Posted: Apr 08, 2010 3:30 pm
by Shrunk
blackarmada wrote: Proves that faith is the core of the problem, religion is just the most obvious symptom.


Exactly. "Faith" encompasses a broader set of ideas than just religion. This was made explicit in a statement by an official in the Bush White House (widely assumed to be Karl Rove), as reported in the New York Times:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html

Many seemingly unfathomable decision made by the US government under Bush suddenly make sense (loosely speaking) in light of this quote.