I stumbled across this earlier post recently and found it quite helpful. The ideas weren't my own, but I was reporting on the work of Jonathan Haidt. Real-world persuasiveness is about far more than the reasons and rational thinking so often offered by Democrats.
Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong. He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist. He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007. Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat. It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion). Ken Ham is one of the more public figures in our current national spasm of extreme religiosity. He’s attempting to have built another show-piece in Kentucky, a theme park based on Noah and the Flood. The problem with this, however, is that tax dollars are being used in its construction and it is a blatantly religious enterprise. In the meantime, Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis have recently been disinvited from a conference on homeschooling.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett discusses closeted atheist preachers in this excellent one-hour video in which he undertakes a "reverse engineering of religion." At about the 20-minute mark Dennett focuses on the works of Bart Ehrman and Jack Good (The Dishonest Church). Dennett points out that Good is outraged by the conspiracy by preachers to keep accurate information from the laity, who "can't handle" the information. Per Dennett, seminarians work hard to devise clever ways to avoid divulging the full truth about the Bible. (minute 24). How did it come to this? Dennett addresses this at minute 25. Dennett quotes Donald Hebb: "If it's not worth doing, then it's not worth doing well." He focuses the question to this: Who needs theologians? His answer: Those preachers who want to avoid being candid with their parishioners. "Theologians are religions' spinmeisters." At minute 29, Dennett recites the "Canons of Good Spin." Two examples: "It has to relieve skepticism without arousing curiosity" and "It should seem profound." These principles can be summed up with Dennett's neologism "deepities." (minute 31). These are statements that seem to be true only because they are ill-formed, and they have two readings. One is true but trivial, and the other is false but would be earth-shaking if true. Examples are given up through the remainder of the video, including a Karen Armstrong assertion at minute 43. Theologians are like magicians, and the concept of "deepities" allows one to see the card up the magician's sleeve. More on Karen Armstrong's evasions at minute 45, including attacks on theologians who, cornered, suggest that existence is not an important attribute of "God." Dennett racks it all up to a belief-in-God-meme. These evasions of theologians are reasons without reasoners. They are the result of unreasoning processes. The "cunning" is in the institutions themselves. These sorts of pseudo-explanations result from "a conspiracy without a mastermind."
NPR is fighting hard to keep it's sliver of federal funding. On the Hill, Anthony Weiner aims his arrows at the Republicans. And at least one Republican, Ron Paul, understands that our Nation's (destructive) money pit is Afghanistan, not NPR. Every week we spend four times more on our military adventure in Afghanistan than we spend for one year on funding domestic public media (we spend a lot more on propaganda devoted for international audiences than we spend on domestic programming).
Several years ago, I admitted my lack of appreciation regarding most abstract art. That voice in my head often says, "a child could have done that." And now this proposition has been tested. The result: People usually, but not overwhelmingly prefer the abstract art of professional artists to that done by children (and art done by animals). The results were reported by Discover Magazine.