Trump recently attended some type of voter summit where he belted out to a crowd of adoring fans about how he would restore Christian values to a nation that had lost its religious roots.  Allowing companies to deny women birth control on the basis of religion was just the beginning.  Every day that I wake up, it's some new unspeakable horror.  Most days, I wish I didn't wake up.

Yes, this blog entry will be provocative and probably offensive to some, if you haven't figured that out.  I can't pull any punches today.  The fact is that losing our religious roots is the only way that we have made any progress.  Outgrowing our attachment to divisive, irrational, superstitious dogma is how we move forward, improve our world, grow out of the infancy of our species, and become adults.  And yet, fans cheered with joy as Trump touted about rolling America back to a more traditional and religious time.  He said, (paraphrasing) "My, how the times have changed, but mark my words, they are changing back."  The actual quote was something extremely close to that.  Trivially different.  That's the sentiment he conveyed.  Trump's vision is bad enough, but the cheers from his fans is what upsets me the most.  It fills me with a horror so dark, black, and unspeakable that I sometimes I feel like my heart is literally going to cave in from despair.  Knowing that, most likely, the next ~7 years will spent watching my culture crumble and eat itself makes me wish I was dead.

Yes indeed, our country has drifted too far from its religious roots.  We have drifted too far from burning witches and heretics.  We have drifted too far into the realms of reason, rationality, sanity, compassion, knowledge, science, truth, fact, tolerance, and equal protection under the law.  No sir, we cannot have any of that.  We must return to a dark age when god's law was THE law, and if your beliefs differed from those in power, then it's a fiery death for you.  We must return to a time when the Earth was flat and the sun revolved around us, as it should.  Letting companies discriminate on the basis of religion is a good start, but certainly not enough to meet our goal of returning us to circa 1314.  We must outlaw gay marriage, and interracial marriage to boot.  We must then teach pseudo-science in school.  All public schools must have a creation class, followed by bible studies, prayer, and alchemy.  We'll want to destroy most modern medicine, as god never intended for us to play him with our bodies in this way.  We must get rid our doctors, surgeons, and therapists and bring in priests to perform exorcisms on children with schizophrenia.  We must roll back women's suffrage--after all, what good has a woman ever done in this world?  Oh, but that's still not enough, is it?  No.  We'll need to reinstate slavery as well in our quest to make a world worth living in.  Above all, we must roll back our world to a time when gods came down out of the sky and flooded the earth and performed miracles, because that time was far more interesting, romantic, and exciting than the boring world of today when all we can do is make self-driving cars, look at the microwave background radiation of the big bang, and move silly carbon monoxide molecules around to make a stop-motion movie with atoms that can only be seen under an electron microscope.

I apologize profusely for the exaggerated sarcasm.  I realize that that last paragraph probably went too far, and was offensive, but my gut-wrenching despair is often too much to bear, and it helps to vent honestly.  I'm sorry.  Please understand a couple of things: first, I am in favor of reason, rationality, secularism, and equal protection under the law.  That last paragraph was sarcasm intended to paint a vision of the most horrific world possible.  Secondly, I am not in any way saying that every religious person, or every conservative, or every republican wants the dark world I just described.  Of course not.  That's crazy.  And I'm not in the habit of painting entire groups of people as my enemy.  But what terrifies me day and night is that a sizable number of people really do want to roll back time, not to the middle ages perhaps, but to the 1950's, absolutely.  Many people desperately want the bible to be a part of our constitution.  They want god's law to be federal law.  They want homosexuality to be a capital crime.  They want segregation.  They want pseudo-science taught in schools.  They want birth control banned.  They want to take away all rights that a woman might have over her reproductive cycle.  I must take a quick tangent to say that while the abortion debate is at least a valid debate, with valid opinions to be heard on both sides, the idea of contraception, of preventing unwanted pregnancy to begin with, being immoral, is purely medieval.  Believing contraception to be immoral is perhaps the darkest, most backwards and disgusting stupidity that our pathetic species is capable of.  Many people want to undo a century of fantastic progress, and I do not doubt for a second that Trump is one of them.  I genuinely believe that if Trump were made lord emperor of earth, with absolute power and no checks of balances, he would roll back our civilization to the dark ages.

I desperately wish to be told that I am GREATLY exaggerating, but I fear am I not.  I fear that we are on a knife's edge, and with the slightest nudge, the enemies of basic human sanity could win.  I fear that forces of superstition, lunacy, and religious fanaticism may be gaining an unstoppable amount of momentum.  It doesn't help that people are losing trust in liberalism due to the outrage culture, what with free speech being hindered due to political correctness and such.  I fear that the agents of ignorance will never stop trying to eat this world, and if we relax and grow complacent, they might yet win.  We need to keep speaking out against dangerous ideas with every fiber of our beings.