Fundamentalism in Religion…and in Dick Cheney

The prophet is often unloved

There is great comfort in absolutes. It is the gray that wobbles us.

So we yearn for truth, the absolute truth. And if we find such sapphire clarity, it flattens our doubts. This is the great attraction of fundamentalism. Whether Hasidic, Shiite, or Evangelical, the acceptor has been presented with a revealed truth. It is a present, a gift from God. And an ethereal, perfect, eternal gift cannot be questioned by the base, the fallible, the mortal.

The comparative study of religion, however, demonstrates that the various revealed truths in the various religions are spectacularly incongruent. Therefore, to those uncaptivated by faith, at least some (maybe all?) of these scriptures are either products of false gods…or there are competing gods…or there is no God…or the One True God has a bizarre sense of humor.

But to those in the embrace of revelation, these multivariate contradictions are ignored as meaningless. Only my truth is true. And I will follow its dictates without question because I know the reward will be greater than any difficulties incurred along the path.

This explains Dick Cheney.

NCHS Class of '59

Cheney attended Natrona County High School in Casper, WY, in the late 50s. (A curiosity: back then his name was CHEE-nee, not CHAY-nee.) My wife was a year behind him, knew him well, and remembers him as cute, friendly, and athletic.

Cute…friendly…athletic.

It appears that he has changed.

Some think Cheney to be an evil man. I see him as a political fundamentalist who has found strength in a revealed truth that includes, among many other negativities, preemptive war, torture, snooping on citizens, and an assault on the separation of powers. He may even believe that he is the prophet whose thankless task it is to lead the ignorant masses through the political desert to the promised Project for a New American Century. Cheney, I suspect, has supreme confidence that his ends are laudable, and therefore, the short-view complaints of those ignorant masses are ignorable.

Interviewed last March in Oman by ABC’s Martha Raddatz, Cheney sloughed off those complaints with a pitying smile and a single word: “So?”

And today, in a 12/24 New York Times article:

Mr. Cheney…is unbowed, defiant to the end. He called the Supreme Court “wrong” for overturning Bush policies on military detainees; criticized his successor, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.; and defended water-boarding, a controversial interrogation technique that critics call torture.

“I feel very good about what we did,” the vice president told The Washington Times, adding, “If I was faced with those circumstances again, I’d do exactly the same thing.”

There is no arguing with fundamentalists; their revealed truths are sapphire: shining, clear, without flaw.

Their minds are closed.