Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Unlike the Scare, the Red Faith is very much alive. It is a plague upon the national debate; the Red Faith rejects reason and poisons the well of ideas. It drives policy without respect for natural life - its values are based upon the pipe dream of a supernatural afterlife.

We are freethinkers. We welcome debate and do not claim to know the absolute truth. Our enemy is neither the Republican party nor the Conservative economic ideology. Our enemy is the Red Faith, the pernicious fundamentalist ideology that has infected far too many of our fellow humans.

We are freethinkers. Our values and beliefs are inspired by the reflections of philosophers long dead, by those of fellow humans that live in our time, by the holy books of various religions - we look at many opinions before we form our own. We refuse to grant anyone or anything a monopoly on truth.

The Red Faith is a mental virus. It infects children before they reach the age of reason; it preys upon the weak and the vulnerable; it preys upon those who are lost by offering them a crutch, a hug and a brainwash.

We are not hypocrites when we say that our way is a better way. We see the Red Faith as the mental pathogen that it is. We know that fundamentalist religious belief is a mind-killer; it suppresses individuality and turns its victims into mantra-reciting drones who lose part of their ability to reason.

Some very intelligent people have been infected by the Red Faith. Talk to them about something other than their values, and they will be reasonable, knowledgeable and willing to engage in productive debate. But brush the wrong subject and the programming of the Red Faith kicks in; suddenly, they become unable to think for themselves.

In today's America, the Red Faith seems unstoppable. But did you know that in many other countries, it has been defeated. There is a recent example very close to America. In the 1960s, Québec went through the Quiet Revolution. In less than ten years, Québec shifted from a church-dominated society to a highly secular society.

The Quiet Revolution was not merely a shift in government policy. It had massive social implications; the people stopped going to church and they lost their respect for superstitious religion. A single text was credited for starting the Quiet Revolution: Refus Global. It has been called "the single most important social document in Québec history".

I ask you to read Refus Global. While the english translation sucks, the message remains. As you try and understand how a simple text can have such an impact, consider that the original french text was written by one of the greatest Québecois poets of all time. Refus Global is a tremendouly powerful mental virus crafted to destroy fundamentalism.

I believe that we can and must craft such mental viruses to fight the Red Faith in America, today. We are not limited to the written word; we can use all forms of media; text, audio, video, images, hypertext... To eradicate the disease, we must use the same techniques that it uses to infect its victims.

We have the ultimate advantage. Instead of trying to enslave people, we free their minds. We are going to change the moral and political landscape of America. It will take many years, but we will wage a war against fundamentalism, and we will prevail.

I want you to imagine America in three years - we have freed a mere 10 million minds from the plague that is the Red Faith. We have ensured the total victory of the Democratic party, and we have set in motion a chain of events that will lead to the rapid secularisation of American society and politics.

It has happened in Québec. It has happened in many european and asian countries. And America is next. As I said earlier, Republicans are not our enemies. If we attempt to fight our friends on the basis of their ideology, we are bound to fail.

Our enemy is the Red Faith. The Red Faith is the root cause of most problems that plague the American political debate; Republican ideology is merely the symptom. We must stop attacking those men and women who are infected. They are our friends and they are sick. We must cure their disease: we must destroy the Red Faith.