This annoys me. In 1971, Dick Van Dyke starred in a movie called Cold Turkey. It was a comedy about a dying town attempting to win a prize sponsored by a tobacco company that was betting against any town remaining "smoke free" for a certain length of time. Van Dyke…
Debate goes on, seeming forever, about the issue of religious belief in a secular society. The validity of sacred texts becomes grist for the mill and sides line up over What Would Jesus Do bumper stickers. We see competing fish on cars–Darwin fish with feet in answer to the unembellished christian fish symbol, then a bigger fish labeled Truth swallowing the diminutive Darwin fish, and on and on.
What is really at issue here hasn’t got one thing to do with who believes in god or evolution. Belief is a self-contained, private matter. The issue that gets lost in all the polemic is very simple: behavior.
Those who would sap the poison from the “inerrant word” crowd are defending their assumed right to live the way they want. One might argue that belief in god doesn’t really limit people, and as far as it goes, that is true. If you, as an individual, choose to believe in god, then you have elected to reform your life according to the tenets of your new faith. You may adopt whatever modest or byzantine traditions and habits you wish. After all, you have chosen this, you get to do it.
What you don’t get to do is tell everyone else to behave accordingly, and that’s where the meat of the issue lies.
Because fundamentalists–and we’re talking about fundamentalists here for the most part, of any stripe–do not adopt such an extreme view of faith out of intellectual curiosity or even spiritual need. They …
A few months ago I stumbled on a preacher on television. The reason I stopped to listen was that on the screen he was scrolling through a litany of famous scientists, their fields and contributions, and noting that each was a Great Christian. Then the preacher–I don’t know who he was, sorry–ended his litany by making the claim that science and religion are inextricably linked, that they must have each other to work, that there is no dispute between them–
–and that evolution is wrong.
This was a week after I listened to an NPR interview with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in which he made the claim that it is vital to settle this question of where “we” (meaning humans) came from because if evolution is true, then we would have no basis for morality.
This is one of the most perverse false syllogisms I have ever heard, and it baffles me no end. Underlying it is the assumption that morality only ever comes from a supernatural source, that without a deity we are too dumb, puerile, self-serving, and just plain hopeless to ever do anything right–for ourselves on anyone else. (The Erik Von Danniken theory of moral provenance.) That atheists are a priori immoral and that evolutionists, who reject special creation, are necessarily atheists, and therefore, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, likewise immoral. They can’t help it. They have no god giving them direction.
A minute of clear thought shows how this is substantively untrue. …
This is going to seem ungenerous at best. But. Part of the difficulty in engaging someone over the issue of the "truth" of their faith can be frustrating, especially when they leave the path of the rational, the demonstrable, the philosophical, the metaphorical, often ending up with a claim that…
The other day, two nice ladies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door. This was, in fact, their third visit. On the previous two, they had spoken with my wife, who was polite and nice and somehow left them with the idea that they had a potential convert here. They had left literature and apparently decided to return. This time, they got me.
I don’t like proselytes. I don’t like telemarketers either. I see them as essentially of the same species of intrusive “you don’t know what you want because you don’t know what I’ve got to sell you” school of bullying. I don’t like aggressive salesmen. If I’m wandering through a store, and someone approaches with a polite “Are you finding everything okay? My name’s Mike, if you have any questions…” That’s fine. If I have questions, I’ll go find Mike or whoever and ask. If I don’t, and he approaches again, my inclination is to leave. He’s stepped over the line as far as I’m concerned. Telemarketing is worse–I’m not even in their showroom–and religious proselytes are from one of the circles of hell.
Here’s the deal: to knock on your door and present you with salvation, they have to make a basic assumption–that you have no clue about the nature of reality and even if you think you do, you’re wrong, because they know the skinny on god’s plan. In other words, they have to assume you’re stupid, ignorant, or tacitly in league with evil.
If …