This bears linking to:

The Wedge Strategy

Posted September 19, 2007 12:39 AM by Stefan Jones

Stefan: You're right, and I have.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:46 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:53 AM by j h woodyatt

That explains a lot.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:58 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Any sufficiently dishonest ideology is indistinguishable from fundamentalism.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:20 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:30 AM by Matthew Daly

Who said anything about not granting people freedom?

Posted September 19, 2007 1:34 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 2:05 AM by miriam beetle

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."

Posted September 19, 2007 2:08 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 2:18 AM by Dave Luckett

I'm sorry. Something weird has happened to that link. The site is w w w(dot)scicop (dot) org.

Posted September 19, 2007 2:24 AM by Dave Luckett

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 2:44 AM by Dave Bell

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...

Posted September 19, 2007 2:57 AM by Brennen Bearnes

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 3:00 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 3:42 AM by Epacris

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 3:53 AM by Heresiarch

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?

Posted September 19, 2007 4:17 AM by chris y

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?

Posted September 19, 2007 4:49 AM by Zander

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 5:30 AM by Michael Weholt

"the impulses behind those behaviors come from the same place"

(As I've said for some time.)

Posted September 19, 2007 5:58 AM by Mez

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 7:09 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 7:14 AM by Fragano Ledgister

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 7:49 AM by Dave Luckett

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 7:58 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 8:02 AM by FrancisT

FrancisT #25: Trust me, I would be thrilled beyond all possible words if something--anything!--happened that would shake my belief in climate change.

Posted September 19, 2007 8:23 AM by ethan

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 8:32 AM by Neil in Chicago

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 8:34 AM by Fragano Ledgister

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)

Posted September 19, 2007 8:36 AM by abi

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 8:47 AM by Dan

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 9:07 AM by mayakda

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....

Posted September 19, 2007 9:12 AM by John Farrell

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 9:13 AM by Heresiarch

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).

Posted September 19, 2007 9:26 AM by FrancisT

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 9:27 AM by Fragano Ledgister

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 9:39 AM by Joel Polowin

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 9:52 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 9:55 AM by Bruce Arthurs

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 9:57 AM by Heresiarch

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?

Posted September 19, 2007 10:03 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:13 AM by Heresiarch

Fragano Ledgister @ 22

There's something fundamentally Platonist about that.

No, the Christian Fundamentalists abhor buggery (they say).

Posted September 19, 2007 10:14 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:24 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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*

Posted September 19, 2007 10:28 AM by Sisuile

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).

Posted September 19, 2007 10:34 AM by Fragano Ledgister

God... is [in] the... ellipses.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:36 AM by Kip W

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:38 AM by Jack Kincaid

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."

Posted September 19, 2007 10:42 AM by Seth Gordon

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!

Posted September 19, 2007 10:42 AM by P J Evans

#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.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:44 AM by Dan

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:49 AM by Dan

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?

Posted September 19, 2007 10:53 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 10:54 AM by Lila

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:12 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:14 AM by Heresiarch

#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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:17 AM by Michael Weholt

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:24 AM by Fragano Ledgister

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:27 AM by albatross

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:46 AM by Fragano Ledgister

"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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:50 AM by Branko Collin

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 11:58 AM by abi

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?

Posted September 19, 2007 12:01 PM by Sandy B.

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:04 PM by Lee

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:07 PM by Emma

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:13 PM by Chris

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:20 PM by Chris

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).

Posted September 19, 2007 12:43 PM by Thena

Kip @ #46: You are Dave Langford and I claim my [...] and [...].

Posted September 19, 2007 12:52 PM by Nix

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.)

Posted September 19, 2007 12:53 PM by P J Evans

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 12:55 PM by ethan

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.)

Posted September 19, 2007 1:07 PM by P J Evans

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:15 PM by Serge

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:16 PM by albatross

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:20 PM by JESR

#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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:23 PM by Michael Weholt

ethan @70:
I think albatross @73 pretty much speaks for me.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:27 PM by abi

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?

Posted September 19, 2007 1:33 PM by albatross

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:51 PM by Claude Muncey

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:56 PM by Serge

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:58 PM by ethan

Claude Muncey @ 78... But there was the child-killing pedophile, who definitely was an atheist.

Posted September 19, 2007 1:59 PM by Serge

Oh, and Serge #72: A(as they say)men.

Posted September 19, 2007 2:01 PM by ethan

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...

Posted September 19, 2007 2:25 PM by Johne Cook

albatross: The Cylons are pretty explicitly religious. Some of the humans are, too, though it's less obvious.

Posted September 19, 2007 2:31 PM by cantabridgian poet

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 3:14 PM by Carrie S.

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?

Posted September 19, 2007 3:17 PM by Glenn Hauman

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.

Posted September 19, 2007 3:36 PM by Serge

Serge: "House vs God", and a couple other, early episodes I think.

Posted September 19, 2007 3:38 PM by Carrie S.

Carrie S... Thanks for the info.

Posted September 19, 2007 3:51 PM by Serge

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...

Posted September 19, 2007 3:58 PM by Owlmirror

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, what does that say? That you have more faith in Him? Or that you place all your face in an object written and created by men?

I grew up in a pretty religious home, fell away as a teen, and came back to my faith when, experientially, I had some things happen that caused me (for me) to doubt my teen-era materialist paradigm. At no time was this internal evolution ever chained to my believing that my religious text(s) were total and absolute truth, down to the last letter, without the slightest chance of a mistake or allowance for certain Bible passages as mere metaphor.

Rather, much of it was based on feeling.

Also, I didn't feel compelled to promptly trot out and start whacking other folk over the nose with my feelings, however strong they might have been. I shared them with those whom I thought would understand, including the woman who eventually became my wife, but I didn't make it my mission to convert the known universe.

Too many people, believers and atheists alike, feel threatened when they run into folk who are from the Other Side of the equation. The atheist wants religion quashed and rubbed out of public manifestation, the Christian wants his faith to dominate all arenas of public and private life, etc.

I long for a day when we can leave each other the Hell alone. And yes, I think it can be said that Christians are the #1 culprits, no denying it. The militant atheists merely mirror the worst in militant Christian behavior.

Posted September 19, 2007 4:04 PM by CommunityRadioVet

Oop. I wrote "face" when I meant "faith".

Typo.

Posted September 19, 2007 4:07 PM by CommunityRadioVet

Teresa says in her essay:

"Science is no threat to religious faith. It only threatens the childish misreadings of Biblical literalism."

The threat's a bit broader than that, and while I'd agree with the argument that ultimately science and Christian faith can coexist, I think it's important to understand the various ways in which the idea of evolution can threaten some people's Christian faith, because it helps in understanding some of the reasons people reject either science or Christianity.

There's the reason of interpretation, alluded to above. The multi-billion-year history of life on Earth obvious contradicts a literal reading of the early Genesis chapters. (And simply taking the "most literal plausible reading", which I've seen a number of people do, for example in the "day-age" reading of Genesis, isn't ultimately supportable either scientifically or theologically.) Thus, doubt may arise over whether *any* reading of the Bible that's distinctively Christian can be supported. (The truths given at the end of the essay are indeed ones that are essential to Christianity, but they're not *distinctive*; non-Christian theists can easily subscribe to them as well without embracing Christianity as such.) I think there are supportable, distinctively Christian readings of the Bible, but they aren't as obvious.

A second kind of threat is that evolution goes a long way to undercutting what's historically been a significant reason for believing in God in the first place: "There's no way we could be here unless God existed." By providing alternate explanations for the origin of life and humanity, science forces believers to find other justifications for faith (which exist, but might be harder for some to rely on).

A third kind of threat arises from philosophical questions raised by evolution and science. To take one example, traditional monotheistic religions have to deal in some way with both an all-benevolent, all-powerful God *and* the existence of suffering. One explanation sometimes given is that suffering and death is purely the result of human sin. But if so, what do you do about the fact that evolution necessarily involves a lot of death, and presumably suffering, well before humans appear on the scene? Questions like these can make one uncomfortable in one's faith, even if one eventually finds an answer for them.

All of these three kinds of issues can be disturbing for the believer. I agree with Teresa's conclusion that Christian religion ultimately *is* disturbing-- in a number of ways-- and if it isn't, something's probably wrong with the way it's being understood. But it's important to recognize that the sense of discomfort that many Christians have with evolution in many cases goes well beyond the question of literalism.

Posted September 19, 2007 4:10 PM by John Mark Ockerbloom

Community Radio Vet, it gets worse: when the militant of one side encounter the moderate or mild of the other, they induce militant behavior. My father was a perfectly reasonable atheist until his students started using God as an excuse for not doing their biology homework. I didn't examine my default non-churchgoing Protestant lack of disbelief until I was told I was going to hell-- or perhaps I did, and as a result of the initial examination was harshly treated by the youthgroup set, and therefore rejected the whole of it.

Posted September 19, 2007 4:12 PM by Diatryma

Diatryma @ #94,

Too true. Nobody likes being attacked, and when you get attacked enough, you tend to develop a defensive response, and suddenly you find yourself amping up that response until you're "armed" to the same level as your "opponent" in the "war" of ideas.

An unfortunate and recognizeable cycle in our modern life; at least in the U.S., where secularism and Christian religiousness are very much locked in a battle for domination and control of our public and private lives.

Somehow, I think Jesus would not approve. But that's just me.

Posted September 19, 2007 4:21 PM by CommunityRadioVet

Good blog, this one. However, discussing the differences between the dead sea scrolls and the earlier known texts (Masoretic, esp.) vis-a-vis the Isaiah scroll does not capture the more considerable differences in the Biblical texts (compared to some other OT books, the Isaiah scroll is fairly close to the Masoretic text). The truth of the matter is that sometimes the dead sea scrolls leave out substantial portions that the Masoretic text includes, and vice-versa.

I don't want to pretend that the dead sea scrolls are radically different, but it should not come as a shock that, for instance, Jeremiah is substantially shorter in the Dead Sea texts, apparently because it hadn't ceased to evolve. Here's a link to some of the more prominent differences:

http://www.bibleandscience.com/bible/sources/deadseascrolls.htm

I do not think that Kevin Miller, writer for "Expelled", gives us much confidence in that movie. I had an exchange with him (I'm fairly sure it's him, not an imposter) on the "Expelled" blog. I pointed out how he essentially argues that ID is science because it begins with the premise that God is fundamental to nature here:

http://expelledthemovie.com/blog/2007/08/21/bens-blog#comment-1113

He responded with some erroneous statements that I'd taken him out of context, and denies my faithful rendering of his "argument" about ID as "science" here:

http://expelledthemovie.com/blog/2007/08/21/bens-blog#comment-1299

I documented his many errors in a series of posts (one long one cut up) here:

http://expelledthemovie.com/blog/2007/08/21/bens-blog#comment-1327

He hasn't responded, yet anyway. Frankly, he seems less than intellectually honest, and far from understanding the issues involved, either the science or the philosophy (medieval philosophy the equal of today's philosophy of science? I hardly think so). If Stein's blog, and Miller's comments, mean anything the film is going to be both ignorant and nearly devoid of intellectual honesty.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

Posted September 19, 2007 4:36 PM by Glen Davidson

I've been thinking about something similar lately. Every part of the political spectrum has an area where they're just nuts when it comes to science. I'd say liberals tend to be nuts about transgenic plants, conservatives tend to be nuts about evolution and human-caused global warming, libertarians tend to be nuts about the effects of systemic bias on historically oppressed groups.

But anecdotally, when I argue with liberals about transgenic plants, they're like "sheep die in this paper, caterpillars die in this paper..." We have arguments about experimental design. When I argue with conservatives or those who claim not to be conservatives (they just happen to advocate conservative positions and denigrate all others), they're like, "the studies haven't been done. Oh wait they have hundreds of times over? Whatever."

Conservatives will not meet you on the field of battle. All their arguments amount to heirarchical dickwaving: find/claim authority, ignore/gloss over facts. Or, you know, lie flat out.

Posted September 19, 2007 4:37 PM by Madeline F

Madeline @ #97,

Not to start a tiff, but living in Seattle I have run into boatloads of self-identifying "liberals" who a) fall back to authority, or b) gloss over facts, or c) flat-out lie.

The funny part is when they point at "conservatives" and lambast conservatives for doing what they themselves do; but just aren't aware of it.

I use scare quotes because "conservative" and "liberal" have utterly lost their true definitions in our modern U.S. society.

Anyway, I think the key is immersion. When a person is immersed in a certain group (liberal, conservative, whatever) and never has to explain or think about their positions to anyone who disagrees, a sort of group-think sets in. Here in Seattle, I have seen that a lot; people who walk around professing to believe in a certain set of ideals, or claiming to adhere to a certain paradigm; not because they personally have explored and adopted said paradigm, but rather because it's simply the paradigm they picked up through social osmosis, without examining it in any critical fashion.

Same thing happens in "conservative" havens, like my birth state of Utah. You spend your whole life living around a certain mindset, it's easy to just adopt the mindset and not worry about it, then ignore or overlook challenging or alternative ideas when they appear, falling back to the position of, "Well all my friends and family think such and such, so this other idea that disagrees with all these good people, it must just be whacked!"

I guess my point is, deliberate ignorance, and all the poor mental habits that contribute to it, is not the provence of "conservatives" alone.

Posted September 19, 2007 5:03 PM by CommunityRadioVet

John @ 93
A second kind of threat is that evolution goes a long way to undercutting what's historically been a significant reason for believing in God in the first place: "There's no way we could be here unless God existed." By providing alternate explanations for the origin of life and humanity, science forces believers to find other justifications for faith (which exist, but might be harder for some to rely on).

I don't find this a problem. As I said to a fundie acquaintance, I don't know why God used these tools to create this Universe, but I'm sure She'll be kind enough to enlighten me when I meet Him.

To me, God is a Why and science is a How.

Muddled theology, but there it is. It allows me to enjoy the best of both.

Posted September 19, 2007 5:21 PM by Emma

Chris Heard makes an excellent point about soi-disant Biblical literalists, one of those points that is obvious as soon as someone very clever has explained it to you.

If you're going to take the Bible literally, word for word, then you have to take seriously the not two, but three creation myths in Genesis. You have to accept that the literal description of the Garden of Eden does not map to any real place on Earth, and understand the implications of that. You must appreciate that Biblical law permits slavery, and you must understand that John's chronology is different to that of the synoptics. And so on.

It's an argument of biblical literalism against fundamentalism. I doubt it will convert a single fundie, who generally lack the intellectual capacity to deal with such subtlety, but it's fascinating to atheists like me who are interested in biblical literature.

Posted September 19, 2007 5:49 PM by Iain Coleman

I don't think this topic deserves the title "Lying in the name of God". To me the distortion of facts and opinions, which Farrel, Heard et al. complain of, isn't fundamentally about religion or God, it's about politics, which almost by its nature involves the distortion of facts and of other people's statements to fit a predetermined agenda. Some nutheads use religion in a political way, just as some nutheads use Marxism in a political way, but that doesn't say anything about religion or Marxism, only about nutheads.

Anyway, Christianity isn't really about any of this stuff; what Christianity is really about, Teresa correctly points out in the last two paragraphs of her introduction to this topic.

Nobody with any sense thinks that every word of the Bible is literally true, because that obviously ain't so. Nor does anybody with any sense think the Bible is the divinely-inspired word of God, because it's obviously written by humans with many different stories to tell about God, and about other humans. And thinking that some particular English translation is the divinely-inspired, literally-true word of God is getting back into nuthead territory. As I understand it, early Protestants tried to take the line of literal truth as a way of defining what Christianity really is, versus what the [Roman] church had made it over the centuries. It didn't work, which is why there are so many varieties of Protestantism.

[Muslims have it much tougher: the Qu'ran (in the original Arabic) is the word of God, dictated by the angel to Muhammad. That means that the Qu'ran is unchallengeable except in interpretation, which makes it difficult to reconcile Islam with some modern ideas.]

Posted September 19, 2007 5:57 PM by John Stanning

One of the good things about Biblical literalists is that anytime a group has an internal disagreement about interpretation, the group is likely to split. You end up with a lot of small groups that don't agree on averything and that can't merge unless they agree on everything.

Posted September 19, 2007 5:58 PM by P J Evans

#101:

Nobody with any sense thinks that every word of the Bible is literally true, because that obviously ain't so.

I'm not saying you're *wrong* about that, mind you. But those people (senseless or not) exist and can create some pretty big problems for the rest of us.

#93:

The truths given at the end of the essay are indeed ones that are essential to Christianity, but they're not *distinctive*; non-Christian theists can easily subscribe to them as well without embracing Christianity as such.

Posted September 19, 2007 6:26 PM by Chris

Jack Carter's an atheist? I'm a few weeks behind on Eureka.

Posted September 19, 2007 6:30 PM by Jen Roth

Mez 20, Seth Gordon 48 -

Here is what I think happens in the minds of Christian fundamentalists. They take Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," and (mis)interpret it as equating faith with absolute certainty. Ignoring James ("you show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works"), they believe that the evidence of their faith is that certainty, and that the more certain they are, the truer a Christian they are. They also hold the corresponding belief that a lack of certainty constitutes a lack of faith, and is therefore a sin.

What they fail to see is that they have made a god of their certainty ("a belief in a belief," as you say, Seth); it, not god, is what they depend on, what gives them a sense of security, that without which they would feel devastated; in short, it is what they worship. Which explains why they feel so threatened when anyone questions their certainty or suggests that there is even any room for uncertainty.

I suspect this also explains why so many evangelical/fundamentalist congregations spend so much time reinforcing their own beliefs, and so little time attending to the things Teresa mentions at the end of her post.

Posted September 19, 2007 6:33 PM by Leslie in CA

john,

[Muslims have it much tougher: the Qu'ran (in the original Arabic) is the word of God, dictated by the angel to Muhammad. That means that the Qu'ran is unchallengeable except in interpretation, which makes it difficult to reconcile Islam with some modern ideas.]

the five books in the original hebrew are supposed to be the literal word of god for jews. the text is acknowledged, in orthodoxy, to be incomplete (as in, doesn't tell the whole story, calling for midrash) & somewhat metaphorical. this is how it is taught in religious day schools (although mine was not the most religious).

there are those who both adhere to strict orthodoxy & are comfortable with the biblical scholar theories of multiple author/editors, but i believe those aer a minority. heck, there are those who adhere to strict orthodoxy & are self-proclaimed athiests. in the judaism i grew up in, it's nobody's business what you believe, including god's.

Posted September 19, 2007 6:33 PM by miriam beetle

CRV @ 98:

Your point is made somewhat more rigorously by the great Liberal political philosopher John Stuart Mill, in chapter 2 of On Liberty. Rehearsing his argument may be a valid criticism of certain self-proclaimed liberals, but it is obviously a poor argument against liberalism.

Posted September 19, 2007 6:36 PM by Iain Coleman

#13 --

I too grew up LCMS, and very strange things have happened to it since those days. Very strange indeed. My first indication was when my parents divorced, and my mother was made to stand up in front of the congregation publicly and be judged by the all male elders of that congregation in order to be allowed to join another LCMS congregation that was closer to the home where she now lived. She had to publicly confess her terrible sin of adultery -- she got divorced and re-married -- please? where is the adultery? -- the new, young, crazy minister of that congregation in which I was brought up, came to visit ME and ordered me (an adult, who had thankfully given up the church anyway as soon as she got the hell outta there) to come and testify AGAINST MY MOTHER for being a whore.

And my devout mother did it!

She didn't have to!

But she did.

She was told by that crazy pastor that this was the only way she could get a transfer as a member of good standing to another congregation.

No matter that a couple of years later he had to be put away in an institution.

And that was the death knell of that particular congregation too.

That all happened was some decades ago when I was still just 17.

Somehow I don't think Martin Luther, wild man that he was, would have acted that way.

Love, C.

Posted September 19, 2007 6:36 PM by Constance

miriam #106 : thanks, I didn't know that about Judaism. I confess that in my post up there (#101) I was thinking of the Bible as Christians know it - the whole thing, including what we call the Old and New Testaments - rather than from the points of view of the other People of the Book.

Posted September 19, 2007 6:43 PM by John Stanning