us because we pray to him. Those who don't put complete faith in him (liberals, progressives, and educated people) are doomed.

George Soros
Nothing scares a conservative more than a European. In fact George Soros is pure European evil that hates America and wants to destroy it from within. Conservatives and Tea party nuts believe he lurks in the shadows as an all powerful socialist puppet master bent on destroying economies, controlling elections and strangling the life out of innocent benign American capitalism with his powerful 80 year old Hungarian penis. Why he even gave up Jews to the Nazis during WWII in Budapest when he was 10 years old!! Of course all this is complete bullshit. But it doesn't matter because the giant Fox News anus keeps squeezing out hot steaming turd after hot steaming turd of regurgitated talking points and lies. Of course the Fox news listeners can't get enough of putrid smell and try to tell you that it smells like sweet tea but we progressives know it's just a pile of shit.

Now there are many more liberal voices that will send chills down a conservative’s spine causing them to loosen their bowels in terror. The Clintons, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Bernie Sanders, Rachael Maddow, this list could go on forever but the reality is that conservatives are just plain scared. Conservative, Right Wing Radio and Fox News also realize this and they feed the fear to their listeners. They create tales of barbaric abortion clinics and leftist woman's rights advocates with the claims that they are evil immoral people yet they offer no solutions to solve the problem of unwed teen mothers, hungry children and poverty. Wait, I'm sorry they do have a solution. Cut welfare, social programs to help young working single mothers and children's healthcare. They blame labor unions as the cause for all the woes of the American worker, yet they stand behind large corporations who ship jobs overseas and expect American citizens to compete for jobs with Asian workers making a dollar a day. They demonize teachers for demanding a living wage to educate our children. They dare to point their lecherous fingers at the President and call him a communist, a terrorist and even question his citizenship to this country.

But I guess it isn't really me they fear. They fear the illusion of me. The filthy liberal. The stupid progressive. The other. But these fears are false and unrealized. What Fox News and Right Wing Radio want us to fear is ourselves. We are teachers and union members and mothers and fathers. Most of us are hard working citizens just doing the best we can for ourselves and our families, but they want us to fear the immigrant and the homosexual and the atheist and the poor even though they are part of us! Tea Partiers always talk about "We the people", yet they always side with big business against their own interests out of unproven, unrealistic fear. Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid of brown people. Don't be afraid of gay people. You know what? How about you try not being afraid at all. Let's all try and work together and try to fight against the things that are really wrong with this country.