Faith: A deceptive authoritarians best friend

This in from The Independent on our nutty health care fight. The piece, from a British perspective, goes into a nice exposé of how totally bonkers the resistance to public health care is in the U.S., noting nicely that Stephen Hawking (who suffers from Lou Gerig's disease), is quite alive and not rationed out by some bureaucratic quackery. But the best part is here:

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

This might be too convenient an explanation but I also find it compelling. I say too convenient because there aren't only religious zealots out there. There are libertarian free market true believers with bogus ideas about the "invisible hand" and Ayn Rand worshippers too. Well...those are kind of religious as well but who's counting? But Altemeyer found in The Authoritarians (also a co-author on a great study on atheists in America) those people identified as fundamentalists, the most infatuated with faith, are the most prone to authoritarian thinking. They defer to the power of their authorities more than those with less self-identified faith. The authority here is America and its holy place in history apparently and its big business.

So perhaps this is another example of God and country coming together to bathe one another in their proverbial blood. Thinking be damned!