Religion and the Democratic party

Here's yet another reason I do not expect to vote for any Democratic candidate in November:

The Democratic National Convention will open next week with an interfaith gathering. Representatives from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths will be there.

No atheists, though.

We weren’t invited.

It's not just that atheists were excluded from this function. That the Democratic party is having an official religious gathering of any kind is itself objectionable. Democrats hold and seek public office in the government; religion simply shouldn’t enter into their official activities.

I'll say it yet again: When you have to invoke God in setting your social and political agenda, you have surrendered your claim to a rational justification for that agenda: if you already have a rational, reasonable, sensible justification, why invoke God?

Alternatively, you're saying that people cannot be persuaded by a rational justification... or at least you lack confidence that people can be so persuaded. But if you support irrational persuasion for a rational idea, what are you going to do tomorrow when someone invokes this same irrational justification for an irrational, nonsensical idea?

We already have a party — the Republican party — of insanity, irrationality, oppression, and imperialism. When the shit finally hits the fan (and any sensible observer can see that economic and political catastrophe is rushing upon us) the Democratic party will have nothing to say. They didn't even sacrifice sensibility in the service of expediency. Trying to be more like the Republican party is a moronic strategy, because Republicans will vote for the Republican party, not the kind-of-like-the-Republican party.

Were it not for Hanlon's razor, I would suspect a conspiracy: the Democratic party is in league with the Republican party to give the appearance of democratic opposition while taking every available step to fail to actually function as such.

But the upshot is the same: I'll no more vote for egregious stupidity than I will for malice.

[cross-posted to We Op-Ed. If you're so moved, please comment there; I'm trying to drive some traffic their way.]