I've been spending some time today browsing the website of Chris Rodda, a senior researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Rodda wrote a book a few years ago called "Liars for Jesus" which, while it could encompass any number of things, in this instance focused on the charlatans who sell Christian-nationalist revisionist history to churches and homeschool parents. Playing the John Brinkley to Rodda's Morris Fishbein is a Texan (where else?) named David Barton, who's come into some provenance recently as a "professor" at Glenn Beck's online "university." (The scare quotes are going to be hot and heavy in this post, folks.) A couple observations occurred to me, laid out here in easy to understand bullet points.
1. The strategy of Christian revisionists is basically to scour documents from the early history of the United States, cherry-pick quotes that have an affirmative reference to Christianity, and then declare it as unassailable that the founders really intended, if not for a theocratic government, then some arrangement in which Christianity would be enshrined with special privileges. As Rodda aptly demonstrates time after time, however, these quotes are almost always ripped completely out of context and demonstrate a total lack of understanding of the historical moment. This isn't surprising, though, when you consider that the Christian revisionists read the Founders in exactly the same way conservative evangelicals read scriptures. Memorizing a random assortment of prooftexts, mashing them together and then interpreting them through the lens of contemporary Christianity is the order of the day for folks like Barton. One shouldn't accept their Biblical pronouncements with any more credulity than their analysis of the United States founders. Unfortunately, many mainstream and Nu Atheist commentators do exactly that.
2. The contrast in style between Rodda and Barton is in itself very telling. Barton presents himself as a comic jockey, delivering one big whammer after another each punctuated with a variation of "har har are secularists dumb or what?!" Barton's clearly not trying to win anyone over; just to provide ammunition to the faithful and instill them with a dose of that smug superiority. Rodda combats his snideness with measured, even-tempered coolness. Relating to my post yesterday, if you were to pick a side solely on the basis of which of them you'd spend a lot of time around, there's no doubt about who most would choose. This blustering smart-assed swagger is the same kind of thing you'll get out of Ken Ham and the Creation Museum; it's apparently an involuntary tic produced by the subconscious realization that they are hopelessly grasping at straws.
29 July 2010
A little birdhouse in the sky
I don't generally get asked that often about my religious views because, well, I don't generally get asked about much at all. But there is something that tends to come up frequently in those conversations, something which I remember quite well from my evangelical days also.
That is, the assumption that I am no longer espouse any spirituality because of some personal bad experiences with religious believers. That's hardly the case. I thought many of the young evangelicals I knew in my time with that crowd were sincerely decent people caught in a belief system that made them act inhumanely. Sure, some of them were creeps who had found a home to justify their superiority and personal authoritarianism. And, of course, there are a great many religious types whose bad theology results directly in their being terrible people. If you believe in some future divine-stomping extinction of humanity, then you're a borderline sociopath. You're mostly harmless in that there is of course not going to be any rapture; not so much if you are sitting on your smug ass while the world is struck by preventable afflictions. That makes you a terrible person, no matter how much we seem to revere any kind of faith as worthwhile.
Digressions aside, the point is that my religiosity or lack thereof has little or nothing to do with the actions of religious people. There are a lot of religious folks whose actions for social justice causes I find very admirable. From my perspective on the left, anyone who's on the side of peace, justice and equality is on my side regardless of what their motivations may be (and I suspect in many cases our fundamental presuppositions about the world aren't that different at all. I try to keep abreast of the news from progressive religious groups, but I could not join them for the simple reason that my own experience has never left me feeling any kind of personal spiritual connection to the supernatural. That is why I am not a religious believer in a nutshell; I cannot find any reason to suspect that there is any kind of extra-dimensional presence that is puling the world around on a kite string.
In a nutshell, my religious philosophy is this: if a God exists and has any kind of personal opinion about how the planet operates, he or she must care primarily about how we go about making the lives of people we can see around us better, and furthermore that we have been given the capacity to understand how to do this on our own. Otherwise, God would be a deceptive, unreliable bastard who wouldn't be worth paying attention to. The god of say, fundamentalist Christianity who selfishly demands arbitrary tasks be performed to no practical end whatsoever can't in any sense actually exist anyway. Furthermore, any god that's going to demand personal recognition of some kind as an arbiter between salvation and damnation had better do a damn sight better job of making itself more readily apparent.
If Christianity could turn itself around from being a mystical self-help religion of navel-gazing and panty-sniffing and recover its tradition of social justice and egalitarianism, I would be happily cheering from the sidelines. But I still wouldn't be reapplying for membership.
More to say on this another time.
That is, the assumption that I am no longer espouse any spirituality because of some personal bad experiences with religious believers. That's hardly the case. I thought many of the young evangelicals I knew in my time with that crowd were sincerely decent people caught in a belief system that made them act inhumanely. Sure, some of them were creeps who had found a home to justify their superiority and personal authoritarianism. And, of course, there are a great many religious types whose bad theology results directly in their being terrible people. If you believe in some future divine-stomping extinction of humanity, then you're a borderline sociopath. You're mostly harmless in that there is of course not going to be any rapture; not so much if you are sitting on your smug ass while the world is struck by preventable afflictions. That makes you a terrible person, no matter how much we seem to revere any kind of faith as worthwhile.
Digressions aside, the point is that my religiosity or lack thereof has little or nothing to do with the actions of religious people. There are a lot of religious folks whose actions for social justice causes I find very admirable. From my perspective on the left, anyone who's on the side of peace, justice and equality is on my side regardless of what their motivations may be (and I suspect in many cases our fundamental presuppositions about the world aren't that different at all. I try to keep abreast of the news from progressive religious groups, but I could not join them for the simple reason that my own experience has never left me feeling any kind of personal spiritual connection to the supernatural. That is why I am not a religious believer in a nutshell; I cannot find any reason to suspect that there is any kind of extra-dimensional presence that is puling the world around on a kite string.
In a nutshell, my religious philosophy is this: if a God exists and has any kind of personal opinion about how the planet operates, he or she must care primarily about how we go about making the lives of people we can see around us better, and furthermore that we have been given the capacity to understand how to do this on our own. Otherwise, God would be a deceptive, unreliable bastard who wouldn't be worth paying attention to. The god of say, fundamentalist Christianity who selfishly demands arbitrary tasks be performed to no practical end whatsoever can't in any sense actually exist anyway. Furthermore, any god that's going to demand personal recognition of some kind as an arbiter between salvation and damnation had better do a damn sight better job of making itself more readily apparent.
If Christianity could turn itself around from being a mystical self-help religion of navel-gazing and panty-sniffing and recover its tradition of social justice and egalitarianism, I would be happily cheering from the sidelines. But I still wouldn't be reapplying for membership.
More to say on this another time.
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