Stan Moody

POB 240 Manchester, ME 04351 626-0594 StanMoody1@aol.com Author Stan Moody has served in the Maine Legislature, was a prison chaplain and has written scores of articles on prison reform. He is a board member of Solitary Watch and has received the ACLU-ME Civil Liberties Baldwin Award. Stans articles can be read at http://www.scribd.com/stanmoody and https://moodyreport.wordpress.com.

Is the Christian Right Losing the War Against Science?

A now-famous video clip1 of Rev. Jerry Falwell lays the blame for 9/11 on the pagans, the abortionists, feminists, the gays, the lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way all of them who tried to secularize America He closes with, I point my finger in their face and say, You helped this happen. Rev. Falwell, historically surprised by the sins of others, led decades of evangelical Christians to a promised land of prayer and Scripture in the public square. Yet, the question remains whether the Christian Right in America has made its own contribution to human tragedy by its worship of the American Dream. Content to defer such discomforts as the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry and thirsty to the government, it now presses forward to take over the government in order to chastise people for being poor, sick, imprisoned, hungry and thirsty. Parasites is the word commonly heard. An Imploding Church and a Broke Government: The great fallacy in evangelical thinking has been that the American Dream of prosperity and success is the blessing of God on a faithful people, degrading the have-nots as lazy and unfaithful, a denial of the mandates of Jesus Sermon on the Mount. Today, we have a fast-imploding church desperately searching for relevancy. Attendance is expected eventually to settle in at about 9% of the population. Concurrently, however, we have an imploding government with a lot of poor, sick, imprisoned, hungry and thirsty people in its care and running out of money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMkBgA9_oQ4&feature=player_embedded

This may be a moment of truth for a church too intent on carving Scripture in the public square and enforcing its brand of morality. The public square, you may have noticed, is now being occupied. Enter the Research Scientists: Science, that hated seeker of truth through research, has risen to the rescue of those willing to reexamine the so-called prosperity gospel. It comes in the form of a study published on Truthdig.org, entitled How Economic Inequality Harms Societies.2 Researcher, Richard Wilkinson, concludes, If Americans want to live the American Dream, they should go to Denmark. The first graph challenges the common view that there is a divinely-specified time of death for everyone. The poorest die 8 years sooner than the richest, while health and social problems are randomly spread across the income spectrum. Life expectancy can be tracked directly to income disparity. Societal health and social problems, on the other hand, tend to rise dramatically as income disparity grows. Those nations with the highest income inequality, the US ranking 2nd to Singapore, experience the lowest levels of child welfare, for example. Mental illness tracked highest in the US (27%), with Japan, having the lowest income disparity, tracking at around 7%. The US and Singapore boast the highest number of prisoners per 100,000 population, around 10x that of Japan. The more unequal societies boast harsher penalties and are more likely to have the death penalty. High school dropout rates rise dramatically in proportion to income disparity, as well. In short, the bigger the income gap between the richest and the poorest, the greater the deterioration in drug abuse, infant mortality, mental illness, obesity, child welfare, homicide, high school drop-out rates, math and literacy scores and teenage pregnancies. The Fallacy of Trickle-Down Economics: Here in America, the move is on to fix social problems with a budgetary knife that simply increases income disparity by reducing entitlements and favoring the rich on the theory that the rich are the job creators. If we are to believe the data, however, this disparity will lead to more, rather than to less, social upheaval. The Christian Right, with its belief in prosperity as a measure of faithfulness, contributes to the very upheaval it lays at the feet of the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays, the lesbians, the ACLU, etc. Severe income disparity carries with it feelings of shame and inadequacy to those unable to financially compete and superiority to those at the top. By way of example, recent corporate financial reports show car companies for the lesser among us with slumping sales, while Mercedes and BMW report increases of some 30%. As the economy worsens, the haves can wear their success with pride. Why the rise in social unrest? Ans.: income disparity. Why the plummeting of church attendance? Ans.: belief in income disparity as evidence of the blessings of God to the faithful. To Jerry Falwell: You helped this happen!

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/how_economic_inequality_harms_societies_20111030/