{"id":1179,"date":"2013-10-01T20:38:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/government-shutdown-its-not-about-the-economy-stupid-in-america-its-always-about-god.html"},"modified":"2013-10-01T20:38:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T20:38:00","slug":"government-shutdown-its-not-about-the-economy-stupid-in-america-its-always-about-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/10\/government-shutdown-its-not-about-the-economy-stupid-in-america-its-always-about-god.html","title":{"rendered":"Government Shutdown: It’s Not About the Economy, Stupid. In America It’s Always About God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
I understand the delusional thinking leading to the potential government shutdown. I understand it from the from the inside and better than the editors of the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>do. See,\u00a0they leave God out of the equation<\/a>. Rational people just don\u2019t \u201cget\u201d holy war.<\/span><\/div>\n
I\u2019ve spent the last twenty-five years writing my way out of my false past certainties. My latest attempt to explain myself to myself is my book about religious delusion:\u00a0And God Said, \u201cBilly!\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Yet in spite of the therapy of writing\u00a0five novels and many nonfiction books<\/a>that describe my tortured journey from fundamentalism to a fact-based way of looking at the world, I keep being reminded of my old self.<\/span><\/div>\n
When I see Ted Cruz and the forty Tea Party extremists in the House grandstanding and ready to plunge the world economy into a tailspin I understand who they are and why they\u2019re seemingly crazy. You see thirty years ago I was one of them. More over without my late father\u2019s work energizing the religious right the Tea Party as we know it would never have emerged from the swamp of American politics to haunt us.<\/span><\/div>\n
Readers of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0have had the right wing delusional echo chamber explained to them. Most recently Nicholas D. Kristof (Suffocating Echo Chamber, NYT\u00a0<\/a>Sept. 26) wrote about the deleterious effect of the closed circuit thinking of Fox News, the talk radio hosts and other culture warriors. Kristof\u2019s emphasis in his excellent column was on the political consequences of far right delusional thinking that\u2019s literally threatening our economic well-being by threatening a government shutdown.<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I understand the delusional thinking leading to the potential government shutdown. I understand it from the from the inside and better than the editors of the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0do. See,\u00a0they leave God out of the equation. Rational people just don\u2019t \u201cget\u201d holy war. I\u2019ve spent the last twenty-five years writing my way out of my false […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nGovernment Shutdown: It's Not About the Economy, Stupid. In America It's Always About God<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I understand the delusional thinking leading to the potential government shutdown. 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