Religious Fanatics Rain Sickness and Death Upon Children

Religious fanatics don’t care about anything apart from their faith, and they’re outraged if it’s challenged.  As Carl Sagan describes it in his essay “Antiscience,” they “…regard the questioning of its credentials as due to wickedness of the heart.”

Zealots demand sacrifice; not just from themselves, but from everyone.  Refusal is a sign of wickedness.  In the ancient Middle East animal were sacrificed.  For the Aztec, humans (up to five percent of the population per year).

Now, the sacrifice is rice.  Well, not rice, but children.  Six thousand children die needlessly every day, according to the former head of Greenpeace.  Many people in countries such as India, Bangladesh and Indonesia depend on rice, but cannot afford the diversified diet that would provide the Beta –carotene needed for good health, for the ability to resist disease.  They could get it through Golden Rice, a genetically modified crop.  But Golden Rice is a GMO, and so it’s attacked as a plot for control of the global food economy by a tiny handful of giant evil corporations.  The free licenses available to the developing world are merely to tempt the poor into the clutches of the corporate, i.e. satanic domain.  Environmentalists protected them from this life-saving product by destroying Golden Rice field trials.

Fish is another form of sacrifice: smelt, suckerfish, the snail darter…  The San Joaquin Valley of California, a region that was known as “the food basket of the world” has faced staggering losses of irrigation water, to protect the fish.  The losses to farmers have been horrific.  The loss to consumers, while not as direct, is also serious.  When lands that were rich in grapes, citrus, tomatoes, cotton and more are taken from production for lack of water, prices rise.  When prices go up in a declining economy, people suffer.

Of course, the National Resources Defense Council, the organization that spearheaded the reduction in irrigation water, blames the problem on insufficient piety:  man-made global warming.

So we have animal sacrifice, rice sacrifice, fish sacrifice- well the latter two are really human sacrifice, because it’s people that are suffering.  And the zealots are never satisfied, as they push for carbon sacrifice (AKA “tax”).  Al Gore, the tax’s chief evangelist (and a divinity school dropout), was described in a Christian magazine: “With the urgency of a Baptist preacher with a judgment day sermon, the former politician is spreading the bad news of global warming.”

It’s sometimes difficult to differentiate between spiritual leaders and snake-oil salesmen, between faith and zealotry.  A good way to tell them apart is to look at the sacrifices they demand.

Addendum: eating eggs or cheese is bestiality, milking cows is  sexual perversion, and women who wear fur deserve to be brutally raped, says a Jewish animal rights zealot, who compares eating meat to the holocaust.  Thanks to Blazing Cat Fur for the information.