God Told me so......Maybe, Maybe not

Pat Robertson likes to talk to God, or thinks and believes he does so.

Pat Robertson also believes God talks to him....but the problem with that is that God doesn't, Pat only thinks he does. I wrote about the kind of insane thinking that makes sense to Pat Robertson here, back in October 2009.  The term for how Pat Robertson thinks is magical thinking.  In 2009, it was literally about a belief in magic, and witches cursing ALL Halloween candy, jacko'lanterns, etc.  In 2010, it was a belief that a voodoo magic ceremony caused the Haiti earthquake.  Pat doesn't only believe he knows what God says, he also believes he is privy to what the Devil says.

Pat is not the only person who engages in magical thinking.  Magical thinking directs the decisions of far too many of our anti-science right wing politicians and political groups, like the more fundamentalists among the right wing evangelicals.

This would include people like Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, or the Nut Gingrich, and many of their state and local counterparts on the right. This is true in believing God directs them to run for office, or that earthquakes occur because of a black magic ritual, or the belief that God is punishing soldiers of a country because of homosexuality or abortion.  

It is magical thinking when state legislators believe that we have an unending supply of fossil fuels, or that God will fix global warming, and prevent human beings from destroying the earth as we know it. This represents a religious tradition, faith, or belief that opts out of human responsibility for the basic cause and effect relationship, that tries to ignore or deny responsibility for consequences by co-opting their faith as a crutch against thought or logic or mature adult behavior. Sadly this has been mainstreamed into one of our major political parties - with disastrous results.

They engage in magical thinking regarding their ideology ever bit as much as they do so with their religion.  No questioning of the ideology is allowed, no challenge is acknowledge, no reality check is permitted. Failure is simply denied or ignored, resulting not in an adaption or correction, but more often in a doubling down on the same mistakes.

People like this should not be allowed anywhere near the decision making processes of government; they are too badly flawed, the do not think, they behave emotionally and irrationally.  They do not acknowledge free will in the relationship with God, and they give a grossly disproportionate importance to all of the wrong criteria for government. This is only one of the many reasons we MUST require the separation of church and state, and that we must strictly limit the extent to which religious tax exempt institutions are allowed to preach politics with religion from the pulpit. They are disastrous at it. Wikipedia provides an excellent definition of this kind of thinking and where and how it is flawed:

Magical thinking is thinking that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it.^[1] It is a type of causal reasoning or causal fallacy that looks for meaningful relationships of grouped phenomena between acts and events. In religion, folk religion, and superstition, the correlation posited is between religious ritual, such as prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities.

"Quasi-magical thinking" describes "cases in which people act as if they erroneously believe that their action influences the outcome, even though they do not really hold that belief".^[2]

Bronisław Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion (1954) discusses another type of magical thinking, in which words and sounds are thought to have the ability to directly affect the world.^[11] This type of wish fulfillment thinking can result in the avoidance of talking about certain subjects ("speak of the devil and he'll appear"), the use of euphemisms instead of certain words, or the belief that to know the "true name" of something gives one power over it, or that certain chants, prayers, or mystical phrases will bring about physical changes in the world. More generally, it is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent or an analogy to represent an identity.

Sigmund Freud believed that magical thinking was produced by cognitive developmental factors. He described practitioners of magic as projecting their mental states onto the world around them, similar to a common phase in child development.^[12] From toddlerhood to early school age, children will often link the outside world with their internal consciousness, e.g. "It is raining because I am sad."

Here is an example of Pat Robertson, for once, admitting he didn't get a message from God. That he still believes he will, however, or that his other flawed assertions were from God only underlines how unreliable and flawed his thinking and belief is. By way of Democratic Underground:

We have had the same problems with past right wing presidential candidates, and we have it with those promoted as future right wing presidential candidates.

Or this:


“I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for president.”
- George W. Bush, quoted in George Magazine, September, 2000

Bush was also a supporter of teaching Creationism/Intelligent design, thought it plausible the earth was only 6,000 or 7,000 years old, and routinely interfered with science during his administration.

for example, from the Boston Globe, back in 2005:

Scientists concede that evolution does not answer every question about the creation of life, but most consider intelligent design an attempt to inject religion into science courses.
Bush compared the current debate to earlier disputes over ''creationism," a related view that adheres more closely to biblical explanations. As governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution.
''I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. ''You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have both concluded that there is no scientific basis for intelligent design and oppose its inclusion in school science classes.
''The claim that equity demands balanced treatment of evolutionary theory and special creation in science classrooms reflects a misunderstanding of what science is and how it is conducted," the academy said in a 1999 assessment. ''Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science."

And according to the New York Times:

George C. Deutsch, a 24-year old presidential appointee (by Bush) to NASA tried to force NASA scientists to call Global Warming and the Big Bang “just theories”. It turns out his qualifications for his job consisted of working for the elect Bush campaign. Deutsch had also claimed that he had a degree from Texas A&M University. Similar to other claims by the current administration, this educational claim was fraudulent.

And then there was former Speaker of the House, corrupt right wing politician Tom Delay, who espoused a position very similar to that of 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney, who tried to blame people failing to embrace his religion and life style choices for gun violence, rather than acknowledging the ease with which the mentally ill can acquire guns they then use in mass shootings:

…youth violence is caused by day care, the teaching of evolution, and working mothers taking birth-control pills. The horror of the shootings at Columbine are easily explained, he says, because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud.

We cannot address properly or effectively ANY of our existing or future problems with irrational, emotional, ill-informed, factually ignorant and reality disconnected political parties or candidates.  Sadly, that is what is shaping too much of our current problems.  It is an obstruction we must overcome or remove to succeed.  Magical thinking, right wing ideology, right wing economics, right wing pseudo-science which is all of a piece will destroy us, will cripple us, will kill us by inches steadily and inexorably.