In the year of Our Lord, 2010...

Of course to be au courant in academic circles we now say "common era," to distinguish European dating from Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic and all sorts of other calendars. And anyway, "our lord" probably wasn't born in the year zero or one, if he existed at all.

Deconversion is such a gradual thing. This year's 'revelation' was that Christianity is perhaps the most selfish, amoral religion ever. It has taken me over 20 years to come to this realization.

"Salvation" from either one's own sins or Eve's (it's debatable, apparently) is "bought" with the "blood" of an innocent god-spirit-man, who knowingly or unknowingly becomes the "sacrificial" lamb to replace the sacrifices at the temple for all the Jews, and later Greeks, Ethiopians, Lebanese, and Europeans etc. who believe in him and don't fuck people of the same sex.

This is supposed to be a wonderful thing. In my reading this year (thank you, John Loftus) I found out that the term is "penal substitution." Instead of punishing the guilty person, someone else is put in that person's place. And it seems this year I've seen more evidence of evangelicals' embrace of this concept.

One of my facebook pals posted recently about how grateful she was that Jesus was all-forgiving. Being a nice person, I bit my fingers-tongue and didn't type out "unless you're a fig tree." Of course Jesus doesn't have the power to forgive, but you don't have to actually think through theology if you're enveloped in a feel-good movement that's all about YOU feeling relieved of your guilt.

This week Governor Bill Richardson decided not to pardon Billy the Kid. Apparently during Billy's lifetime a pardon was promised, then renegged on, and then Billy continued killing people. Richardson decided on the pardon on the terms he would if the Kid were still alive: based on his behavior subsequent to the original crime. My question is, why didn't he reject it on the pure ridiculousness of the request? It's not like the Kid was on Death Row! I think the answer is that we care about our reputations after our death. We want to be remembered well, and we can't guarantee that we will. We can leave all kinds of instructions for our funerals, pre-engrave our epitaphs, and publish our story in a self-serving autobiography, but when we're gone we won't be able to defend ourselves.

This is where "God" comes in. The trial takes place immediately upon death, and it's quick because there's only one matter to take up: whether we accept Jesus as Lawd, or God, or whatever. (The evangelicals have confused me on this point, I admit) Anywho, if we "ak-Tsept JEEE-zussss" into our hearts at the last possible moment, all the rest is pardoned. And that should be enough.

The Billy the Kid case reminded me of another, Karla Faye Tucker. She was still alive when her earthly fate was being decided on by none other than then-governor George W. Bush. I had just moved to Texas that year and the case really represented Texas for me. Karla Faye had converted to Christianity in prison. While reading the Bible, she was "asking God to forgive" her." She became a cause celebre when she tried to escape the Death Penalty on the basis of her conversion.

She had already something of an evangelical celebrity as her conversion and subsequent good behavior, so she had the Army of Gawd on her side. (This, of course, is quite opposite to what Christians should have wanted for her -- the best she could have hoped for was life without parole, but if she'd been executed she'd be in Heaven with Gawd). But perhaps her jailbird testimony was just too delicious for them, and they wanted her to stick around for their purposes.

The conflict for Dubya: the death penalty, which is almost sacred in Texas, vs. born-again Christianity, which he himself professed. He chose not to forgive her, and Karla Faye was executed. Her last words included the following: "I am going to be face to face with Jesus now." Yes, Jesus forgives murder.

I don't remember any debate about whether she would in fact be forgiven by God for her part in the murder of two people. It's convenient that Christians are all about the Ten Commandments when they want them posted in courthouses or recited by school children, but when one of their own has violated one, they suddenly don't care so much.

The true common element for Billy the Kid and Karla Faye Tucker is time. Christians will forgive if enough time has passed without further ill will. Billy the Kid stopped murdering people ... upon his death... and hasn't broken any laws since then. Karla Faye was a youngster and had spent many years in prison waiting for her lethal injection. After so much time has passed, m'eh they're okay.

Supposedly hell and heaven are forever decisions. God doesn't forgive, and he doesn't forget, either. His judgment isn't mitigated by time or good behavior. Either you're with him or agin'im, and that's forever.

Yet somehow the Ten Commandments only matter when we want them to. Forgiveness is not God's to give or retract, but ours. The whole judgment-in-heaven concept is a projection of our desires. It's 100% cultural, and has nothing to do with eternal spirits, burning bushes, or any of the rest of it.

What it comes down to is this: We want to be forgiven, and we also want to forgive. The Christian theology of forgiveness is a reflection of our human nature, not the cause of it. Society holds together based on whether members of the community can trust each other to behave in a way that supports the community. We have that trust at birth, and we can lose it. It can be lost forever, or it can be regained after a time-out, or some act of redemption. Folk stories from around the world reflect the very human need to keep the very human community intact.

Sometimes we can't control whether we get that trust back. If we've killed someone, they can't turn around and say "aw it's okay I know you're really a nice person." Or if someone holds a grudge we can only do so much to get back into their "good graces." So we ask the Sky Daddy to forgive us. How that happens depends on your interpretation of the Sky Daddy. Evangelicals don't have to do much at all, though they will tell you they base their morals on a fear of Hell. Episcopalians mumble contritious words at weekly services. Catholics go to confession and do some act of penance to make up for whatever they've confessed to.

My absolute #1 favorite religious tradition is the Jewish New Year tradition of self-reflection for acts done during the previous year, then doing an act of charity to erase those deeds. It's all done in one's lifetime, and within a brief time span so guilt doesn't accumulate. Lazy Jews donate money to "the building fund," but a lot donate to actual charities or give their time to the needy. Animal Sacrifice went the way of the dinosaur after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. (oops, C.E.), and God has stopped punishing entire cities and countries for group misdeeds. This is their substitution. I think it's a great idea. When it was explained to me it was called "mitzvah" and I even like the sound of the word.

Last year I had the means and opportunity to do an act of charity that directly made up for something I regretted. It cost me a lot of time and money but when it was done it was a very "clean" feeling. My mitzvah had been accomplished and though I could never set right the original situation, I had done the next-best thing. My guilt for what couldn't be righted (don't worry, I didn't break any laws, just felt guilty) was matched by my satisfaction of making a real contribution in a parallel situation. I can start the New Year with a clear conscious, knowing that what's past is past and I've done my best.

When Christians ask me why I'm not worried about Hell, I don't go into all this detail. I simply say I'm not afraid of something that doesn't exist. They're not really interested in a "sermon" about guilt, retribution, redemption, making the most of one lifetime, paying for your own "sins," etc. but I wish they were. Atheism is liberating, but in a grow-the-fuck-up and take responsibility for yourself kind of way. That's much more frightening than Hell to them.

So Happy New Year, atheists. Let's make the best of the time we have and not worry about our 'afterlife' here or in the sky.

It's *not* a Wonderful Life!

Well, it might be or it might not be. I love the sentiment of generosity in that movie but the rest of the message, well...

Let's summarize the plot: George Bailey gets whacked upside the head, loses his hearing, and can't join the army. Fortunately, the whack didn't destroy his ambition; love did that. So instead of going to the big city to be a little fish, he stays "home" and works at the family's savings & loan, then has a few kids and fixes up This Old House.

Being a little soft-hearted (or -headed) he lets his "special" employee take cash to the big bank and the retard loses it to the mean old crippled guy. Yes, Tiny Tim has grown up to be a selfish, mean-spirited MoneyBags who wants nothing less than to destroy all competition and be King of Bedford Falls. Bwahahahahaaaa!!!!!! And we all know that when you put two people with disabilities in the same room together hilarity ensues!

This is Mr. Potter's moment! He calls in feckless George's loan, and now George, Mr. Ambition, contemplates suicide. Because of course we all know that when you have a wife & kids the best thing you can do for them is jump off a bridge. Naturally they'd rather have money than a husband and father.

Oh wait! Here comes an Angel straight from HEAVEN to convince George he shouldn't jump. Why? Because George is popular and lots of people are praying for him. Now we know that all those people who jumped from the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unpopular anyway, since nobody could have been praying for them or else they'd have been rescued.

So this angel, instead of saying "it's only money and there are worse things than being in debt," grants George the wish to know what Bedford Falls would have been like without him. Oh my it's terrible. Mr. Potter is rolling all over everyone, his wife is *gasp* an old maid and *BIG GASP* a LIBRARIAN! *faint* He regrets his wish, his life is restored, and he finds out that he's POPULAR! How does he know he's popular? People shower him with cash to bail him out of a tough spot.

The moral of the story: what goes around comes around? If you're popular God will intervene? Money is the most important sign of love?

Here's what this atheist would like to see:
George Bailey doesn't even know the money's missing yet. God is pissed by what Mr. Potter did, and of course he saw the whole thing. He doesn't have to wait to hear about it on the prayer party line. He smites Mr. Potter, perhaps with a good smack upside the head, and the wad of cash falls to the ground in full view of everybody. The retard who misplaced it is suddenly cured of his affliction, grabs the money and tells everyone exactly how much money it was to prove it belonged to the Baileys. Mr. Potter goes to jail, the retard is now qualified to take over the business, and George moves to TheBigCity with his family after scoring a hostile takeover of Mr. Potter's bank.

That's how a powerful, omniscient, loving, just god would handle the situation. Clarence would get his wings upon arrival in Heaven just for being a nice guy, because that's what God really wants to see -- nice people getting their reward.

Instead, we have a God who needs to be implored for mercy, and is so powerless he has to employ trickery to save a life. He runs heaven like the army, with ranks and seemingly impossible tasks to complete to get promoted.

Theologians probably don't like this movie much, either, but it resonates with people even decades after its release because it fulfills the fantasy role that religion has in so many lives: prayer works, God works in mysterious ways, the "reality" one person experiences is really true no matter how bizarre, and even though money doesn't matter, in the end it really does.

Of course this could never happen today. Banks have security cameras now so they don't need God looking in on them.

Feelings Aren't Facts

"Debbie," in the discussion here, insists that her feelings are justification for the "knowledge" that God is "real." One of her posts seemed so insane to me I was sure it was sarcasm, until I read more posts by her. It's worth copying here:

I care and seek to know the truth. Jesus claimed to be the Truth. To know Jesus is to know the Truth. He is the answer to the Big Questions of life. So it seems to me.

This is posited like some kind of logical argument but in the end she waffles with "So it seems to me." That's the key. The rest is baloney. She trusts her intuition, so the rest is irrelevant.

Later she posts: "Truth by it's very nature is narrow. A fact is a fact period. Broad is the road that leads to destruction. Narrow is the gate that leads to life. Isn't it interesting that Jesus claimed to be the Truth?"

Yes, very interesting. We all care to seek and to know the truth. It's human nature. SO ... of course if you want people to follow your religion you need to convince them that it's TRUE. And apparently SAYING it's true is enough for some people.

So "Jesus is God" is true because I feel good about Jesus, and Jesus supposedly said it's true, and there can only be one truth. Therefore, any other truth claims must be false.

This kind of thinking drives me crazy. But the "thinking" is irrelevant because she really wants to 1) respect a predictable authority figure, 2) belong to a social group that validates her feelings, and 3) believe that her feelings are facts. "A fact is a fact period." Debbie believes that her feelings are facts. She has positive feelings about authority figures, her church spokespeople & writers, the Jesus of her imagination, and of positive feelings themselves.

If Debbie were the only one, I'd just reply to her rather than blogging about this. Sadly, she's just one of thousands, possibly millions, of people who think that her feelings justify her faith. It's more likely the other way around. Theologists with Ph.D.s call their beliefs "properly basic," which amounts to the same thing.

Believers who pepper me with questions after finding out that I'm an atheist often start by questioning my answer to uncomfortable feelings, such as fear of death, fear of a chaotic society, fear of nothingness... All bogeymen invented by the church to keep the fearful in the flock. It's simple: create good feelings for insiders, create bad feelings about outsiders.

But it really just comes down to feelings. They "feel the spirit," or so they believe. If I felt the "spirit" of Heidi Klum enter me and started doing runway walks in my underpants, I'd be considered "insane." If I said I felt the spirit of Jesus enter me and started speaking in tongues, I'd be welcomed into a few cults.

Feelings aren't facts, and they are no proof of the supernatural in any way. This is why atheists can't reach most believers: we don't manipulate people via an opposition of positive and negative emotion. And being the moral people we are, we find it difficult to ramp up the rhetoric the way that religions have done. Many of us self-identify as "free-thinkers" and resent others' attempts to impose their beliefs, so of course we wouldn't commit that offense either.

The irony for me is that after decades of non-belief I find that there are some emotional benefits. Life means more because it's limited to time on Earth, and death is less scary because I've accepted the inevitability of it.

Many of the "comforting" parts of Christian theology have actually become anathema to me:

• ritualistic cannibalism (yech!)
• penal substitution (how unfair!)
• "original" sin carrying through to every human (yet we're "innocent" at birth?)
• eternal existence without a body (how boring!)
• "bad" people going to hell (somebody loved them!)
• God listening to our thoughts (if he didn't like them why give them to us?)

The rest of them were distasteful to me even while I was trying to be a believer! Fortunately for the ticket-takers at the Pearly Gate, most Christians don't think too hard about these things. They've been offered a self-centered fairy tale future, and it feels pretty good to them.

Is Charlie Brown a Christian?

Every time Lucy holds out the football, Charlie Brown takes the bait and tries to kick it. Then Lucy pulls it away and poor Charlie lands on his back with a *thud.* Predictably, Charlie Brown blames himself for his gullibility. As a woman, I say, "Go ahead and kick her in the crotch!" Yes, getting kicked in the crotch is painful for women too. We won't barf but we will double over, and this Lucy bitch deserves a taste of her own medicine.

Would an atheist version of Charlie Brown be such a sucker? He'd say "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice..." and he'd turn to the side and kick Lucy in whatever body part happened to be within range. Because despite not having any god-given morals, even an atheist knows that HURTING OTHER PEOPLE ISN'T FUNNY!

We have the other example of pro football players intentionally giving concussions to the other team's players. How charming.

I have read comparisons between football and religion, and there are some remarkable similarities, it's true. It's us vs. them, break the rules for a good cause, drop everything on the appointed day, and make pilgrimmages to partake of ritual foods. There are heroes and villains. And after hours of "play" nothing has really changed except a few numbers that will be erased in a few months.

...and quite a few people will have new scars and debilitating injuries.

Yep, football is just like religion.

So, Christians, don't blame yourself if you crack open the Bible and it makes no sense to you. It's a nonsensical piece of dreck written by bronze age superstitious tribal leaders and propagated by generations of Lucy's who make it your fault for taking the bait. The next time someone tells you to read the bible, kick them in the crotch!

Can an atheist pray?

In one of my former cities I had a friend who was in A.A. He was a believer of sorts but he said "We have atheists in A.A., but they pray." At the time I was trying to be a believer, and I was praying as part of that attempt. His promise that atheists can indeed pray gave me hope that I would get something out of prayer, if not a connection with a supernatural entity. I decided that even if it was mental masturbation it was mostly harmless as long as this "God" guy wasn't answering. I think if he answered I'd have worried that my family gene for psychosis.

A little while later I realized trying to be a believer was a hopeless task. I just couldn't accept the supernatural in any form and the religion thing was just one of many pieces of supernatural goofiness that humans had made up. But the prayer thing really did feel good and I do sometimes miss it when I have a hard decision to make. I can't for a minute think that "God" speaks to me and gives me an answer from "above" but being quiet and reflective seems to be helpful.

Part of my quest involved looking into "Eastern" religion, and I tried meditation. Curiously the effect is pretty much the same. Nobody answers but I feel more relaxed and sometimes make progress on a life issue. Have one currently, a life or death decision about my beloved diabetic dog. I have been feeling the urge to "pray" about this, and I'm embarrassed to admit it. Well, really meditation... still, it's embarrassing because I know it's 100% natural and in my head. We atheists don't talk about our mental needs. I think this is why we meet with such resistance.

My family wasn't big on prayer except when we were all together. Even at the time it felt phony and forced. Any public declarations make me snicker even now. We all knew it was really about convincing everyone else that you're a Christian, not so much about communicating with the Deity. If God can read your mind when you're coveting, He should be able to do it while you're praying. Still, it had to be done before digging into the Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey. Some branches of the family still keep up the pretense. Nothing wrong with expressing thanks, and thankfully, my family keeps it brief: God is Great, God is Good, and we thank him for this food. Amen.

Being puzzled, being grateful, being quiet... nothing wrong with any of these things. They're part of the human condition. Sometimes writing (like here) helps me sort things out. Sometimes talking it over with someone helps me come to an insight (note: in-sight not outside my head at all!) Sometimes I just need time away from my routine, such as when I'm driving.

Recently I figured out how to drop my unhelpful therapist while driving. Curiously she felt the need to tell me that she was Christian & that her whole workgroup also was. This was at my first meeting with her, and she promised she wouldn't hold my atheism against me. Of course I can't hold out for an atheist therapist in FundyTown so I didn't expect any trouble either. She turned out to be judgmental, talky, scolding, and bossy. Just a coincidence that a self-professed Christian was like that, of course. ;-) She seemed flummoxed by some of my answers to her questions. I sometimes went away wondering if we'd come to the point where she'd usually jump into religion. On her workgroup's website all of the therapist bios say they work on "spiritual issues." I snickered when I read that -- did that mean they would help people who had been abused by crazy fundies, or by crazy fundy issues? I'm not curious enough to ask, but it made me go "hmmm."

So anyway, I dropped the therapist just as I'd dropped the Sky-Daddy, but I haven't dropped self-reflection and talking to other people as means for finding "answers." I consult "facts" as well as my feelings. I won't always do the "logical" thing, and sometimes there are two competing logical choices anyway. In the end I'll consult my feelings and objective reality equally. It's probably not a girly thing to do this, but it's a girly thing to admit to it, and even be proud of it. I have made a few decisions lately that I can proudly say are both logical and emotional.

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I will admit to doing what "prayer" really is - looking inside my head to figure out what I want. The only difference is that I take credit for what I "hear" instead of attributing it to Sky-Daddy or his rape victim or their psychotic bastard child.

I find in the craziest of places that I"m not completely alone in being an atheist who admires the better psychological qualities of Thanksgiving and ritual in general:

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/lifestyle/50690119-80/thanksgiving-says-holiday-god.html.csp

Why don't Christians adopt abandonned embryos?

This has been on my mind since the Octomom hoopla began. Octomom became the mother of octuplets for various reasons depending on your point of view: she's an irresponsible welfare mother, she's nucking futs, her doctor is irresponsible, she loves baybeees....

My view is that religion is at the root, and nobody in the media was willing to touch it at the time. I saw her horrifying defense of her actions in an interview: the embryos were her babies, and she could only get pregnant one more time. She had to have them all implanted, or some would die!

While everyone else was vilifying her, I had to admire her. She is the only Christian I've heard of who puts her uterus where her mouth is, so to speak. While many oppose stem cell research on the grounds that the embryos are human beings, I have yet to hear of any coming to their rescue the way she did. It's immoral to use stem cells to save the life of another human being, but apparently it's perfectly okay to throw them in a dumpster or keep them frozen for eternity (or until a power failure).

"Snowflake" babies are embryos implanted into women who want to become pregnant. Where are the women who don't want to raise these "children?" They aren't offering up their uteruses (uteri?) to incubate the little snow people for other people to adopt. The Snowflake "parents" are getting bargain adoptions, and they get to have healthy white babies to boot. (Note there are probably some nonwhite embryos, but if you look closely at the fundy propaganda, all the ones they care about are white).

There are supposedly 400,000 frozen embryos with no place to go. You can imagine how picky these "parents" are. They can even pick the religion of the adopters. But the number of willing donors hasn't kept pace with the number of people who want to adopt baybeees. I say Christian women who have all the children they want should offer up their uteri to these embryos for incubation. Surely with such a huge numbers of fundies overruning the country, we ought to be able to "place" these "babies" in a few underutilized uteri. Or how about prisoners? Let's implant into them. They could make a few bucks to help them when they parole out, and the adoptive parents get some pretty good quality offspring (IVF costs a bundle, and the Bible tells us that rich people are better quality than poor people).

This would have been the best possible reason for keeping Teri Schiavo "alive" too. How many other functioning uteri are being kept "alive" on "life" support? They're draining precious financial resources that could be put to better use. I say, make them earn their daily tube feeding!

Mass production usually brings down prices, so the average 40ish couple that would ordinarily have to resort to an inferior Chinese baby girl or handicapped African "orphan" due to competition from younger parents could get approved for some higher quality Amurkin babies! And then the rest can just go whereever. Since they were ordained by God to be whoever they're going to be, they can grow up anywhere. Sure, they might grow up in a doublewide, but with their inherent superiority they'd go on to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or maybe even people who can make real money -- politicians & preachers!

R.I.P. Religious Right

I watched some of tonight's election coverage, first on MSNBC, then on NBC, and then on the local news. MSNBC had only their liberal talking heads on, which was amusing. Lots of hand-wringing over the loss of the House. Some pontificated about the implications of the Tea Party groundswell for the future of the Republican party. Some played armchair coach and mused about the new division of labor in Congress. Who will be the quarterback? Who will punt? Will the Dems get to the finish line with a crippled offensive line? Tom Brokaw spoke about today's zeitgeist, the anti-incumbent sentiment, the average person's view of the economy, the high cost of war.

I didn't hear anything at all about what I think is the most important take-away this election season:

FINALLY... voters who don't believe in selecting politicians based on a misguided attempt to impose Christianity on the whole country are in the MAJORITY!!!

"Taxed Enough Already" a.k.a. Tea Party, has displaced the Religious Right as the engine behind the Republican Party.

I'm old enough to remember the so-called "Moral Majority." The movement was started in the late 1970s by Rev. Jerry Falwell, who also founded Liberty "University." (He died recently and if I ever go to his grave I'll be sure to save up a big loogie and drink a quart of water so I can show my appreciation properly.)

Anyway, this "majority" was supposedly "moral" because a vast majority of Americans are Christians and believe in the Ten Commandments. Jerry Falwell and a few other religious misleaders thought it was time that this sleeping giant woke up and imposed Christianity on the country. The Republican Party thought this was a fine idea and exploited these idiots because of the vast numbers they could command. And command is right! After all, Jimmy Carter was a "born-again" Christian and that seemed to give him an edge with this supposed majority. In order to defeat him, they had to take the South. Racism was not a winning strategy with enough districts to do the trick so they needed a new master plan.


This unholy alliance accomplished its goal. In 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter and politics seemed to have changed forever. Poor Ronnie was forced to pretend to be religious in order to stay in their good graces. Fortunately, his experience in such winning films as "Bedtime for Bonzo" taught him how to cuddle up to subhumans. And the subhumans who parroted their televangelists and pastors really only needed to hear him parrot the same few things once in awhile. Their misleaders could fill in the blanks on a need-to-know basis.

From then until now, politicians have pandered to the fundamentalist wing of Christianity in order to gain power. First it was just the Republicans, but eventually the Dems figured out that they had to spew the same words in order to stay in the race, literally. "God Bless America" is the final line in almost every speech or press conference nowadays. Because you know how a Jewish song really represents a "Christian" nation!


The 1970s also brought the feminine side of the Religious Right the fore, with Phyllis Schafley in the lead making a career of telling women not to have careers. Uppity women had started something called the "Women's Movement" in the 1970s. They weren't satisfied just to be able to vote. They wanted to do EVERYTHING and ANYTHING that a man could do! Of course the "Moral" majority objected to this on Christian grounds. Nevermind the three Marys at the tomb, Christ letting two women wash his feet over the objections of his apostles, and a few other passages that could be lassoed into supporting women's rights. But on the whole, the Bible is not on the side of women, and the Religious Right made sure to incorporate suppression of women's rights into their agenda.

I have known a lot of religious women who voted the way their husbands told them to. They quote about how a woman should be subservient to men in all things, the man is the "head" of the household and blah blah blah blah. If women wanted their place in society, what would the place of the man be??? The doghouse? Shining shoes? Changing diapers?

Uhhhh sometimes.

They lost that one, too. Ineffectual men now have to compete with blacks AND women for jobs! What next? Illegal aliens who don't even speak English? FAGS???? Oh noes!!!

****************

After the end of the Reagan administration, the Moral Majority folded as an official group, but the damage had been done. They had brought Christianity and politics together and they gave ineffectual men a megaphone to drown out the people they wanted to victimize. These are the people who often decry the silliness of "political correctness" but they have successfully bullied politicians and pretty much everyone in the country into showing respect for their backwards beliefs. Out of 365 Representatives, only one is openly atheistic. How many are "in the closet" thanks to the Religious Right and its many bully pulpits?

30 years after the rise of the Religious Right they are now reduced to being represented by dumbasses like Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin, and they both lost their respective elections. The movement is now a cariacature of itself, with nobody taking their promises seriously. Dubya gave them everything they wanted and yet there are still uppity blacks and women going to college and working in high-paying fields. Mexicans are working in low-paying fields. Gay people want to make their relationships official in the eyes of the state. Dubya put evangelicals into high-level government positions, assured us that God had called him to trump up the evidence for blowing Iraqis the hell up, and praised God openly. Ahhhh they finally had "their man" in the hot seat.

At the same time many of their televangelists and the megachurch preachers have turned out to be not quite what they thought. Apparently being "moral" isn't guaranteed when someone is born again. The politicians they elected were just as bad. They had gay sex, gay anonymous sex, gay sex on crack, sex with hookers, sex with foreigners, sex with subordinates, sex with married people, sex with kids, and who knows what else? And some of them also got into money trouble despite "prosperity theology" offering such promise.

So now the fundamentalist voter is not voting on "social" issues. Now that they've had a taste of theocracy they're not so hot for it. Now they want a prosperous nation. They want competent (if smaller) government. They want to "take their country back" from the black guy, the libruls, the foreigners, the people they don't like, but Christianity is in the back seat with the exception of religious bigotry, which is always popular.

That's the big news of the mid-term election, in my opinion.

There are probably more Sarah Palins and Christine O'Donnells waiting in the wings for their turn to embarrass themselves, but I think we're in the end-times for fundamentalist control over American politics. The strange bedfellows that elected Ronald Reagan seem to be having marital difficulty.

Wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority