Reply #17: Confirms many things I've heard/read on the subject

[SavageDem]

I think the other thing it doesn't really point out is that conservatives/neocons/Republicans don't deal well with "gray" areas, with the abstract, the unknown, the unknowable. They are concrete thinkers that want everything to fall into neatly defined buckets of right/wrong, black/white, good/bad. And that's why they flock to things like Catholicism, Al Qaeda, the Republican party, my neighborhood: it's a lot easier to - as earlier posters have said - let someone else do the thinking for you and have an answer for everything.

How did the universe come into being? Well, Big-Bang and other scientific theories are just too hard to wrap your head around (what existed before the universe? where is the "end" of the universe? what's beyond the end of the universe?), so just go with the Genesis story and be done with it.

Where did humans come from? Evolution is just so weird and hard to fathom and how could a single-celled organism eventually turn into a person? Much easier to think God/Allah/Yahweh just stuck us here a few thousand years ago, complete with funny tricks for us to puzzle with, like dinosaur bones and Carbon-14, and light from distant galaxies.

Why am I losing my job? Blame it on the damn Mexicans. It's so much easier to find someone who looks/sounds/thinks differently than you to blame than to deal with hard things, like extreme poverty, wage disparity, immigration reform, corporations moving jobs overseas, Walmart crushing competitors and suppliers into oblivion through unfair trade practices supported by a Republican administration. "But Walmart has such good prices!" Never mind that the end effect - of you and millions of others acting in concert - is that your family and others end up with a bankrupt economy and job loss.

<stepping off soapbox>

Good article!