Those Superstitious, Irrational Democrates

They've merely replaced God with Leviathan:

How do you spell superstition? The professional atheists have been busy spelling it out lately, especially Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion and Sam Harris with The End of Faith. There is almost certainly no God, according to Dawkins.

The atheists worship a different God. For Dawkins, it seems to be the power of Darwin's theory of natural selection. For Sam Harris it seems to be the value of meditation and a rational ethics. And don't think you can talk them out it.

We can thank the atheists at least for this: They are magnificently applying the principle of "motivated skepticism" to the human God project.

Motivated skepticism? That's the concept from the paper "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs" by Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge. (Hat tip to TCS Daily Arnold Kling.)

Taber and Lodge observe that we humans have lots of faith in our own ideas and plans but not in other peoples' ideas.

"Physicists do it...Psychologists do it...Even political scientists do it...Research findings confirming a hypothesis are accepted more or less at face value, but when confronted with contrary evidence, we become "motivated skeptics" ... picking apart possible flaws in the study, recoding variables, and only when all the counterarguing fails do we rethink our beliefs[.]"
To understand the power of faith we have only to look at the 100 hour legislative marathon of the newly empowered House Democrats. They are intent upon passing an increase in the minimum wage. But the science is in on this, and it has been for over a century. The minimum wage puts low-skilled people out of work. Democrats are also intent upon adding new subsidies to college students. But the science is in on subsidies. And the science is also in on drug price controls.

Why do they do it? Faith, that's why. Blind faith in the power of government and their own good intentions.

When a faith has been utterly exploded by science, rational folks like you and me usually call it "superstition."

Which brings to mind my favorite response to Democrats who want to separate church from state:

You first.