A couple of posts ago I wrote that the cultural war is, at a certain level, a battle between theists and atheists. One good thing about this election is that it has exposed that previously camouflaged fight for what it is. Check out this condescending, mocking hysterical ranting from columnist Steve Lopez. He makes fun of those who believe in God as "rubes" who have abandoned a "true" view of reality and stuck their brains in their back pockets. He claims that "faith" means rejecting what all intelligent people in the world know is true – that there is no God – and blindly following a fantasy.
The same theme is echoed in a Salon article, entitled "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States":
Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you—if you don’t believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.
So Christians are the unthinking, unreasonable ones, needing to be enlightened by their superior atheist elites. Unbelievable. If it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny. These people have things exactly backwards. Christianity is the worldview that accepts unwaveringly the power of scientific evidence and reasonable thinking. Atheistic naturalism (the worldview of these writers), on the other hand, must be accepted entirely on blind faith. There is no evidence for evolution. In fact, all the good science points to an intelligent designer of the universe. The Bible is not full of contradictions. Just the opposite again. Among all the authoritative worldview writings (from The Koran to Origin of the Species), the Bible presents the one truly unified, coherent view of reality. It is the explanation of our universe that best answers the big questions of life and looks to historical, scientific evidence to back up its claims. According to the Bible, all truth is God’s truth. It is the atheists that are on the wrong side of the faith/reason divide, not the Christians. Maybe one day even Steve Lopez will get that.