Huckabee's got a hotline to God

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a man with a popular FOX TV show and who has been on the periphery of becoming a presidential or vice-presidential candidate for years, had this so say about the Connecticut slayings:

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

This is one reason why I have disdain for religion. Christianity, the religion I was raised around, has never made one iota of sense to me because it's based on a whole lot of magic thinking like this, even if it has—as all religions do—some appealing and sensible components.

In this case, the logic this man, and so many others, is using is that the more Christianity you have, the less violence. Tell it to the Crusades.

He's also explicitly arguing that if you're a good Christian, you will never be visited with violence and despair. That kind of thinking is reflected when people talk about being "blessed," as if their religion has somehow shielded them from a bad thing. But as we all do—or should—know, terrible things do happen to good and even pious people. Often! And when they do, religious leaders say we're not supposed to question God's motives. So if we're not supposed to question His motives when He allows tragedy to befall us, why are we pretending to understand them so clearly when He allows tragedy to befall others?

If you think about it, Huckabee's logic is identical to that used murderer Adam Lanza, at least as we currently understand it. Lanza apparently murdered his mother and then, in some twisted act designed to further hurt her, murdered the children she taught. Whether or not that turns out to be the actual thought process, that diseased logic is the same currently used by Huckabee: Huckabee is arguing that our wrathful god, angry at our refusal to make public schools into fronts for churches, has gotten back at our entire society by allowing Lanza to murder those children.

It's sickening how closely fundamentalism and psychosis resemble one another.