(Mis)information feeds fanaticism

Re: Racial and religious fanatics have no future, by Lloyd Brown-John, Oct. 27.

It’s about power. Religious, social and economic power. For those of us who do not believe in a god, we cannot be dominated by any religious dogma or recruited to do its deeds no matter how benign or vile.

My decisions, in this arena of race and religion, are based on my sense of right and wrong, not someone else’s.

It’s obvious to me that those who discriminate on the basis of race or murder in the name of anything have not thought things through either by choice or immediate social pressure.

Racism is and always has been all about fear and implied or actual loss of individual and collective economic and social power. If certain economic advantages are threatened or challenged, for instance, the leaders of the advantaged will invariably find it easy to rally the troops by holding colour and social differences up for the glassy-eyed “Google it” crowd to latch onto.

Fanaticism has grown with the (mis)information age. Malleable minds and those who let technology do their thinking for them rather than use it as a tool to a reasonable end are to a large part at the root of this phenomenon.

Sometimes it takes more work than usual to cut through the crap. Unfortunately, more and more people are not willing to do that so even though these fanatics will be relatively short-lived, their numbers seem to be increasing especially south of this border. Jerry Wright, Leamington