Mother's Day 2022 comes with a double shot of irony. As we celebrate the love, dedication, and sacrifices of our mothers, we also have to consider the the loss of women's constitutional right to decide for themselves if or when they will become mothers.

And this year Mother's day happens to fall on May 9th, the day Russia celebrates the defeat of the Nazis, who invaded and savaged their country in World War II. You would think they would have a deep aversion to committing such atrocities. Yet Russia is, at this moment, murdering Ukrainian mothers and children in a genicidal campaign every bit as savage as anything the Nazis did some 80 years ago.

As a capstone to this grotesque irony we have Patriarch Kirill, Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, giving his holy stamp of approval to Vladimir Putin's imperial mass-murder fever dream.

None of these things are occurring in isolation. They are all connected. And the bloody thread that binds them is religion, or religious thinking.

To anyone schooled in science, religion has many visible flaws. But we should not be too surprised that lots of folks still believe the old myths, and quite a few new ones. Religious indoctrination begins in early childhood, when the young, impressionable mind is most vulnerable to fantastical dogmas. Religions provide easy answers to complex questions (like those concerning the origin of species) and it conveniently ignores pesky scientific standards of evidence. No need to spend hours studying; just take this leap of faith!

Some regular churchgoers only profess to believe, or at least have their doubts, but go along in order to remain in good stead with their social groups. This is not unlike Republican politicians who despise Donald Trump but will not openly denounce him for fear of a primary challenge from the extreme right wing of their own Party. We have lately been hearing the recorded voices of Republican leaders expressing how they really felt about Trump following the J6 insurrection. My, how they changed their tune when they discovered his enduring popularity among the religious right! After denouncing Trump privately, Kevin McCarthy did a 180 and hurried down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Don Cheato's ass. Moscow Mitch McConnell was hopping mad at Trump after the J6 insurrection, denounced him on the senate floor, and has not spoken a word to him since. But McConnell will not now repeat his denunciation of Trump. Mum's the word.

In spite of a glaring lack of supporting evidence, religious belief is still widespread and persistent. However, things are slowly changing. Never before have as many Americans been unaffiliated with any religious institution. This trend is mirrored in many Western democracies. This has everything to do with rising education levels, and the popular dissemination of scientific facts such as DNA technology and evolutionary biology. Some religious dogmas (such as Creationism) are directly refuted by science. And that is why there has been a concerted effort on the part of religious conservatives to eviscerate public education through voucher programs, inserting pseudoscience into science classrooms, and banning some books altogether if they do not conform to a comfortable white conservative view of history.

Belief in cult figures like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is equivalent to religious belief. So, no surprise, religious thinking continues to be a contributing factor, if not primary cause, of conflict around the world. And because religion is deeply intertwined with politics, a con man was elevated to the American presidency in 2016.

The election of Donald Trump would have been impossible without the 85% of Evangelical Christians who gave the Donald the nod in 2016. And in 2020, according to a recent Gallup poll, 81% of Evangelicals again voted for Trump. Christians supported Trump in the face of his denial of climate science and his efforts to weaken or do away with environmental protections. They voted for him in spite of his driving up the national debt by giving massive tax break to the rich. They voted for him in spite his impeachment for abuse of office. They voted for him in spite of his bungling of the COVID pandemic. They voted for him in spite of the Mueller report, which detailed at least ten instances of obstruction of justice and could NOT rule out collusion with the Russians as they meddled in the 2016 election!

You will not find among the Republican Senators that let Trump off the hook in his two impeachment trials, a single person who is openly atheistic. They all at least talk like believers. They couldn't get elected if they didn't. Yet their supposed Christian beliefs, and those of their constituents, allowed them to give a pass to the high crime of bribery when Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine for months, trying to extort a political favor from Volodomir Zelensky. And the good "Christian" senators also turned a blind eye to Trump's high crime of treason, when he incited the January 6th insurrection with false claims of election fraud. It's the hieght of hypocrisy!

We still have some 53% of nominally Christian Republicans saying they believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, even though Trump's own handpicked Attorney General said there is no evidence of widespread fraud, his cyber security czar said the election was the cleanest in history, and Trump's lawyers went zero for sixty-three in the spurious lawsuits they brought to courts all around the country. Trump's personal lawer even had his law license suspended for bringing baseless claims to court. In spite of a mountain of countervailing evidence, over half of Republicans at least claim to believe Trump's Big Lie.

Sigh.

But we should not be too surprised that the same people who believe Trump's Big Lie also cling to a set of absurd religious beliefs. Both thought patterns spring from the same intellectual flabbiness: the attitude that evidence is not a prerequisite for belief.

Today we can see the disastrous result of Christian electoral victory. Trump's presidency was a carnival of mendacity, recklessness, and incompetence. His attempt to coerce the president of Ukraine into carrying out a political hatchet job, and his many efforts to alienate our NATO allies undoubtedly emboldened Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine and lay waste to its people and democratic way of life. (Let's not be under any illusion that Putin's war war won't affect us, or that it doesn't threaten every democracy on Earth.)

And now it looks like the overturning of Roe v Wade, a fervent desire of Christians for nearly 50 years, is a fait accompli. The very notion of a constitutionally protected right to privacy hangs in the balance. And along with it, rights such as access to contraception, interracial marriage, gay marriage, and egual treatment of LGBTQ people.

The Republican Party does not even have a political platform. They're not really FOR anything. It's merely a cult of personality, and its guiding principle is obedience to Trump. Such cults are, arguably, religious in nature. And if we lose Democracy in America, if we slide into fascistic, theocratic autocracy, it will be on the back of wacky, illogical, and unsupported religious beliefs.

Happy Mother's Day Mom.