First a quote that came to mind from Sam Harris (via):
“George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.”
I got my post title from God Discussion and a post quoting a piece from The Progressive about Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker. I don’t make a point of following American politics (or Canada’s for that matter) but I’ve seen his name in a few places lately, mostly to do with union issues in that state right now.
He doesn’t really come across as sane as Matthew Rothschild paraphrases and quotes parts from a talk Walker gave the Christian Businessmen’s Committee in Madison a couple years ago.
At the talk, Walker stated that he’s been taking orders from Jesus Christ since the age of thirteen and claims that many major decisions he’s made in his life he made thanks to His influence. Christ told him who to marry, where to work, and when to withdraw from the governor race in 2006 –
which he said was a difficult decision.
“My wife and I prayed on it,” he said. “I remember feeling so torn: I just didn’t want to let people down. I said, “Lord, I can’t do this. I can’t let people down.”
But he says he found divine guidance from the daily devotion, which “was about a guy who was a sailor. One of his buddies came along, they were in choppy waters, and the guy was throwing up. He was told, stop looking at the waves, find a point on the horizon. And he did this and it worked.”
Walker took this random page in his devotional to mean Jesus directly pointed out his own choppy sea and told him to get his head on straight. Then he told the audience at this talk that everyone else had to look where he was looking and do what he was doing because it was the only right and proper thing to ever do.
“The way to be complete in life is to fully and unconditionally turn your life over to Christ as your personal lord and savior and to make sure that every step of every day is one that you trust and obey, and keep looking out to the horizon to the path that Christ is calling you to follow and know that ultimately he’s going to take you home both here at home and ultimately far beyond.”
Blah blah blah, yadda yadda, barf.
Rothschild only provides one quote from some opposition here, from Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation:
“It is frightening that the highest executive in our state suffers from the delusion that God dictates his every move,” she says. “Consider the personal and historic devastation inflicted by fanatics who think they are acting in the name of their deity.”
I guess that also means God isn’t a union man. No surprise there, I guess.
His beliefs here are alarming because this means he winds up believing he’s incapable of making a bad decision. Every choice he makes, every idea he has, everything he utters is coming down the God pipeline so it’s all good and right and what’s meant to be. He’ll never admit to mistakes because he won’t think he made any. He hears the voice of God. He’s a favoured son. He can’t do wrong because everything he wants for his country and the world will be officially sanctioned by his Almighty Lord Jesus Christ.
That should be enough to give anyone nightmares, no matter what they believe.
One Minion's Opinion 