Epic

Is anybody else here wondering why we can't get any real climate-change legislation in this country? Is anybody else wanting to know what the goddamn holdup is with the alleged health-care reform? Well, wonder no more, for I have the answer, and I'm just gonna come right out and say it. The culprit is religion.

What's that, you say? How can religion be to blame for these problems? Why, it's quite obvious, really. Religions all but explicitly tell their adherents to have faith. Faith, by definition, requires believing something with no evidence to back up that belief. Religious folk have faith in spades, so much so that it permeates their thinking in non-religious issues, to the detriment of us all. Faith is not necessary to believe that, say, Belgium exists. There is empirical evidence to back it up, in case you ever find yourself doubting it. No, you only need faith in order to believe something that is either not provable or not true in the first place. Faith might be in order if you wish to believe that we are not emitting greenhouse gases left and right, or that the polar icecaps are not shrinking, or that we won't all be underwater before our lifespan comes to an end. There is all sorts of evidence that these things are true, so if you wish not to believe it all, just have faith that it's all a lie perpetrated by Al Gore! Ignore all the facts and numbers and scientific mumbo-jumbo! You know it's wrong, that's what's important.

Sure, the statistics tell us that 18,000 people die every year in this country because they don't have health insurance. Sure the statistics tell us that untold thousands of people who do have health insurance still go bankrupt trying to pay for long-term health care that their insurance company makes up some bizarre reason not to pay for. Sure, we can see that every single other industrialized country in the world has socialized medicine and doesn't have these problems. But it's just not right for the people of this country. Why is health care of this sort not right for the people of the United States? We don't know, we just have faith that it's not right. It's everyone else who's got it wrong, not us.

You see what happens when you allow faith to poison your rationale? And that's not a slippery slope fallacy there, folks. That is exactly the way things work in this country. We let our media get away with pretending there are two sides to these issues: either we are experiencing global warming, or we're not. There aren't two sides to it. The facts say that the climate is changing. Either we need to reform the health care system or we don't. There aren't two sides to that, either. All evidence shows that it has to be fixed, and quickly. Faith is not a position in an argument, it is an obfuscation of the truth.

In today's world, we ridicule people like those who deny the Holocaust. Why? Because we have massive evidence that it took place. It's absurd to argue otherwise, yet some people do, through the strange bedfellows combination of manipulated "facts" and the faith part of the equation. Fifty years down the road, we'll be lumping those who deny climate change and the need for socialized medicine and these birther lunatics into the same category. But why wait for decades? These people are dragging down the civilization we are attempting to have right now! So...why wait?