I don’t like to go after religious nutters. Well, I do, but I feel sort of guilty when I do, like I’m going for the easy targets. But I’m approaching this story in a different way, so stick with me.

This story is about manatees and Jesus.

A Citrus County tea party group has announced that it’s fighting new restrictions on boating and other human activities in Kings Bay that have been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We cannot elevate nature above people,” explained Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.”

Their interpretation of the Bible is such that the right of humans to enjoy riding speedboats trumps the rights of manatees to not be killed. Must be that part about having dominion over the Earth, though I think they’re defining that a little broadly.

Of course, a religious person could complain that I’m tarring all believers. They could quite rightly say, “That’s ridiculous. I’m religious, and I think it’s important to save manatees.” Good, and I’m glad you’re out there.

But this is central to my point: Religious methods are not able to help co-believers to come to an agreement about even the simplest of moral decisions. This wouldn’t be a problem, but for the fact that religious people view their religions as (among other things) a morals-delivery mechanism. They routinely claim that their morals come from a god, that their religious system helps people become more moral, and they wonder aloud where people who don’t believe in a god get their morals from. For all that, religion seems to give co-believers widely diverging results on moral issues.