My co-worker, Mike, sees an alarming parallel between the political climate surrounding the current presidential campaign and that of 1960. He’s old enough to remember all the anti-Catholic rhetoric directed toward a young, charismatic candidate back then, and he’s noticed the same people acting the same way now, except in this election that heady combination of fear and anger coming from the religious right is aimed at Muslims, and by superficial extension, Barack Obama.

Mike sees danger in religious people letting their politics and their religion mix to the point that they are no longer separable. For lack of a better term, he calls this politigion. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but a quick search of the intertoobz shows he is not the first to use it, so who knows, maybe it has legs. Irrespective of the label, Mike and I are in agreement that those who suffer from it bear watching. While not entirely relevant to our subject matter, Mike and I both noticed that JFK’s assassination was right there, just sort of hovering over our conversation. It is a definite cause for concern. I’ve heard more than one loudmouth goober proclaim that Obama is just a holiday waiting to happen.

As I noted, Mike, who is a practicing mythologist, though not outspoken about it, thinks the problem lies in the mixing of religion and politics. He sees either ingredient alone as useful, even essential for certain purposes, but much like mixing ammonia and bleach releases deadly chlorine gas, mixing religion and politics releases a concentrated distillation of hate. Of course, being an evangelical atheist, I blame religion.

By looking at the evangelicals and fundies of the Amurkin religious right and declaring them — albeit correctly, in my opinion — to be a little “fucked up”, Mike is doing what I’ve seen religious people of every persuasion do all my life. He reinforces his own beliefs by pointing out the differences over there while downplaying the similarities over here.

For the atheist, the outsider looking in, it doesn’t matter whether you rattle beads and chant or pray to the east, recite litanies or roll around on the floor speaking in tongues, burn incense or handle venomous snakes, all religions have one thing in common. They allow one group of people to choose to believe in a supreme being based on no evidence whatsoever, to not only believe in this invisible cloud-daddy, but create an entire belief system around it, worship it, pray to it, build monuments to it, and wage wars for it, all of this while simultaneously allowing them to believe that a different group of people who have done the exact same thing in a different language or a different culture are evil, and their belief system ridiculous. It’s mind-boggling.

I have a theory that somewhere back there in the primitive part of the human brain, the part that controls our bodies most basic functions like heartbeat and breathing, the part that keeps us alive when the earth shakes, there exists a very rudimentary logic center which, when presented with the stress of accepting two mutually exclusive ideas, reacts with a basic fight-or-flight response. I firmly believe this cognitive dissonance is the source of most of the divisiveness and anger that emanates from the most religious among us.