It is very easy to find bizarre stuff on the web. I usually don’t read the comments sections on the more popular political blogs because they quickly veer into incoherent rants. But once in a while my eye catches something that is so quirky that I become curious as to how any rational mind can think like that.

Take this comment in response to a Politico post about raising the debt ceiling:

END ABORTION NATIONALLY OR FACE NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY. The most recent increase in the U.S. debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion by H.J.Res. 45 was signed into law on February 12, 2010. The amount of national debt accumulated from 1791 until Roe V. Wade made abortion legal on January 22, 1973 was about $444 billion. Do the math to find the % of the total national debt prior abortion being made legal nationally. I predict that US Congress will raise the debt ceiling again. We will go bankrupt as a nation because of the national sin of legal abortion. There is a solution. Abortionility, A plague from sea to sea. To Christ our knees must bend, Then Roe V. Wade will end. 2 Chronicles 7:14

In case you are curious what the Chronicles reference is and don’t carry your Bible around with you all the time, here is the verse: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

The person who wrote this is educated enough to write grammatically and is knowledgeable enough to marshall some fairly esoteric facts to buttress his argument. But then the neurons seem to suddenly start firing randomly, leading to a chain of reasoning that is bizarre, to say the least. Basically the author seems to be saying that god started rapidly increasing the US national debt as punishment for legalizing abortion and will erase the debt if we stop the practice. Who knew?

Not only is it a textbook example of confusing correlation with causation, it is also an example of how religion subverts people’s reasoning skills.