“You must have been AWOL when God was handing out the brains”

Are fringe elements within the Republican Party represented by the myth of Sisyphus, thought by Albert Camus to personify the happy fool?

For those who stay up with the news it should come as no surprise to discover that many on the religious right who are deeply imbedded within the Republican Party view a pregnancy from a rape as an act of God, or as VP nominee Paul Ryan puts it, “a method of conception”.   One that should not be tampered with by an abortion.   Many of these people are also opposed to measures that could prevent such an unwanted pregnancy in the form of the pill and the day after pill contraceptives.

Following this ludicrous position that puts God in play with the act of rape I have finally seen a pattern with these people who are unwilling to intervene in what they perceive as the will of the Almighty.  The recent tropical storm Isaac, turned hurricane by the time it hit the Louisiana coastline 7 years to the day when Katrina played havoc with New Orleans, raised the interest of Scott Lilly over at the Center for American Progress blog.  In so doing he showed yet another area where the Republican Party has pretty much taken a hands off approach to such divine action, as some within the Party see it.

It’s late August. The Republicans are having their national convention. A huge tropical storm is bearing down on the U.S. Gulf Coast. So what’s new? We have had major hurricanes bearing down on the United States during four of the past six Republican conventions: Andrew in 1992, Frances in 2004, Gustav in 2008, and this year, Isaac.

But the Republican problem with hurricanes seems to go well beyond convention timing. A number of hurricanes have erupted into huge political issues, and it has almost always been at the expense of Republican candidates. This is not a coincidence: Republicans seem determined to underfund, undermanage, and understaff the government agencies that respond to hurricanes, putting lives and property at risk, as well as their political careers.   SOURCE

Lilly concludes that Republicans seem determined to underfund, under-manage, and understaff the government agencies that are designed to deal with hurricanes, before and after because …

“they have become so good at convincing themselves that the public sector doesn’t matter that when they run into problems such as hurricanes they simply don’t know what to do. If you admit that you need government to solve that problem, you might have to make concessions in other places, as well. On the other hand, if you treat agencies that manage such problems as though they don’t matter by appointing incompetent administrators and starving them of the resources necessary to provide adequate service, you end up in the kind of mess we have seen repeatedly in Republican handling with hurricanes.kind of mess we have seen repeatedly in Republican handling with hurricanes.”

This would explain the laissez-faire, Ayn Rand mindset of the Tea Party officials within the GOP.  They are more concerned with the notion that some “invisible hand” controls our fate and avoid the God issue altogether.  Rand was after all a devout atheist.  But this won’t do for the fundamentalist christians who view the bible as the inerrant word of God and that in all things, God is in control.

We do not expect to understand fully the purpose for our trials until our Lord calls us home to be with Him. But we do know that He loves us too much to harm us, and that He is far more concerned with our welfare than we are. God’s choices are always right. He is capable of carrying out any project to a successful conclusion without the possibility of fault or failure. Nothing in His universe happens by chance or accident. For every effect there is a cause. God “worketh all things after the counsel of His own will: That we should be to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:11-12). Yes, God is in control.    Source

I’m pretty sure that victims of Katrina and brutal rapes would have to be brainwashed to believe that part about God loving us too much to harm us. Looking a little deeper within this frame of reference we discover another bible-thumper who claims that God, not man, is responsible for a serious deviation from the natural cycle of global warming. 

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) appeared on Voice of Christian Youth America’s radio program Crosstalk with Vic Eliason yesterday to promote his new book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, where he repeated his frequent claim that human influenced climate change is impossible because “God’s still up there.” Inhofe cited Genesis 8:22 to claim that it is “outrageous” and arrogant for people to believe human beings are “able to change what He is doing in the climate.” SOURCE

Now I have been convinced for years that the biblical account of God is nothing more than the creation of man’s mind and therefore holds no validity for me.  I do love the poetry in the Old  Testament and some of the inspiring homilies found within New Testament pages.  But the notion that an omniscient God who had already eradicated most of his creation in a fit of rage, save Noah and his family, only to later allow “his only begotten son” to be crucified by the spawn of Noah, just doesn’t appeal to the rational mind that supposedly is a product of our creation. The only thing I can logically conclude by those who refuse to act intelligently about the natural and man-made consequences we face is something my mom once accused me of when I was about five years of age.

I tried to watch electricity come out of a frayed wire.  As I was focused on watching myself plug in the wire at the electrical socket I discovered too late that my other hand was resting on the exposed wires at the other end.    When mom came running into the room after hearing my blood curdling scream and discovered what I had done, she told me “You must have been AWOL when God was handing out the brains”.

And then, bless her heart, she did something that we have since learned NOT to do to a burn which serves as a perfect metaphor to explain how the extremist in the Republican Party respond to critical issues today.  She put butter over the open wound which does more harm than good.