Rationality is predicated on inputs and outputs. If you're surrounded by second and third hand accounts of divine mysteries, it isn't irrational to accept them as true absent some more compelling data. At least, no more irrational than believing in dinosaurs or the Big Bang Theory, without ever actually having seen a fossil or learned about the significance of background radiation.
Puritans coming to America and being told it was a good thing….
I mean, there's a world in which protestant refugees of the Thirty Years War don't just show up and start slaughtering native peoples.
In fact, quite a few early settler colonies ended up "Going Native" and integrating with local tribes, rather than clinging to European identity and loyalty.
But the promise of a New World Gold Rush invited all the wrong kinds of migrants. Add in the Transatlantic slave trade, and you had a thoughtfully toxic stew of feudal politics layered atop capitalist expansion.
"Didn't Vote" could as easily be "Any/All" as "None". Also discounts the voters who were legally disenfranchised or otherwise discouraged from participating.
Hence "not a democracy". Voters don't pick their politicians. Politicians pick their voters.
A Christian (or, really, anyone who believes in predestination) thinking "X is Part of God's Plan" is perfectly consistent with their understanding of the world.
It's the Christians who don't believe this who are being irrational
he was extremely well read and had a very good working knowledge of what the powerful were up to
He grabbed headline news and mashed it up with popular conspiracy theories of the moment.
Jones didn't know anything you couldn't find in the pages of The New Republic or The Austin American Statesman or PBS. He just made an art of cobbling it together with The Drudge Report and Townhall.com, so that people who didn't follow both strains of news figured he was saying something novel or insightful.
Jones has been shuffling the ownership of his company behind shells and leading the collections agencies on a merry chase.
It's Texas, so a big chunk of the legal system is politically inclined to drag its heels or implicitly support him. Not surprised to see the case dragging on got years under these terms.
