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From John Farrell, A Problem of Credibility:
The problem with relying solely on philosophy when it comes to discussing the ‘big picture’ about God and his role in the evolution of life, is that it too often gives cover to scientific stupidity.Also from John Farrell, 11 September 2007:I would much rather say ignorance instead of stupidity, believe me. But ignorance is a condition that can be remedied, assuming the ignorant party is interested in learning the truth. That is not the case with many conservatives and the journalists who pander to them. …
Another part of the problem—at least with regard to conservative journalists and how they cover science—is the narrow provincialism, born of the small social circle of people who make up the current conservative intellectual establishment, meaning, in the corridor between New York and Washington, D.C. [I’m a Red Sox fan, so shoot me.]
A friend of mine, who is also a longtime reader of National Review and the other conservative opinion journals, had some interesting comments about this a while back in an email, and I think he’s right on the money: “The problem with NRO is that it’s intellectually incurious. It’s gotten to be dull and airless because it’s not really interested in exploring new ideas and rethinking old ones in light of experience, but instead serving as a political rallying point. There is so much more to conservatism — or to be more precise, what interests, or should interest, conservatives — than what happens in Washington, but that’s all they seem to care about.”
For example, he might have ventured to query some Christians who are scientists and philosophers, ones who are not scared of Darwin. … But talking to anyone who might politely disprove the point is just not part of what Bethell, Gilder, Buchanan, Coulter & Co. are up to.
More depressing evidence of Christian documentary filmmakers who feel no need to be honest about what they are doing when they approach prospective interviewees to be in their films.The link is to a blog called Higgaion, written by Chris Heard, Associate Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University. The entry is called I wish that weren’t me on that DVD:
A couple of years ago, I welcomed a camera crew into my office for some interviews about Old Testament stories. The crew went away and I never heard from them again, until I e-mailed the production company last week to find out what ever became of the footage. A representative of that company promptly e-mailed me back and kindly sent out a screener of the DVD that is scheduled to release in October.More after the jump.I am not happy with the end result.
When I agreed to do the interview, I did not know that the thankfully direct-to-video program would feature “re-enactments” of biblical scenes (and horrible re-enactments at that; only Moses has a proper beard). I did not know that the film would use completely irrelevant footage to distract viewers during longish voiceovers by host Roger Moore (yes, that Roger Moore). And I certainly did not realize that the production would end up trying to promote views that I do not personally endorse. I did suppose that a diversity of opinions might be represented, and represented as such. Silly me.And so on. It’s a long, detailed description of the flawed scholarship underlying the documentary, and how Chris Heard’s remarks were misrepresented in it. He goes through Noah’s Flood (bad geology); Lot, Sodom, and Gomorrah (bad etymology and geography); Job (text is wildly misread and misrepresented); Abraham (which Ur, which Abraham?); Joseph (no real examination of the historicity of the Joseph narratives); Moses (the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, and Constitution are not part of a universal inbred human ethical code); Samson; and David (gross misrepresentation of the Tel Dan stela).Here are some of my specific complaints about the program. Yes, I know that you haven’t seen it yet. My hope is that maybe you won’t. But perhaps if I embarrass myself pre-emptively by means of this post, at least my learned colleagues will cut me some slack. Also, as far as I know, I’m not bound by any non-disclosure agreement, so please consider this an “advance review” of the film.
Adam, Eve, and Eden. The first eight minutes or so of the program offer up young-earth creationism, with a heaping helping of commentary from folk associated with the Institute for Creation Research. Longtime readers of Higgaion know that I have no sympathy whatsoever with young-earth creationism (I’d sympathize with a young-earth creationist who got bit by a pit bull or something, but you know what I mean); I consider it exegetically irresponsible and it is (regardless of my consideration one way or the other) not scientific in the least. The producers conveniently left out the parts of my interview where I expressed the view that the biblical Adam and Eve are “everyman” and “everywoman” and that the impossible geography of Eden is a clue to readers not to try to interpret Genesis 2–3 literally. Instead, the film gives air time to ICR folk who completely misuse the real scientific concept of a Y-chromosome most recent common ancestor (Y-mcra) and a mitochondrial DNA most recent common ancestor (mt-mcra), sometimes called “Y-chromosome Adam” and “mtDNA Eve”; the talking heads try to conflate Y-mcra and mt-mcra with a literal Adam and Eve from Genesis 2–3, even though Y-mcra and mt-mcra, according to current evidence, lived almost 90,000 years apart from one another. (To my better-informed friends: yes, I know that this brief explanation is awfully simplistic.) A caption in the film claims that “Using geographical clues given in Genesis, scholars almost all agree that the Garden of Eden is in Iraq.” Wrong. There are some biblical scholars who want to locate the original location of Eden in what is now Iraq, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates; of course, none of these scholars would say that the Garden is (now) anywhere to be found. And most biblical scholars are not even interested in the question. If you take the geographical description in Genesis 2 as your clue, you will be hopelessly frustrated, for the clues simply don’t work. No such place exists. If you are willing to stretch some of the geographical references in Genesis 2, and allow certain place names to mean things in Genesis 2 that they don’t mean anywhere else in the Bible, you can assign a geographical context to Eden, not in southeastern Mesopotamia but in the mountains of Asia Minor. I’m pretty sure I talked about this with the interviewers. If I did, they didn’t use any of that material. It wouldn’t fit the agenda.
Then they get to Jesus:
The teaser for the next segment asks viewers, “What did archaeologists dig up in the 1960s that proves the Bible’s accuracy?” The segment opens with a couple of talking heads telling viewers that “there really aren’t any” contradictions in the Bible and that there is no evidence contradicting any part of the biblical story. Amazing. These people either can’t or don’t actually read the Bible, but only talk about it, or they have become remarkably adept at the mental gymnastics required to pay incredibly selective attention to their sources, both biblical and non-biblical. Yes, I realize that’s probably a rude thing to say, but one can hardly read the gospels carefully without realizing that John’s chronology is explicitly different from that of the Synoptics, for example, and the Tel Dan stela (mentioned above) makes claims that clash with a story early in 2 Kings. Please understand—I’m not anti-Bible (far from it), but I am anti-lying, even on the Bible’s behalf. …One of Chris Heard’s commenters observes that:To try to prove the reliability of the traditions about Jesus, the filmmakers turn to—are you sitting down?—the Dead Sea Scrolls, which of course having nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus. Moore makes reference to the Great Isaiah Scroll, but the first on-screen image is 4Q175, or 4QTestimonia, which has nothing to do with the Isaiah scroll. The second scroll is shown upside-down and backwards on the screen, and too close-up (and blurry) for me to identify it. According to Moore’s script, comparison of the Isaiah scroll with the Masoretic Text (he doesn’t use that term) yields “stunning” results; one of the talking heads, a guy named Paul Maier and identified as a Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University at Kalamazoo, tells him that the two manuscripts are “99.9% identical” (meanwhile, a caption on-screen quotes Matthew 5:18, which has nothing to do with textual transmission). I cannot be even 99.9% certain that Maier was talking about the Isaiah manuscripts, though I hope the filmmakers weren’t that careless or mendacious. I am, however, 100% certain that the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic Text of Isaiah are considerably less than 99.9% identical. … The figures given in the film are simply false. Maier claims that “This idea that the copyists have totally change scripture just doesn’t work,” and depending on how strongly you ramify his word totally, he may be right; but in the case of the Isaiah scroll, it’s quite clear that copyists did in fact change יהוה into אדני for reasons of theological propriety. The comparison of DSS Isaiah and MT Isaiah proves what Maier says it disproves.
Of course, the degree of exact correspondence between DSS Isaiah and MT Isaiah has nothing to do with the reliability of the transmission of the New Testament documents, since completely different communities were doing the transmission. Moreover, scribal accuracy in copying a text has no bearing on whether or not the story is true.
… I’m a bit upset—no, incensed—at being threaded into a production that sets out to prove a whole bunch of stuff that I don’t agree with, much of which is demonstrably wrong.
You may be pleased (or not!) to know that Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula have been similarly victimised by stealth creationist film crews. PZ’s account is here. Does one detect a pattern? Is it Intelligently Designed?The P.Z. Myers piece in question is I’m gonna be a *MOVIE STAR*, posted in August of this year:
Last April, I received this nice letter from Mark Mathis.The idea that freedom of thought and inquiry have been expelled from academia is a mendacious assertion that would, if allowed, undermine the public’s understanding of the entire enterprise of science. The Creationist far right is fond of making that claim, since it projects their own tactics onto academia, and also explains why reputable scholars and institutions never agree with them: they’re not allowed to do so! Honest facts and honest scholarly inquiry have nothing to do with it.Hello Mr. Myers,I looked up Rampant Films. Yes, they are doing a movie called Crossroads, and it has perfectly reasonable blurb:My name is Mark Mathis. I am a Producer for Rampant Films. We are currently in production of the documentary film, “Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion.”
At your convenience I would like to discuss our project with you and to see if we might be able to schedule an interview with you for the film. The interview would take no more than 90 minutes total, including set up and break down of our equipment.
We are interested in asking you a number of questions about the disconnect/controversy that exists in America between Evolution, Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement.
Please let me know what time would be convenient for me to reach you at your office. Also, could you please let me know if you charge a fee for interviews and if so, what that fee would be for 90 minutes of your time.
I look forward to speaking with you soon. …
Crossroads - The Intersection of Science and Religion:So I said, sure, I’d be happy to talk with you, and as long as any travel expenses are covered, I’m willing to do it gratis (academic, you know…we aren’t used to charging big fees to explain things to people). They came out to Morris, set up cameras and gear in my lab, and we did an interview for a few hours. I got paid (woo hoo!). They left. I figured that, as a fairly minor figure in this argument, I might well get cut out altogether—they talked about also interviewing Dawkins and Eugenie Scott and Pennock and various other people—and that was OK.It’s been the central question of humanity throughout the ages: How in the world did we get here? In 1859 Charles Darwin provided the answer in his landmark book, “The Origin of Species.” IN the century and a half since, biologists, geologists, physicists, astronomers and philosophers have contributed a vast amount of research and data in support of Darwin’s idea. And yet, millions of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other people of faith believe in a literal interpretation that humans were crafted by the hand of God. This conflict between science and religion has unleashed passions in school board meetings, courtrooms, and town halls across America and beyond.
Now we’ve got this new ID (Intelligent Design) creationist movie, Expelled, coming out, and there’s a press release with this claim:
Unlike some other documentary films, Expelled doesn’t just talk to people representing one side of the story. The film confronts scientists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, influential biologist and atheist blogger PZ Myers, and Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education. The creators of Expelled crossed the globe over a two-year period, interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers and public leaders. The result is a startling revelation that freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions.
Naturally, they find this reassuring, and get happily indignant over the thought that this blatant bias is being pursued using their tax dollars. It’s the reverse of their usual scenario, wherein propaganda based on their biases is developed and promulgated at other people’s expense.
Back to P.Z.:
What? I didn’t do any interviews for pro-creation films, and I certainly haven’t said that “freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry” aren’t part of the university. There must be some mistake.These projects have nothing to do with the ordinary people. More on that in a moment.But then I noticed in the credits for the movie that a certain familiar name is the associate producer, or ass-prod, as I’ll henceforth consider him.
Denyse O’Leary also ties Mathis of Rampant Films to this movie, and this page from Expelled uses the same graphic that Rampant Films used for Crossroads. The case is closed: Ben Stein’s propaganda film for ID is the one I was interviewed for.In Theaters February 2008
Starring Ben Stein
Featuring a CAST OF THOUSANDS Directed by NATHAN FRANKOWSKI Written by KEVIN MILLER, WALT RULOFF & BEN STEIN
Produced by LOGAN CRAFT & WALT RULOFF Associate Producer MARK MATHISWell. I guess I didn’t end up on the cutting room floor after all, although I’m sure a select set of my words did. Unless, that is, the whole movie is me sitting in my lab, talking. It’s real. I’m going to be featured in a big-time movie with second-tier character actor and game-show host Ben Stein. I bet my whole family is going to go out to the moving-picture theatre to see me on the big screen … and since my family lives near Seattle and the Discovery Institute is so happy about it, they’ll probably have the opportunity.
I do have a few questions, though.
I’m wondering why the Discovery Institute would be so enthused about this movie. It lays its premise on the line: science is flawed because it excludes god and the supernatural. It’s one big promo for religion—which means it’s going to further undercut Intelligent Design creationism’s claims to be a secular idea.
Randy Olson points out that this is clearly a well-funded movie. It’s slick, they’re paying Ben Stein, they had to have shelled out a good chunk of money for the rights for the “Bad to the Bone” theme. Randy’s probably wondering why he couldn’t get that kind of money for Flock of Dodos.
So who is funding the movie? Some people with deep pockets are throwing quite a bit of cash at this thing, and I can assure you that it didn’t end up in my hands. I think I was paid something like $1200. I should have asked for much more!
Isn’t it a little ironic that a fairly expensive production like this is billing itself as representing the ordinary people, and is pretending to be the “rebel”? There’s a bit of the no-expenses-will-be-spared (except in the case of their evilutionist dupes!) glitz about it—it really doesn’t look like the work of some brave independent film-maker living hand-to-mouth while making his artistic vision manifest.
Why were they so dishonest about it? If Mathis had said outright that he wants to interview an atheist and outspoken critic of Intelligent Design for a film he was making about how ID is unfairly excluded from academe, I would have said, “bring it on!” We would have had a good, pugnacious argument on tape that directly addresses the claims of his movie, and it would have been a better (at least, more honest and more relevant) sequence.Why didn’t they tell the truth about what they were doing? That’s easy. P.Z. Myers would have been on his guard, and Mathis wouldn’t have gotten the footage he needed. This project is about agenda, not inquiry.
He would have also been more likely to get that good ol’ wild-haired, bulgy-eyed furious John Brown of the Godless vision than the usual mild-mannered professor that he did tape. And I probably would have been more aggressive with a plainly stated disagreement between us.What I find interesting about this is where the lines are being drawn.I mean, seriously, not telling one of the sides in a debate about what the subject might be and then leading him around randomly to various topics, with the intent of later editing it down to the parts that just make the points you want, is the video version of quote-mining and is fundamentally dishonest.
I don’t mind sharing my views with creationists, and do so all the time. By filming under false pretenses, much like the example of the case of Richard Dawkins’ infamous “pause”, they’ve undercut their own credibility … not that that will matter. I suspect their audience will not question whatever mangling of the video that they carry out, and the subterfuges used to make it will not be brought up.
Chris Heard is an Associate Professor of Religion. P.Z. Myers is a famously atheistic biologist with a thing for cephalopods. Both of them were tricked, defrauded, and misrepresented by documentary-makers interested only in making propaganda for Biblical-literalist creationist audiences. You wouldn’t expect such organizations to see P.Z. Myers as an insider; what’s interesting is that they don’t see Chris Heard as an insider, either.
I don’t think these documentarists are drawing the line between theists and atheists. I think the line is drawn between honest thinkers and weighers of evidence (Myers and Heard both qualify) on the one hand, and liars and propagandists on the other.
It’s not possible to produce such programs honestly. Chopping logic and falsifying arguments like that can only be done by someone who knows that he or she is doing it. To put it another way: if you know enough about the Book of Job or the Tel Dan stela to make up really effective lies about them that will fit into your preordained agenda, you know enough about them to know you’re lying.
This process of cooking up faith-promoting lies is not evidence of religious faith. Say you profess the basic Christian package: God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, created all things, and wants us to love and understand Him.* If you truly believe that, how can you fear scientific knowledge? Creation doesn’t lie.** Surely it must follow that to know more about it is to see further into God’s ways.
(There are two married women. Both their husbands are accused of being present at a particularly wanton and disgraceful stag party. Both husbands deny it. One wife accepts this denial at face value, dismisses the story, and goes on with her life. The other wife goes into a frenzy of fact-checking, affidavit-gathering, and timeline construction, in order to demonstrate once and for all that her husband couldn’t possibly have been at that party. Which woman has faith in her husband?)
Science is no threat to religious faith. It only threatens the childish misreadings of Biblical literalism. They should have long since been jettisoned. Instead, we have an industry of disinformation devoted to telling people lies that bolster the apparent tenability of that belief system. This is creepy because, as I pointed out a few paragraphs up, the people manufacturing this disinformation can’t be doing it as an act of faith. They know they’re lying. Their audience doesn’t.
Why should it be so important to insist that God created the animals via mysterious unspecified means, and to deny that the processes that brought them into being left perceptible traces in the geological record and in the form and nature of the animals we have with us today? There’s no virtue in the denial. Understanding something about how animals happened neither makes us gods nor distances us from God. Refusing to understand it—or worse, lying to maintain a false model of how things happened—puts us very far from God and/or truth.
Lying about evolution is not evidence of faith. Lying about anything is not evidence of faith. Lying to one’s co-religionists is not evidence that you care about the state of their souls or your own. So why do it? Possibly because it fosters an unwarranted certainty, an us-and-them mentality that can be exploited for political gains. And possibly, just possibly, because it leads believers into distracting thickets of false exegesis, and away from a faith whose basic tenets have never been terribly complicated: Love god. Love one another. Share what you have, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, comfort the afflicted, be humble, love justice, seek peace, tell the truth, pray often, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, recognize everyone as a child of God just like yourself, and forgive trespasses as you hope to have your own forgiven.
It’s a disturbing religion when you take it straight. Heaven only knows what would happen if more of these people started practicing it.
Stefan: You're right, and I have.
My attitude is that they're obviously from that annoying branch of Satanism that gets off on pretending to be Christian for the purposes of undermining the church from within.
Those pesky Satanists. They're everywhere, you know. You just have to know how to recognize them.
That explains a lot.
Any sufficiently dishonest ideology is indistinguishable from fundamentalism.
I agree that these people's behavior is beneath contempt (although, fortunately, not beneath ridicule), but I am leery of a determination concerning which religious tenets are ripe to be jettisoned. I believe that people should be afforded the freedom to believe counter-scientific notions if that is their (informed) choice, and along with that is the freedom to share those beliefs with others.
Yeah, I've heard before that there are some freedoms we can't afford to grant because that plays into the Evil Agenda of the Sinister Opposition. I didn't believe it when it was the fundamentalists making this argument, and frankly I won't buy into it now that they are the targets.
Who said anything about not granting people freedom?
huh. that is actually not the first time i've heard of expelled, & now i feel weirdly implicated.
i agreed to be on a panel on "spirituality in comics" this past san diego comic-con. the panelists were me (jewish), doug tennapel (catholic), holly golightly (witch), & christine kerrick (evangelical, i believe). the moderator was representing the christian comic arts society, the group that put the panel together.
it was a pretty small deal. there were about 100 people in the audience (i declined my microphone, since it was shabbat, & got mad props), we went for about 50 minutes, & the only question from the audience was, i'm almost certain, a stealth heckler.
anyhow, it was very convivial. holly golightly is the most bubbly, adorable goth cartoonist i've ever met, christine kerrick was humble & unpretentious, i dropped mystical, all-purpose words like kavana, & doug tennapel only made me nervous a couple of times railing against moral relativism & tolerance.
but the people who put it on creeped me out. when they started off the panel talking about the great new "michael moore style" documentary that proved intelligent design, apparently done by a sponsor of the panel, i understood why i felt like running away most of the time. it was worse when they were like "hosted by ben stein. oh yeah! ben stein!" my ick was compounded by my no-good-for-the-jews spidey sense.
but, it was a panel. no one had ever invited me on a panel before, & it was about spirituality, & hey, i got spirituality. i put my discomfort down to a lifetime indoctrination against missionaries.
now i feel like i really shoudn't have. i feel like i was party to that documentary, & all the other dirty political things some outfit somehow related to the comic-con christian group does. like maybe i was a useful idiot, even if not so obviously useful as the people they tricked into appearing in the documentary.
Matthew Daly @ 6
This isn't about freedom to hold counterfactual opinions, it's about deliberately distorting the truth, misusing and selectively editing quotes to make them mean things the original speaker does not agree with, and otherwise using deceit and fraud to persuade ignorant people of untrue things for the purpose of obtaining power over them, in one sense or another.
Let's take Justice Holmes as a starting position: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."
I recently subscribed to CSICOP here.
I am not yet in a position to recommend this body unreservedly, but the articles in their magazine "The Skeptical Inquirer" seem to be well-argued and scholarly. Something must be done to counter the avalanche of creationist propaganda on the web. This might help.
I'm sorry. Something weird has happened to that link. The site is w w w(dot)scicop (dot) org.
Apparently, Justice Holmes was expressing a sensible princible to justify a pretty poor decision.
What it all comes down to is that freedom of speech isn't an untrammeled freedom to lie. It doesn't nullify the concept of defamation. All this might be legal (and you can bet there's room in any contract for this: no film-maker is going to give up the right to edit an interview), but it still diminishes the reputation of the victim.
And there have been reports of similar editing being used on science documentaries, where you have a controversy and the talking heads.
It's getting so you can't trust anyone.
I've come across Paul Maier before. He's a VP of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (I grew up LCMS) and the son of Walter A. Maier, founder of The Lutheran Hour. I had the impression that he'd done some amount of legitimate scholarship in the past, though maybe I just wasn't paying much
attention at the age of 18...
The reason why this sort of intellectual dishonesty and fraud is so heinous is that in the world we live in, with its ever-increasing flood of available and often critical information, no one person or group, not even one as perspicacious as the Fluorosphere, can have all the information needed to make intelligent decisions. Dealing with this world requires that we get information from other people, and that we have sources we can trust, or at least have some way to rate for reliability. When information that is critical to an informed understanding of our entire world is deliberately falsified, a major crime is committed against our entire society because it reduces the chances of the survival of our society.
Dave @ 10 & 11, the link was behaving badly because it was missing the http:// before the www. It's an easy and common mistake/problem in making links.
Bruce @ 14: "When information that is critical to an informed understanding of our entire world is deliberately falsified, a major crime is committed against our entire society because it reduces the chances of the survival of our society."
Well said.
a major crime is committed against our entire society because it reduces the chances of the survival of our society
If by "our society" you mean "a pluralist society in which social and political legitimacy is vested in 'We, the people'", isn't this part of their objective?
And see my LJ post on one TV programme which used similar non-facts (I can't speak for the interviewing and editing techniques employed) in what was in this case an overtly acknowledged attempt to prove the truth of Biblical events while disproving the supernatural explanations therefor, and thus removing God from the equation. (Sorry, no references--I can't even remember the name of the programme. Not so much with the scholarship, me.) It's hard to see how this could serve the purpose of either legitimate science or religion; but as an ill-conceived attack on Bible-literalist Christianity using their own weapons, it works fine. For a given value of "fine."
Summing up: one of the main products of the information age is disinformation. Are we surprised?
Lying and distorting text and tricking people into interviews that will be bogusly edited are not by any stretch of the imagination the same as, for example, blowing people up or beheading them or stoning them to death for various religious offenses, but the impulses behind those behaviors come from the same place.
Certitude is Heaven, Uncertainty is Hell, which has been pretty much the World's Oldest Religion (not to say Profession) for far too many of us for far too long.
"the impulses behind those behaviors come from the same place"Yup. See these links, for instance.
(As I've said for some time.)
Matthew Daly, I've clarified a bit of the essay at the end. My objection isn't that people naturally come to those beliefs; it's that there's an entire industry of disinformation out there that's devoted to telling people lies about the tenability of literalist fundamentalist belief systems. The ones manufacturing the disinformation know they're lying. Their audience doesn't.
I don't believe I've ever argued that there are freedoms we can't afford to grant.
It's clear -- yet again -- that Christian fundamentalism is fundamentally advocacy of an immoral order: one in which useful lies must overwhelm inconvenient truths. There's something fundamentally Platonist about that.
Martin Luther wrote:
"What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church...a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them." in a letter in Max Lenz, ed., Briefwechsel Landgraf Phillips des Grossmuthigen von Hessen mit Bucer, vol. 1.
I can find only those words, having vaguely remembered reading them somewhere. Perhaps those with greater knowledge can say whether Luther was flying a philosophical kite with the intention of knocking it down, or whether he was serious. If the latter, I find it difficult to forgive.
Fragano: It bugs me. Always has. Faking the evidence is what you do if you don't have faith. Really, they're no better than the peddlers of fake miracles that Erasmus denounced.
This link to the creationist take on fossil horses may be interesting and relevant.
I find it odd that some of the people who defend creationism and other biblical literalism related BS are also keen to debunk distortions and biases in the media and nail the MSM for staging news, photoshopping photos, failing to analyse fake documents properly (Mind you there are plenty of people like me who criticise both the media AND the creationists).
T H Huxley had a great motto: “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion.” All good investigators follow this principle instictively, but people who have a blind faith in something don't.
Switching gear slightly. Religion gives people an artificial sense of certainty, rather like the (false and simplistic) linear evolution model in the horse article. The reality is that science advances in a "bushy" model and any science that doesn't accept that is destined to be as wrong as any religion. It is why I get annoyed by people who say they "believe" in Evolution or Climate Change. If you believe in it you have neatly joined the ranks of the religious because you won't question whether the foundation for your belief is based on reality or not.
FrancisT #25: Trust me, I would be thrilled beyond all possible words if something--anything!--happened that would shake my belief in climate change.
They're antinomian.
"We're saved, so what we do to advance Goodness is good."
Just like the brethren in Washington who use them for shock troops.
TNH #24: I can understand why it bugs you. Biblical literalists, however, are invested in the absolute truth of the Bible (as they interpret little strips of it -- you don't see much exegesis of Isaiah 36 xii, for some reason, or, more seriously, of the endorsement of slavery in both Old and New Testaments) because they cannot believe that a moral code can exist on any other basis (and, perhaps, that if they don't so believe they won't get into the rather boring heaven they seem to believe in).
If they had real faith in their god (as opposed to the iconic text), they wouldn't have to worry about facts that challenged a text put together by committees 1900 and 1700 years ago, but might see beyond it. As it is, I'd suspect they were more inclined to bibliolatry than Christianity.
In either case, since I'm an atheist, they frighten the hell out of me.
Teresa you remind me of a scene from a story, where two men are sitting on a bench talking. One is a thief masquerading as a priest; the other is a true priest.
"Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?""No," said the other priest; "reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason."
The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky and said:
"Yet who knows if in that infinite universe - ?"
"Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning sharply in his seat, "not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of truth."
Later, when the subterfuge is revealed, the true priest explains how he knew the other was faking.
"But, as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren’t a priest.""What?" asked the thief, almost gaping.
"You attacked reason," said Father Brown. "It’s bad theology."
("The Blue Cross", from The Innocence of Father Brown, by GK Chesterton)
I always wonder how far mankind could have come, and where we'd be, if it wasn't for that dead weight of religion constantly contradicting the observable and provable reality. The history of censorship of science at the hands of religion is appalling and embarrassing and probably the worst thing imaginable for mankind. And, yet we're expected to sit and mollycoddle these fools for what reason? To further hamper our discoveries and intellectual advancement as a species?
21st Century living should not be based upon the fables of Bronze Age itinerant sheepherders.
There's only a disconnect if you take religion at face value. If, on the other hand, you see religion as a tool for enforcing or advancing a group's socio-political power, then clearly it is a good and time-honored strategy for religion to have a monopoly on handing out and interpreting the "truth". When outright censorship is not feasible, (dis)-information overload is an available alternative for accomplishing this.
Abi, that's a great passage. What's sad is so many of the anti-evolution jerks love to quote Chesterton. It would be nice if they read him more deeply....
It strikes me as unutterably sad to think that after a thousand years spent refining our understanding of truth, we are now forced to develop an ontology of lies. In Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit," and this post, we're exploring a new realm of falsehood: lies told not by those who believe them, but by those who don't even care.
Maybe the concept isn't as new as I think, but the scale of it must be. They pour more effort (and money) into coming up with persuasive lies than it could possibly take to discover the truth. That, I think, is our ray of light--truth is elegant, and ultimately self-apparent.
re 26: http://www.climateaudit.org/ may help you. Although it has to be said I believe in Cliamte Change, because it's a chaotic system and therefore by definition always changing, what I am considerably more sceptical about is whether it has a human cause and whether it is going to be a bad thing or not and whether it makes sense to fight it instead of work out ways to imrpove life while living with it.
re 29: Excellent quote
Re 30: James P Hogan's Giants series springs immediately to mind for some reason...
PS Now available in Baen ebooks to my great pleasure since I'd mislaid my 2nd hand paper vol 3 (I think 'twas vol 3).
Heresiarch, you have to understand the perspective: a lie told for a good end is good. A truth told for an end deemed bad is bad. That's it.
I'm poorly equipped to chop theological logic. But... "And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted." They're deliberately telling lies. By their own declarations... we know who their Father is.
chris y
I had a carefully articulated and scholarly answer to your comment, and then fumblefingers here accidentally closed the tab the comment preview was in, losing it all. As that took most of the coffee in the pot, I won't try to recreate it, but just say that, yes, the crime is often intentional and premeditated, and that's why it needs to be addressed as a crime. Also that saying "our society" was probably misleading; I was thinking specifically of the US and the original post, but that's hardly the only venue for this particular drama these days.
From MAKING BOOK, page 101:
"Truth is not not-fibbing."
Perhaps not completely, but "not-fibbing" is where you start.
The film-makers in this case seem to have not realized that.
Dan @ 30: "I always wonder how far mankind could have come, and where we'd be, if it wasn't for that dead weight of religion constantly contradicting the observable and provable reality. The history of censorship of science at the hands of religion is appalling and embarrassing and probably the worst thing imaginable for mankind. And, yet we're expected to sit and mollycoddle these fools for what reason? To further hamper our discoveries and intellectual advancement as a species?"
You know Dan, that's a really good point. What has religion ever contributed to humanity's progress? Certainly none of those religious philosophers like Aquinas, Descartes and Spinoza ever did any work of real value. And tell me, what's the point of preserving books and a literary tradition through a centuries-long, continent-wide political collapse anyway? Not to mention that none of those religiously-funded and/or -inspired artist were worth much either: who's ever heard of Michelangelo, Milton, or Rumi? Personally, I think that the Blue Mosque, St. Peter's, Tenryuji, and Angkor Wat are a collection of just about the most boring buildings ever built. Straight-up modernism for me!
And to top it all off, not a single religion has ever improved humanity's understanding of what it means to be human a single jot! Catholicism, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, Shinto, (neo-)paganism, and all the rest have been an unrelenting drag on the momentum of history since the very first human came up with the idea that there just might be more to the world than meets the raw, purely material eye. The sooner we're rid of them, the better.
Michael Weholt @ 19
Lying and distorting text and tricking people into interviews that will be bogusly edited are not by any stretch of the imagination the same as, for example, blowing people up or beheading them or stoning them to death for various religious offenses ...
But disinformation often has much longer-term effects over much larger populations. And its purpose and effect is often to enable the blowing up and beheading. Was it not in part the deliberate campaign of lies and distortion about the history and likelihood of sex crimes by blacks against whites in the American South that justified lynching?
Fragano Ledgister @ 35: "Heresiarch, you have to understand the perspective: a lie told for a good end is good. A truth told for an end deemed bad is bad. That's it."
But their methods for determining which ends are good and which are bad are equally arbitrary. Ultimately, their only credo with any substance to it is the one that begins "I want..." and everything else is window-dressing. Truth and falsehood are utterly orthogonal not only to their means by which they accomplish their goals, but also to their goals themselves.
Fragano Ledgister @ 22
There's something fundamentally Platonist about that.
No, the Christian Fundamentalists abhor buggery (they say).
A deep irony: so few of the Christian truth-distorters remember the line "What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer". As usual, you go to war with the text you can use, not the text that refutes you.
Teresa- you've got it.
Religion ain't easy. It should challenge you to be more, understand more of yourself and the world you live in. And if your religion is easy, a matter of just going to church or synagogue or circle and saying the words...then something is wrong. These liars are saying that it should be easy- just accept everything in the bible as litteral truth and it will all be fine. No thinking required.
This has reminded me that I was going to do a rant on this a few weeks ago. *toddles off*
Heresiarch #41: Actually the basis of their worship is 'I fear...' The thing most feared, it seems, being freedom (though irrelevance is up there, I suppose).
Sadly, none of this surprises me. This thread has provoked so many thoughts that I am not even sure where to begin. (I am not, for that matter, sure I even should...)
Religious zealots know what politicians know (and what writers know, through learning to ground their fiction) and that, of course, is that the most effective means of selling a lie is to bond and wrap it with truths. For the most desperate: where "truths" cannot be found, they will be fabricated.
Over the years I've grown very tired of watching the inane ping-pong game between Evolution and ID, as if one is the alternative to the other. It is not "one or the other" in that disproving one (in this case, trying to poke holes in Evolution) validates the other. That is ridiculous.
In philosophy, it almost always comes down to the same. In knowing that an intelligent designer must be equally or more complex than what he designs: the existence of this designer, who himself was not designed, cannot be justified by the principle that in order for complex things to exist, they must be designed. The notion negates itself, doomed to death in an objective, rational mind. To say that the complexity of the world, life, and its nature substantiates a creator ... is to talk nonsense and presuppose that it could be any other way. To concede that the designer must also be designed is to open the door to an infinite regression of designers, which is not meaningul if one means to utilize the true power of philosophy to 'quantify' and does not immediately infer that there must be 'one' simply because infinity is an abstraction. (That people presuppose creation to be linear, based on their limited experience, is worth noting too.)
Creationist and ID "philosophies" are clearly attempts, be it through amazing courage or shocking ignorance, to smuggle the concept of God into the rational mind through the most hostile environment possible: one of logic and reason.
It's not my intention to spark any argument between factions on this matter in this thread. They are always ultimately inane, as inane as squandering the gift of life by trying to justify why they possess it. Humans have the beliefs they do for a reason. I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I do prefer things tidy.
My point (presupposing I have one) is that there is no means of reverse engineering a high abstract concept such as God. The philosophical path to certain knowledge which can't be shaken is through building through absolute truths and while the impossibility that a god may be stumbled on along the way should not be presupposed, skewing logic to reach a desired result is bad Philosophy. Philosophy at its greatest efficiency is the province of those devoid of agendas that tie in with preconceived notions. Presupposition castrates...
In the end, this is really neither a question for science nor philosophy, but one of religion which is a matter of *faith*. Not evidence. To fabricate evidence or even to seek it, to willfully endeavor to substantiate religion through science or philosophy, can only denote one thing:
a lack of faith.
Why do they presuppose that He can't see it?
#24: Agreed.
My two hazy cents.
Taner Edis: "It seems that the primary religious belief of many is not a belief in the Bible, but a belief in belief in the Bible. This leads pretty quickly to distorted interpretations, twisting of language, and substitution of word games and mythology revisionism for action."
I picked up John Dean's latest book last night, and in it he points out that authoritarians, including religious authoritarians, thend to be intellectually uncurious. They really don't want to look more deely into stuff: they might have to change the way they think about something!
#39 ::: Heresiarch :::
You know Dan, that's a really good point. What has religion ever contributed to humanity's progress? Certainly none of those religious philosophers like Aquinas, Descartes and Spinoza ever did any work of real value. And tell me, what's the point of preserving books and a literary tradition through a centuries-long, continent-wide political collapse anyway? Not to mention that none of those religiously-funded and/or -inspired artist were worth much either: who's ever heard of Michelangelo, Milton, or Rumi? Personally, I think that the Blue Mosque, St. Peter's, Tenryuji, and Angkor Wat are a collection of just about the most boring buildings ever built. Straight-up modernism for me!
Perhaps you should reread what I wrote before continuing n ths trllsh lttl blt. Where did I condemn religious-fueled works or contributions?
I don't believe I did. I don't discount the contributions, but I do have a problem with the anchor of having every scientific discovery accommodate humanity's cmclly tdtd religious beliefs. Science should not be changed to suit the Church. It should be the other way around.
Now, you're welcome to continue on about pretty buildings and whatnots, bt hnstly cldn't cr lss t hr t.
Sorry. I mucked-up my HTML. Sorry about the confusion.
#39 ::: Heresiarch :::
You know Dan, that's a really good point. What has religion ever contributed to humanity's progress? Certainly none of those religious philosophers like Aquinas, Descartes and Spinoza ever did any work of real value. And tell me, what's the point of preserving books and a literary tradition through a centuries-long, continent-wide political collapse anyway? Not to mention that none of those religiously-funded and/or -inspired artist were worth much either: who's ever heard of Michelangelo, Milton, or Rumi? Personally, I think that the Blue Mosque, St. Peter's, Tenryuji, and Angkor Wat are a collection of just about the most boring buildings ever built. Straight-up modernism for me!
Perhaps you should reread what I wrote before continuing n ths trllsh lttl blt. Where did I condemn religious-fueled works or contributions?
I don't believe I did. I don't discount the contributions, but I do have a problem with the anchor of having every scientific discovery accommodate humanity's cmclly tdtd religious beliefs. Science should not be changed to suit the Church. It should be the other way around.
Now, you're welcome to continue on about pretty buildings and whatnots, bt hnstly cldn't cr lss t hr t.
Heresiarch @
That, I think, is our ray of light--truth is elegant, and ultimately self-apparent.
This is almost certainly true, in the sense you mean it. Unfortunately, there are more than two classes of people: those who lie with lack of concern for the consequences to truth, and those who tell the truth*. There is also a large class, very likely containing the majority of people, who aren't concerned as much with the truth as they are with beliefs that justify and comfort them. These are the natural targets of the disinformation merchants, who have a home-court advantage with this class.
* This is beginning to sound like one of Raymond Smullyan's books on logic. Who's your Vampire, baby?
Fragano @ #28: I'm a Christian, and they scare me too.
abi @ #29: "Reason is the Devil's own whore." --Martin Luther (I'm inclined to believe he was serious about the useful lie.) Not to say that Chesterton and Luther had nothing in common. They both wrote good hymns, and they were both antisemites.
Dan @ #30, blind adherence to dogma is by no means limited to religion. See for example the effect on the history of medicine of adherence to Galen's pronouncements.
Heresiarch @ 39
IMO the question of what humanity would be like without religion is superficially interesting as a stimulation for an intellectual exercise, but ultimately meaningless. Humans evolved, and are so constituted at a very basic level, that religion is inevitable for us. We're pattern-recognizers and pattern-creators way back up the evolutionary tree, and religion is just an attempt to look for larger and more all-encompassing patterns. As well ask what dragons would be like without the hoarding instinct.
Fragano Ledgister @ 45: "Actually the basis of their worship is 'I fear...'"
There are those motivated by fear, no doubt, and others by desire for power. It all boils down to the same thing, I think: they are ruled by emotion, not reason. With emotion, the only truth is what you feel, and it is truthful in direct proportion to how strongly you believe it and how well you can convince others to believe it.
It would be nice to live in that world--I see the appeal. Starving people could simply believe themselves fed and educated, and it would be so. Yet reality is not so accomodating.
#53 Lila: blind adherence to dogma is by no means limited to religion....
Indeed. Just this morning I was listening to a report on NPR about the African National Congress (South Africa) and the ridiculous, deadly, dogmatic belief by the current President and his Health Minister that HIV can be controlled not by proven-effective drugs, but by olive oil and honey and gawd knows what all else. These idiots are killing people, infecting babies, and so on... everytime I'm reminded of this idiocy I get so angry I could spit nine -- or even ten -- inch nails.
Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #42: Indeed, they say. Then they excuse ('We're all sinners'), but at the same time they claim that no one who does not agree with them can be moral.
Alternate hypothesis: Many or most of the people involved in making these films are milking the rubes for money, and know it. They no more believe in what they're selling than most of the folks who sell UFO anal-probe-and-ancient-pyramid films believe it. They're just con men. If there were a market for films that proved that the bible was all written by some drunk guy 1000 years ago on a bet, or that the Elders of Zion were secretly running the world, they'd make those, too--perhaps reusing the same footage for different films as needed.
People who *need* to believe something are a great market for con men, which is why investment scams, gambling system scams, and miracle cure scams are good businesses to be in. IMO, getting people to link their religion to stuff that's not only untrue but trivially wrong is an evil on a par with getting schoolkids hooked on heroin. It's a guaranteed market--some people base their whole lives, identities, membership in a community, etc., on their faith. Getting them to base that faith on lies, and then selling them comforting supporting lies to let them convince themselves to keep believing, is truly evil.
Heresiarch #55: I think fear lies at the base of it -- fear of change, fear of loss of status and power, fear that pretentions will be revealed for what they are -- and that, it seems to me, is rather sad.
"Dealing with this world requires that we get information from other people, and that we have sources we can trust"
I would say: and that we learn to trust our sources
"tricking people into interviews"
Which, by the way, is not wrong in and of itself. Sometimes you can only get to the truth if the person between you and that truth is off his guard. See also: Günter Wallraff, Nelly Bly.
Bruce Cohen @54
Humans evolved, and are so constituted at a very basic level, that religion is inevitable for us. We're pattern-recognizers and pattern-creators way back up the evolutionary tree, and religion is just an attempt to look for larger and more all-encompassing patterns.
That's more of an answer to the same comment Heresiarch was answering in 39: Dan @30. (I always wonder how far mankind could have come, and where we'd be, if it wasn't for that dead weight of religion constantly contradicting the observable and provable reality.)
I'd say that religion and science are born of the same impulse. To posit a path of human evolution that includes science but not religion is like positing a world where cheese is possible, but not butter.
There are only ten commandments, and one of them is "Thou shalt not bear false witness."
Not being in the club myself, I have to say... is ten that many, that people lose track?
P.J. Evans, #49: Yes, and that's really frightening, because if true, it means that one of the fundamental precepts that keeps most of us in there pitching -- the belief that we can reach the authoritarians if we just find the right approach -- is WRONG. And at that point, it comes down to a matter of who's better organized, because even an overwhelming majority can be overcome by a minority with strong enough organization.
Adding to the general conversation:
"He who does a good thing in the name of another god does it for me; and he who does an evil thing in my name does it for the darkest demons in hell." - from the Book of Vkandis, in Mercedes Lackey's Mage Storms trilogy
I wish more religions had that as an explicit concept. It still wouldn't prevent people from redefining evil as good if it served their ends, but it would at least remove the "ends justify the means" part.
I feel a great deal of pity for people who are so desperate for certainty that they will cling to anything that will provide it. I think it's a failure of imagination, really. Some of us look around as say: the Universe if beautiful, look how big, how expansive, how mysterious, how grand, isn't it wonderful,let's go see how it works. They look and see only something they cannot grasp and it terrifies them.
Dean's points about authoritarians are based largely on this free online book, which I recommend to everyone.
Chapter Four, Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism, seems particularly relevant to this thread. Altemeyer defines fundamentalism not by adherence to a specific creed, but by the believer's attitudes toward the infallibility of doctrine, relative importance of belonging to the right religion compared to doing good, strict dichotomy between good and evil, etc.
So in addition to the familiar Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists (aka Muslim extremists, a name concocted to conceal their resemblance to Christian fundamentalists) there could also be Jewish fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, etc. Possibly if you reword the questions you could have fundamentalist followers of a (not explicitly religious) philosophy - fundamentalist Marxists, fundamentalist Objectivists, etc. - although I don't know if anyone has actually done research on that.
But the whole book is interesting (and, I believe, important).
The people who actually believe and try to live up to the principles expressed at the end of the original post, I respect even when I disagree with them. But I have nothing but contempt for the Liars for Jesus.
P.S.: One of the scary things about fundamentalists is that when they *do* convert, they are still usually fundamentalist about their new belief system. Hardly ever do they actually set down their fundamentalism and embrace a more nuanced approach to looking for truth. They'd rather exchange their not-so-infallible received truths for... a new set of infallible received truths. This time for sure!
It never dawns on them that that trick never works.
re #65 -
I think I've met a fundamentalist vegan or two over the years (a thankfully very small subset of the meat-excluders of my acquaintence).
Kip @ #46: You are Dave Langford and I claim my [...] and [...].
Chris @ 65-66
I've been known to describe people as 'evangelical atheists' - those are the ones who are so sure there's no gods that they want everyone else to become atheist also. It's the same kind of mindset. (It makes me want to invoke something like Duane's Vulcan privacies: the things you shouldn't talk about in public or to strangers, including sex and religion.)
Bruce Cohen, abi, anyone else who's saying that religion is a necessary part of being human: what do you make of people who have absolutely no, and I mean zero, religious impulse, and on a fundamental level cannot grasp what it is that people mean when they talk about faith? Because, trust me, we exist.
ethan
I'd say it's just the way you are, and (trust me) it's hard to understand from this side too. (Doesn't mean you're either right or wrong in your view.)
(See the aforemention Duane. She uses the phrase 'sense of immanence' for it, which seems to fit.)
P J... I don't. I only want people outside of ML not to assume I have no sense of right & wrong. How many atheists are portrayed positively in movies and on TV? House is a bleeping unhappy jerk. The less said about Saving Grace... True there is Jodie Foster in Contact and in real life. And there is Eureka's Jack Carter.
ethan #70:
(Speaking only for myself.)
There might be a common tendency toward religious belief in the same sense that there's a common tendency toward artistic expression or music or storytelling or sexual adventurism or ethnic nepotism or whatever. This doesn't require that everyone have any of these tendencies, or that everyone run with them. And even though I'd say that religion and art and music and stories are a big part of the human experience, I would never think that someone wasn't fully human because they didn't much get into religion, art, music, or stories.
ethan at 70, I tend to take any and all statements about human nature as probabalistic rather than absolute. Most people I've met have a need to consider the universe as a place which is orderly and progressive and centered on the first person singular and I think that much religious sentiment comes from that place; that is not to say that every human I know is that egoistic, nor that every religious person I know uses religion primarily as a way to preserve their sense of safety and self importance.
But neither do I exclude myself from either category.
The ID and Creationist types are amazing, to me, for their ability to ignore the evidence. The Discovery Institute goes gaga over the Channeled Scablands and utterly ignores the Miocene basalts beneath that recent scratch on the landscape: yes, one afternoon an ice dam broke and you can see the way it sluiced off topsoil and deposited gravel, big wowie: under the channels, exposed by the erosion lies hard basalt in layers, with the top of each layer of hard stone eroded, pulverized, developed into soil with a stable ecosystem atop and then drowned, again, by lava: these things are not the work of an afternoon.
#70 ethan: Bruce Cohen, abi, anyone else who's saying that religion is a necessary part of being human: what do you make of people who have absolutely no, and I mean zero, religious impulse, and on a fundamental level cannot grasp what it is that people mean when they talk about faith? Because, trust me, we exist.
<parenthetically>*Sigh...* Can I still be called a blogwhore even when I don't have a blog anymore? Well, whatever...</parenthetically>
I, too, was born without a religious bone in my body... a fact I intend to turn into a Proof of the Non-Existence of a Loving God someday... but in the meantime I think I, nevertheless, have a pretty good understanding of the notion of faith.
ethan @70:
I think albatross @73 pretty much speaks for me.
Serge,
It seems like the most common movie portrayals are about people for whom religion is just not that important in their lives. And this is usually not said openly, it's just a consequence of how the story unfolds. If you have some enormous personal crisis going on, or a big moral dilemma, your religion or lack thereof is likely to show through in how you deal with it.
It seems like most of the main SF book characters have no religion and no interest in it. Star Trek seems to be rather friendly toward alien religions in a multiculti sort of way, but I don't think the main human characters give much sense of being religious. There is a psychologist and a bartender on the new Enterprise, but I don't ever recall seeing a chaplain. (Though some Father Mulcahy type trying to zap Worf with the pain sticks to help out with a Klingon ritual would be kind of fun to see, especially if played right. "Sorry my son *ZAP*." And trying to help with Troi's religious needs would probably put a strain on his vow of celibacy.)
I don't really watch much TV, so maybe I'm missing some widespread phenomenon. But outside of explicitly religiously-oriented TV shows like 7th Heaven or that show about angels (Touched by an Angel?), I don't notice a lot of explicitly religious characters on TV.
Nor is this all that new. How big a role did religion play in the Brady Bunch, or ER, or in most cop dramas?
Serge @ 72
How many atheists are portrayed positively in movies and on TV? ... The less said about Saving Grace...
Grace Hanadarko is not an atheist -- she is someone who would like to be an atheist. She would be much more comfortable if she were sure that God really wasn't there.
Albatross @ 77... your religion or lack thereof is likely to show through in how you deal with it
Which is why I absolutely HATED the show Saving Grace.
It wasn't easy when I saw my father in a coffin. He'd died suddenly, and I had never gotten to say goodbye to him, and looking at his body, there was no comfort that part of him persists. I did see him in my dreams frequently after that, until we said goodbye in one of them, and that was it.
Thanks for the responses, guys. The original statements make more sense to me now. If I sounded cranky (which I'm pretty sure I did), my deepest apologies. I need my nappytime.
Claude Muncey @ 78... But there was the child-killing pedophile, who definitely was an atheist.
Oh, and Serge #72: A(as they say)men.
I am intellectually curious. I am also Christian. The talking heads don't speak for me. I have a feeling that the Christ I worship would go apesh1t in many of our temples. But then I would want that on a T-shirt, thus paving the way to a whole 'nother cottage industry, WWJT, Who Would Jesus Thrash. I can see the wristbands already...
albatross: The Cylons are pretty explicitly religious. Some of the humans are, too, though it's less obvious.
How many atheists are portrayed positively in movies and on TV? House is a bleeping unhappy jerk.
But Cameron's not, and she's also an atheist. Which doesn't help if you don't like Cameron, I guess. I happen to like her.
There are two married women. Both their husbands are accused of being present at a particularly wanton and disgraceful stag party. Both husbands deny it. One wife accepts this denial at face value, dismisses the story, and goes on with her life. The other wife goes into a frenzy of fact-checking, affidavit-gathering, and timeline construction, in order to demonstrate once and for all that her husband couldn’t possibly have been at that party. Which woman has faith in her husband?
The follow-up question, of course, is: Which woman is right?
Not the best analogy here. Try this instead:
There are two married women. Both their husbands claim that they saved the life of a stranger on 9/11. One wife accepts this claim at face value, smiles happily that she found such a good man, and goes on with her life. The other wife goes into a frenzy of fact-checking, affidavit-gathering, timeline construction, and invention of ever more outlandish theories, in order to demonstrate once and for all that her husband had to have saved a person's life, and that he should be lauded for it. Which woman has faith in her husband?
Carrie S... Somehow, I completely missed that about Cameron. Maybe it was in episodes I never got to watch. I myself like her character, and I'm quite happy to hear that, in spite of the way the previous season ended, she'll be back.
Serge: "House vs God", and a couple other, early episodes I think.
Some armchair psychoanalyzing: Perhaps those pious ones who advocate lying for God, and denounce reason have a model of God in their heads which strongly matches that of a petty tyrant, and their attitudes towards God are similar to the hierarchical attitudes that the subjects of a tyrant might feel: Loyalty, and only loyalty, is rewarded; Disloyalty, and only disloyalty is punished.
Which is why there is the utter dedication to deceit: Lying doesn't matter if it's in the service of loyalty. As long as they feel that they are doing something worthy of reward — being loyal — nothing else matters.
Some armchair theologizing: William of Occam promoted the idea of parsimony in philosophy; people might forget that he was both a theologian and a natural philosopher. It was thus his contention that God could not be known through reason, only through revelation.
Of course, I would argue that given the general fallibility of humanity, why should any revelation ever be given any credence? Without evidence, no revelation can be distinguished from delusion, and thus ought to be treated as such.
It may be that he thought of such arguments himself, but he lived in a time that doubting revelation could get you in very hot water...
Personally, I never understood the obsession many U.S. Christians have with needing to jam reality into the box of Biblical literalism. All this 'dinosaurs on the Ark' stuff, and other outright denial of geologic and fossil evidence, really smacks of deliberate obtuseness.
In the end, what does it mean to have faith? And if your entire religious paradigm rests on your belief that a multi-translated, oft-edited text is the literal and absolute word of God, w
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