IGNORANCE = PREJUDICE
More criticism of President Barack Obama is motivated by prejudice than we care to admit to ourselves. We are prone to take snippets of information and see each snippet as a support to our already-decided prejudices. Of course we cannot admit them to ourselves because we are uncomfortable seeing ourselves that way. We all do it, to a certain extent. But those with the strongest feelings on most subjects are often the most bigoted, the most patriotic, and the most hateful. It is an extension of how "perfect" we see ourselves, and how threatened we are when our "facts" are proven to be wrong or full of prejudice. We need only to look to the "biblical" defense of slavery, or the savage religious wars that have gone on between Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Muslims, and the absolutely "certain" actions by missionaries to others. How about a dose of reality?
"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion." -John Adams (1735-1826)
"Doctrines get inside of a man's own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines." -William Graham Sumner
"Goose pimples rose all over me, my hair stood on end, my eyes filled with tears of love and gratitude for this greatest of all conquerors of human misery and shame; and my breath came in little gasps. If I had not known that the Leader would have scorned such adulation, I might have fallen to my knees in unashamed worship, but instead I drew myself to attention, raised my arm in the eternal salute of the ancient Roman Legions and repeated the holy words, 'Heil Hitler!' " -George Lincoln Rockwell, an AMERICAN right-wing extremist
"What is the new loyalty? It is, above all, conformity. It is the uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of America as it is. . .It rejects inquiry into the race question or socialized medicine, or public housing. . . . regards as heinous any challenge to what is called the 'system of private enterprise,' identifying that system with Americanism. It abandons evolution, repudiates the once popular concept of progress, and regards America as a finished product, perfect and complete." -Henry Steele Commager
"He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all." -Samuel Taylor Colerridge
"The big majority of Americans, who are comparitively well off, have developed an ability to have enclaves of people living in the greatest misery without almost noticing them." -Gunnar Myrdal
"I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian." -Mohandas Gandhi
"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both." -Justice Louis D. Brandeis
"We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism or radicalism is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what, they call socialism." -Richard T. Ely
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building for the poor." -John K. Galbraith
"Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them." -Edward R. Murrow
"The First Crusade . . . set off on its two-thousand mile jaunt by massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan. 'In the temple of Solomon,' wrote the ecstatic cleric, Raimundus de Agiles, 'one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses' bridles, by the just and marvelous Judgment of God!' " -Herbert J. Muller [ah, those marvelous Christians showed those terrible Moslems!]
