Rapture of Charlatans

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Rapture-of-Charlatans-by-Mark-Biskeborn-100902-639.html

The overwhelming readership of the Left Behind series of novels by Lahaye and Jenkins reveals to what extent our "exceptional" American culture cannot distinguish between reality and illusion. A huge swath of the American public has gone out and bought these and other similar escapist novels by the millions. Many, many Americans seek to escape reality by drugs or by religious fantasies. It may well be a sign that many of us have died morally, spiritually, and intellectually. No other culture of industrialized countries is so hoodwinked by the vagaries of born-again evangelical cults.

Eventually, we Americans will have to wake from our state of self-indulged juvenility. Delusional interpretations of the Book of Revelation, which John wrote as an allegory of his spite for the Imperial Romans who imprisoned him, has turned into public policy about the most crucial areas of civilization's survival on earth: nuclear arms and global warming. Sensational gossip about celebrities passes for news and information, and middle-class Tea Party participants support the despotic right-wing agenda, in the hope that, yes, they too can become multi-millionaires simply by sounding like the wealthy corporatists who, in turn, deteriorate their own standard of living. In reality, in 1773, the original Bostonian Tea Party members committed acts of terrorism against the British imperial despotism--taxation without representation.

As the American ideals have been undermined by the corporatist, neoliberal, economic policies, our government has weakened to the point of losing its ability to bridle the corporations that impoverish our economy and destroy our environment. Many Americans prefer to cling to fantasies that God will snatch us up from this harsh reality and take us to a Disney World in the sky.

In times of despair and turmoil, many Americans have turned to demagogues, like G.W. Bush, who gave lip service to shallow notions of Christian faith, and charlatans like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, or Joel Osteen who entertain us with reassuring wet-dreams of Christ coming down to enable us with wealth and prosperity or to swoop up only those among us who care less about our community and our own political interests so long as we get right with God.

More at the link ---

[Flipper999]

1. "Eventually, we Americans will have to wake from our state of self-indulged juvenility."

Honestly, I don't see an end to it. Even when people are poor and desperate (especially when they are poor and desperate), they will turn to a fantasy that tells them that someone else with great power will make all the bad things go away. Sometime. Any day now...

It is human nature, and I don't really see anything looming on the horizon to change it.

[struggle4progress]

2. Many hallucinatory delusions are promoted by the mass media

Not all such delusions assume traditionally religious forms

For example, for as long as I can remember, a certain number of the people I have encountered believe that we will be visiting other stars and colonizing other planetary systems: of course, it is impossible to say that we will never do so, but our prospects for doing so based on any currently known physics are nil: it is a hallucinatory delusion based on too much time in front of screens showing Star Trek

Similarly, many people I meet have only the crudest rudimentary notions of how their government actually works: their ideas are apparently formed by slogans from TV shows, not by real experience