Sarah Palin's Demon Haunted Churches

Now I'm not one to cast aspersions on organized religion or anything like that but...oh wait, that's exactly who I am and what I do. Seriously though, as I've written in the past I really do think that John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was a blatant move to woo the conservative, religious base of his party, and she's made very clear that she comes down on their side as it pertains to cultural issues in this election. But if you've been paying attention (and I have) you might have noticed that the McCain campaign has kind of downplayed the extent of her Christian revelry; they've made it very clear that she's a Christian with all of the little clues and codewords used to describe her faith but the details of her church and what goes on there have been conspicuously absent from their mainstream ads and press releases. This short documentary about Palin's church (which was removed from YouTube for "inappropriate content") may shed some light on why this is the case:

Mindless religious zealotry like this scares the shit out of me anyway but when you factor in that they're asking people for money every week (and based on pretty much every church and/or religion I've ever seen or heard about, I have no reason to doubt that they are) I get just that much more uncomfortable with McCain choosing this woman as his running mate. Examining the vast extent of religious fervor and magical beliefs in this country sometimes makes me feel like the last sane man in a massive asylum; I'm not saying that religious believers are crazy, just that they can really come off that way most of the time they're saying or doing anything religious.

[Update: And then there's this exchange between Palin and a social activist while Palin was mayor of Wasilla, AK; from Salon.com:

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board," said Munger, a music composer and teacher. "I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, 'Sarah, how can you believe in creationism -- your father's a science teacher.' And she said, 'We don't have to agree on everything.'

"I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. "She looked in my eyes and said, 'Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'"]