Do Republican Believe Being Poorly Educated Will Help You Go to Heaven?

Earlier in this campaign cycle, we had Rick Santorum arguing that college was bad for you because thinking and examining a wider range of ideas would make you less likely to believe in Jesus.  He blamed the cause on liberal professors.  Of course, Santorum was wrong; the objective reality, which the right flees and fears, shows us that those who DON'T go to college fall away from church attendance even more dramatically.  From the article which fact checked the fact-averse Santorum:

According to religious sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker (1), "64 percent of those currently enrolled in a traditional four-year institution have curbed their [church] attendance habits."
When one looks at young people who did not attend college, the decline in church attendance is even greater with 76 percent saying that their religious attendance had fallen.
(Incidentally the numbers actually losing their religious affiliation are much smaller with 13 percent of four-year college students renouncing their religious affiliation compared to 20 percent of those who did not pursue college).

The article goes on to elaborate that it is not level of education, per se, which has a causal relationship to religious beliefs or a lack of them.

When nations become highly developed, and when individuals feel secure in the sense of having a reliable income, high life expectancy, little fear of violence, and so forth, they lose interest in supernatural solutions to their problems, focusing instead on practical improvements to the quality of life.
This view of secularization has long been controversial in academic circles but has recently survived rigorous scientific tests. The precise role of education in the loss of religious belief remains unclear but college education, as such, cannot be a large factor.
 It has far more to do with quality of life and economic security.

Another article by the same author on the subject shows us why the right not only is sabotaging our education system, but could be sabotaging our economy as well.  The right is seeking to use our tax dollars not only to create an ignorant majority who are economically disadvantaged, by their redistribution of wealth to the 1%, they want to use our tax dollars to enforce their versions of Christianity, turning us from a democracy into a theocracy, possibly modeled on the preference given to Judaism in Israel, where non-Jews are second class citizens. There are some right wing politicians who appear to want everyone who isn't Christian to be second class citizens.
The article elaborates on secularism versus religion:

Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe (Barber, 2012). In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists. Atheism is thus a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism?

First, as to the distribution of atheism in the world, a clear pattern can be discerned. In sub-Saharan Africa there is almost no atheism (Zuckerman, 2007). Belief in God declines in more developed countries and is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). In contrast, the incidence of atheism in most sub-Saharan countries is below 1%.

Whatever the cause, the role of secularism is one that terrifies the right; it is a common theme for the ignorami like the Nut Gingrich in pandering to the extreme right.  The notion that in order to save our souls, it is reasonable to ruin the planet with global warming makes a lot more sense when you have the religious extremists on the right believing that fires, floods, famines and drought, and other climate derived disasters will send us back to Jesus.  It also explains a lot about why the right has pursued educational ignorance more actively in poor southern states where a larger segment of people don't know any better and are less capable of critical thinking or fact checking. 
Remember, studies like the one done by Arkansas psychologist Scott Eidelman linked 'low effort thinking' with conservative views; low effort thinking means not questioning what one hears or sees.  Further low IQs tend to produce greater conservative views, and more racism and other bigotry, and to equate to greater alcohol use, and greater resistance to change.

The red states are rejecting the benefits to their public health systems which would provide assistance for the health care and health insurance for the currently uninsured in southern states, who are badly under served medically, especially children.  This isn't only about the right wing contempt for the disadvantaged, or overly rigid ideology; it could be they hope that by blocking medical care they will keep their populations less intelligent.  Intelligence has an hereditary component, but there are many environmental factors, ranging from problems like mercury contamination, to the level of enrichment in the stimulation of children impact their later intelligence.
Apparently conservatives like Santorum and Jindal are convinced that therefore, thinking and education are bad for you, and that one's faith will not survive a healthy and thoughtful challenge. 

I'm not sure which is worse in that context, the presumption that one cannot be both an intelligent and educated person with a rich spiritual life, or the presumption that it is better to be ignorant, and uneducated in critical thinking skills, and instead hold a blind and uninformed faith.  Both premises are badly flawed and tragically ignorant and uninformed.
It should alarm people across the political spectrum that this appears to be a premise of the right wingers that is actively being inserted into public policies, and is not unique to Santorum.

For example, in the sadly backwards state of Louisiana, right wing potential VP choice Republican Governor Bobby Jindal signed a controversial voucher program into law. 
Voucher programs are part of the right wing efforts to gut public education.
The GOP plans for education has a two-fold intention; on the one hand it helps the religious right extremists to promote their creationist teaching agenda that promotes junk science to disguise their efforts to ignore objective reality in favor of religious based stupidity.  These are the folks who are teaching that the Loch Ness monster is real, an example of a living dinosaur, in order to deny the science of geology, and of course to try to discredit the many branches of science that support evolution.  The right wants to require us all not only to believe literally in Genesis but to deny the validity of science. 

There is an entire right wing war on science, of which this is just a part, as well as a war on literature and history.
Then there is the other component of the anti-education efforts on the right, which is to dismantle public education in favor of for PROFIT education, so that all education will become privatized, including through their Charter Schools initiatives, making it easier to insert right wing propaganda into it, at the expense of the quality of education, while enriching select right wing political donors.  Unfortunately, just like their other tactics, this results in very bad educational outcomes.

Religious indoctrination, which means Christianity not just any God or God(s) generally, and more redistribution of Money into right wing hands is the effective focus of the GOP for education, instead of quality education.  They want to subvert public education funding, text book content, and curricula requirements.

Too many conservatives are of the 'turtles, turtles all the way down' variety of non-thinkers.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"—Hawking, 1988 from  "A Brief History of Time" 

So now we have Louisiana, which usually ties with Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas for dead last in academic accomplishment, economic success, and public health statistics, and where they have some of the worst environmental pollution like mercury contributing - among other factors - to low IQs, doing their darnedest on ideological and religious grounds to sabotage the education of children in their states, to save their souls and to ensure they stay stupid Republican.

The Jindal voucher system uses public funds to try to make it easier to funnel public school students to religious schools where there is substandard academic accomplishment, but plenty of teaching of religious anti-science curriculum, and revisionist history that is equally factually wrong.

Mother Jones identified some of the more glaring inaccuracies taught by the religious right parochial schools, using materials provided in part through Bob Jones university, a pseudo-academic institution which receives the support of right wingers ranging from Michele Bachmann to Mitts on R-money.  This is what the GOP is trying to do in Louisiana; and this is what the religious right insanity would like to do across the country.  We need to resist this in all its forms. Here are ten from the Mother Jones article.

1. Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out:  Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

2. Dragons were totally real:
"[Is] it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls…The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke."—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007
 3. "God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ."—America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994
4. Africa needs religion: "Africa is a continent with many needs. It is still in need of the gospel…Only about ten percent of Africans can read and write. In some areas the mission schools have been shut down by Communists who have taken over the government."—Old World History and Geography in Christian Perspective, 3rd ed., A Beka Book, 2004
5. Slave masters were nice guys: "A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well."—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991
6. The KKK was A-OK: "[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians."—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001
(I find the attempts to put lipstick on the KKK pig particularly disturbing as part of the larger embracing of white supremacist extremists and hate groups such as the John Birch Society founded in part by the father of the Koch Brothers, as occurs at CPAC,  to be especially disturbing in view of the mass shooting at the Wisconsin Sikh temple earlier this week.)

7. The Great Depression wasn't as bad as the liberals made it sound:
 "Perhaps the best known work of propaganda to come from the Depression was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath…Other forms of propaganda included rumors of mortgage foreclosures, mass evictions, and hunger riots and exaggerated statistics representing the number of unemployed and homeless people in America."—United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1996
8. SCOTUS enslaved fetuses:
"Ignoring 3,500 years of Judeo-Christian civilization, religion, morality, and law, the Burger Court held that an unborn child was not a living person but rather the "property" of the mother (much like slaves were considered property in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford)."—American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997
9. The Red Scare isn't over yet:
"It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism."— American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997
10. Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson were a couple of hacks:
"[Mark] Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless…Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel."—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001"Several of [Emily Dickinson's] poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life."—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

Some readers may remember that in the effort to discredit Planned Parenthood, when the always-fact-averse right-wing educated Michele Bachmann asserted on the floor of Congress that Health Care Reform fear mongered her fact-free claim that the ACA aka Obamacare would result in this;

"What does that mean?" Bachmann said. "It means that parents will never know what kind of counsel and treatment that their children are receiving. As a matter of fact, the bill goes on to say what's going to go on — comprehensive primary health services, physicals, treatment of minor acute medical conditions, referrals to follow-up for specialty care."
"Is that abortion?" Bachmann continued. "Does that mean that someone's 13-year old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back, and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser. They don't know any different."

So it should be a surprise, but then again maybe not, that the voucher system that Jindal signed into law would give money to a Charter School that requires girls to take pregnancy tests to stay in school.  This is a medical test that is not offered by Planned Parenthood -- but also is done by the school, without first seeking the permission of the parents or the students. 
This violates federal law, specifically Title XI.  The school did not know about the basic of the laws regulating education; apparently so long as they love Jesus they don't believe they need to know anything about actual education.  Somehow, so long as it doesn't have any connection to Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, or Muslims, I don't think the bigoted Bachmann would care about a charter school giving students pregnancy tests without parental permission, or for that matter care about a school which penalizes pregnancy instead of assisting students to deal with the additional challenges and difficulties. 
The right after all just LOVES to interfere and dictate the sexual values and behavior of other people, even as they engage in more porn, strip joints, etc. than liberals.  The right is all about do as I say, not as I do.

It doesn't matter to the right if you pass those academic subjects, so long as you pass your pregnancy tests!  It doesn't matter to them if you can read or write or do math, or if you know history or literature, so long as you vote Republican and love Jesus when you grow up.  It is the religious right that claims that diseases like HIV, or earthquakes, floods and other disasters are sent by God for failing to make us a Christian theocracy.  I would characterize that thinking as a form of superstition rather than legitimate religion, but then I learned critical thinking and like to be fact based and operate in objective reality, not an alternte right wing universe where our conduct results in plagues, and other Biblical punishments.

The right winger profiteers and religious crazies are plague enough.