Over the weekend, Michele Bachmann said this:
“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people, because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet, and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”
Today, Alice Stewart, Michele Bachmann’s press secretary, claimed that Bachmann has a sense of humor: “Obviously she was saying it in jest,” Stewart said. Was Bachmann joking? Maybe. Problem is, if you attribute human qualities like jealousy and bigotry to your god, nobody can tell when you’re joking or not. If Michele Bachmann were to announce that God came to her and told her that he believes lasagna is an abomination, nobody would know if she was serious or not. The default would be to assume she was serious. If she believes God loses sleep over gay sex, why wouldn’t he also have strong opinions about lasagna?
You know, when anyone says that thing about Rush Limbaugh – “Oh, he doesn’t mean it; he’s just an entertainer, lighten up”- I can’t help but be even more pissed off. Great: so you’re fomenting hatred and further division in a society that needs no more of either of them and you don’t even believe what you’re saying? Wonderful. You should be kicked to death. Just Kidding.
Anyway, who the fuck cares if M. Bachmann is kidding? She said it, and the damage is done.
sweet stealth “god’s a gay man” joke there, bro
God is sending a message through a sub-six earthquake and a tropical storm? He doesn’t really do it with the kind of flair he used to. He’s really been mailing it in since the black plague, if you ask me.
Dear Michelle the jokester,
Don’t you think that if god wanted to bitch-slap the country he’d have really made it stick? Maybe it didn’t get bad because Rick Perry didn’t pray about it?
(Apologies to the handful of casualties, injuries, and 5 million without power of course.)
And this person thinks she’s qualified to be president?
This woman represents the worst kind of primitive thinking. Equating divine wrath via natural disasters with the social and political goings-on of the day is dangerous. It’s the same kind of thinking behind thousands of years of oppression and atrocity at the hands of organized religion. It’s the same kind of thinking that humanity has struggled to overcome for the last 40,000 years or so, and it’s a total shame to see in on display (and welcomed, apparently) in this day and age.
Isn’t it odd how the same kind of primitive imagination that produced the beautiful cave paintings shown in Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ also produced the mass delusion of the world’s organized religions? Cheesy as it may sound, it seems to me that the same spark that can create such light and warmth and beauty in the world can also burn it to cinders.
Most of us would like to see the world filled with that light and warmth and beauty. This Michelle Bachmann person would see it burned to cinders for her god, if given half a chance. Can you imagine a religious lunatic like this woman having the power to start a nuclear war?
I realize that this next statement probably makes me no better than her or others like her, but I honestly wish she was dead. I wish that all the people who think just like her were dead. They cannot be reasoned with, and I highly doubt that they can even be bargained with, or kept in check.
I think that almost everything they do is contrary to the flourishing of our species (and every other species, for that matter), and for that simple reason alone, they don’t deserve the honor of living a human life.
I understand that to take such an extreme position puts me in some less than desirable company, conceptually speaking, but I venture to guess that many, if not most people have wandered down the same conceptual path I just did. Maybe they’ll pause a moment to consider that before judging my comment too harshly.