Guilt and Stupid

"Guilt", someone once told me, "goes away."

And it does, if you think about it. Unless you were raised Roman Catholic in parochial schools or Orthodox Jewish, you might feel bad about something you did/said/didn't do/didn't say for a while, but then you get tired of feeling guilty and just stop. The human brain can, in most cases, only sustain guilt for a while.

Stupid, on the other hand, endures and endures.

I read an article the other day about David Bartman, who is described as a 'former Evangelical pastor' and a 'conservative activist'. In a May 9 sermon (what's a 'former' pastor doing preaching?) said that a Christian couldn't drink Starbucks coffee and be Biblically faithful since Starbucks, as a company, supports gay marriage.

Well, I shouldn't be so fast to judge. I have avoided Denny's since some racial stuff about that restaurant chain and Home Depot because they are anti-gay in some way. It's ok, in my mind, to avoid certain retailers out of a political position. But when you bring the Bible into it and say "Christians can't do thus and so" it changes it all for me.

I'm just getting really tired of stupid.

Since there are few, if any, Native Americans in the U.S. Congress, it seems obvious that all of them, somewhere in their families' past, came from somewhere else. And yet the hysteria over an Immigration Policy giving those without papers and without a criminal record a path to citizenship would make you think most Republicans are Cherokee or Apache. Decent, hardworking people who left their country of origin to come here for a better life, deserve a chance at it, just like my ancestors had.

And the irrational hatred of President Obama and most anything he supports must, if seems to me, be motivated by some sort of racism (conscious or unconscious).

And the shit about guns...give me a break! "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," is the lamest and among the most stupid things I've ever heard. Let's accept it on face value. Which would you like to come face-to-face with: a person who wants to kill you with a gun or a person who wants to kill you with a #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencil?

'Nuff said about stupid when it comes to guns.

An Oxford Neuroscientist named Kathleen Taylor, has recently opined that religious fundamentalism could be treated as a mental illness.

Well, I'm glad someone besides me thinks that. It's obvious to me that strapping an explosive device to yourself and blowing up innocent people is crazy. So is an irrational hatred of people different from you. So is an inflexible adherence to doctrine and dogma someone centuries ago made up out of smoke and mirrors.

Maybe there should be a special ward in every mental hospital for folks suffering from Tea Party Stress Syndrome.

(I'll feel bad for a while about being so harsh on these people I consider stupid. Who put me in charge of deciding who is stupid, after all? But guilt, as I've been told, goes away.

Stupid endures.)