Someone emailed me what an unnamed Christian scholar had written him so I responded as follows. I'll blockquote his comments:
That's right, or so he claims. What is missing from his credal statement? What is different from the historic creeds of the faith? Convert I say.
How Viral Ideas Hook UsDid you know that Temple Baptist Church was built on land that sold for 57 cents, the amount saved by a little girl that had been turned away from their Sunday school? Did you hear about the guy who died in his sleep, killed by his own farts? Can you believe that racist jerk Elvis Presley once said: "The only thing a nigger can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." And,guess what--Scholars at the Smithsonian have found Nostradamus predictions that relate to Barack Obama! As you may have guessed, the above statements are false. But that hasn't kept them from circulating the internet for years. Each of them is part of a viral email message, which means that each has some quality that makes people forward it, over and over and over.
The first is a kind of message commonly known as "glurge," too-sweet-to-be-true stories that give people a warm feeling or even chills. The second makes us laugh and piques our sense of curiosity. The third plays with our contradictory fascination with celebrities, which includes a desire to tear them down. The fourth appeals to our yearning for magic. These stories all are drawn from the urban legends fact-finding site, Snopes.com. What is the common theme? Emotional arousal.
Comparing religion to chain mail seems crass, but the kinship is real. And as Francis Bacon said, "The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances."
Viral email has a variety of reproductive strategies. Like computer viruses, many chain mail messages contain explicit "copy-me commands." Some promise us good luck if we forward the message to ten people before the day is up - or a week of happiness, or even prosperity. Some threatens us with bad luck if we don't. Some tries to shame us: "If you care about your friends, you'll send this information about cervical cancer/visa fraud/brown recluse spiders . . ." But most viral emails simply contain something that makes us want to pass them on. They may make us laugh or feel validated and righteous. Many delight us. A few tap our sense of magic or mystery or transcendence.
The term "viral marketing" has itself gone viral recently, popularized by books like Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, or Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. Corporations have discovered that their best sales staff are satisfied customers, and they've been experimenting. Can we figure out the formula for starting a fad? Can we seed the virus with a few hired hands who create buzz? The Heath brothers offer communications professionals a simple formula which they call the "Six Principles for SUCCESs:" SIMPLE UNEXPECTED CONCRETE CREDIBLE EMOTIONAL STORIES. Look at the formula. Now think back about what I said regarding the boundaries of supernaturalism and the born again experience. The fit is remarkably tight.
In the field of medicine, epidemiologists study patterns of contagion. They might track, for example, how an influenza virus spread across one region and how it jumped from country to country in the bodies of specific carriers. Based on the way infections fan out, they may even be able to identify the “epicenter” of a disease. Some of the tools of epidemiology are now being applied to study the spread of viral ideas. But whereas diseases spread passively, meaning people rarely try to infect each other, viral ideas, also known as “memes” spread by harnessing the human desire to share what we know and to learn from each other. Memes get transmitted through established social networks. They spread horizontally within a generation, and vertically from generation to generation. That is why specific religions are concentrated in one part of the world or another and children tend to have the same religion as their parents.
For developmental reasons, children are particularly susceptible to simply accepting the ideas of their parents and community. If a parent says stoves burn you, cars can squish you, and bathing keeps you from getting itchy, kids tend to do best if they simply trust what their parents say. Nature has designed children to be "credulous." This allows them to learn from the mistakes of their elders. It makes them more efficient in acquiring valuable information and adapting to cultural norms. It is also why evangelical parents are encouraged to convert their children. Research on identity development shows that if children can be contained within an enveloping religious community through their transition into young adulthood, few will ever leave. Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6)
A successful religion needs to have the qualities of a successful virus. In a changing environment, this means it must have the ability to mutate and adapt. In the past, religions were spread largely by edict and conquest. This is how Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and into the Americas. Today, though, religion is perceived as an individual choice and religions must gain share by attracting adherents. This is why, today, the religions that are gaining mindshare are those that have good marketing, high birthrates, and what economists call “appealing club goods”. In the current environment, Christianity has been able to produce offshoots that need no edict or conquest.
Significantly, the religions that are growing right now are ones with strong copy-me commands. Evangelical Christianity is centered on what Christians call the Great Commission: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost." In addition, just as the Roman church latched onto the strategy of competitive breeding (keep women home, sanctify a high birth rate), so Evangelicals have begun to explicitly add this form of copy-me command to the mix. By contrast, modernist Christianity is more often centered on what Christians call the Great Commandment: "Love the Lord your god with all your heart, soul and mind, and . . . love your neighbor as yourself." In a straight up competition, the copy-me command wins out, and in fact, evangelicals are gaining mindshare, while modernists are losing it.
One of the fastest changing aspects of our world is the growth of information. As knowledge grows, some varieties Christianity accept new scientific or historical findings and reinterpret their sacred texts and traditions in light of our best understanding of the world around us. Tangentially, this is the approach taken by Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th Dalai Lama has said, "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview." This kind of adaptation is common for forms of Christianity that, like Buddhism, are more centered in praxis (practice) than belief. For those that are centered in belief, adapting to new knowledge is more difficult, and the survival strategy more often is a sort of fundamentalist retrenchment. Karen Armstrong's book, The Battle for God, describes this retrenchment in the Abrahamic religions.
The need to adapt may seem at odds with the recent success of fundamentalism, but in actual fact, fundamentalism is an adaptation to a changing world. Rather than revising dogmas, fundamentalists develop stronger defenses against external threats to a traditional homeostasis. An extreme example of this can be seen in the case of the Amish or Hassidic Jews: the belief system sustains itself relatively unchanged by engaging people to re-create an ancestral environment in which the belief system emerged.
But most theological fundamentalists have a more hybrid approach. They protect their children from external influence by home schooling or parochial schools, but don't mind accessing creationist materials from interactive websites. They expand in-house social services that include pop psychology. They promote hierarchy and sexism but are willing to have women and children as spokespersons for these views. They play up the risks of inquiry and doubt and use scientific findings and follies to make their arguments convincing. Fundamentalist populations resist ideological change, but they have learned to exploit popular culture, best business practices, new technologies, and even scholarship itself to maintain the survival of their beliefs.
Since a virus and host fit together like a lock and key, understanding viral ideas helps us to understand the human mind, and vice versa. Retro-viruses and influenza mutate rapidly, which makes it hard to develop immunizations against them. On the spectrum of religions, Christianity shows a similar flexibility, regularly spinning off new sects, denominations, and even non-denominational renegades. And yet each of these taps a familiar range of emotions and social mechanisms and is constrained by the cognitive structures that place bounds on human supernaturalism. Christianity has adapted to a broad range of human minds and cultures, a strategy that has resulted in success beyond the wildest visions of the patriarchs.
Learn More:
Memetic Lexicon
Richard Brodie - Virus of the Mind
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 253-257.
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IV. The Born Again ExperienceI prayed harder and just then I felt like everything I was saying was being sucked into a vacuum. When I stood up, I felt like thin air; I had to brace myself. I felt this energy, it was a kind of an ecstasy.” --Cathy “Something began to flow in me—a kind of energy . . . Then came the strange sensation that water was not only running down my cheeks, but surging through my body as well, cleansing and cooling as it went.” --Colson “It was a beautiful feeling of well-being, warmth and loving . . . I went home and all night long these warm feelings kept coming up in my body.” --Jean “I felt something real warm overwhelming me. It was in just a moment, yet it was like an eternity. . . . a joy, such a joy hit me with such a tremendous force that I jumped . . . and ran.” --Helen. (From Conway & Siegelman,
Snapping, pp 24, 32, 12, 31)
For many Christians, being born again is unlike anything they have ever known. A sense of personal conviction, yielding or release followed by indescribable peace and joy – this is the stuff of spiritual transformation. Once experienced it is unforgettable, and many people can recall small details years later. In the aftermath of such a moment, an alcoholic may stop drinking or a criminal fugitive may hand himself in to the authorities. A housewife may sail through her tasks for weeks, flooded by a sense of God’s love flowing through her to her children. A normally introverted programmer may begin inviting his co-workers to church.
This experience, more than any other, creates a sense of certainty about Christian belief and so makes belief impervious to rational argumentation. A believer knows what he or she has experienced and seen. Even converts who don’t feel radically transformed after praying “the sinner’s prayer” may feel overwhelmed by God’s presence during subsequent prayer or worship. Evangelical and Pentecostal forms of Christianity that are gaining ground around the world particularly emphasize emotional peaks such as faith healing or speaking in tongues. Worshipers may get caught up in exuberant singing, shouting, dancing and tears of joy.
What most Christians don’t know is that these experiences are not unique to Christianity. In fact, the quotations that you just read come from two born again Christians, a Moonie, and an encounter group participant. Their words are similar, because the born again experience doesn’t require a specific set of beliefs. It requires a specific social/emotional process, and the dogmas or explanations are secondary.
Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have written an excellent book on what they call sudden personality change, or “snapping.” The first edition of their book, Snapping focused on small countercultural cults and self-help groups that sprang up in the 1960’s and 1970’s such as Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, EST, Mind Dynamics, Unification Church, Scientology, and others. When asked about whether Evangelical Christianity might fit the pattern, Conway and Siegelman were reluctant to say yes. Today they admit, “In America today, increasingly, that line [between a cult and a legitimate religion] cannot be categorically drawn. . . . Our research raised serious questions concerning the techniques used to bring about conversion in many evangelical groups.”(p. 37).
Conversion is a process that begins with social influence. As sociologists like to say, our sense of reality is socially constructed. We will come back to this later. Suffice for now to say that missionary work typically begins with simple offers of friendship or conversations about shared interests. As a prospective converts are drawn in, a group may envelope them in warmth, good will, thoughtful conversations and playful activities, always with gentle pressure toward the group reality.
In revival meetings or retreats, semi-hypnotic processes draw a potential convert closer to the toggle point. These include including repetition of words, repetition of rhythms, evocative music, and Barnum statements (messages that seem personal but apply to almost everyone-- like horoscopes). Because of the positive energy created by the group, potential converts become unwitting participants in the influence process, actively seeking to make the group’s ideas fit with their own life history and knowledge. Factors that can strengthen the effect include sleep deprivation or isolation from a person’s normal social environment. An example would be a late night campfire gathering with an inspirational story-teller and altar call at Child Evangelism’s “Camp Good News.”
These powerful social experiences culminate in conversion, a peak experience in which the new converts experience a flood of relief. Until that moment they have been consciously or unconsciously at odds with the group center of gravity. Now, they may feel that their darkest secrets are known and forgiven. They may experience the kind of joy or transcendence normally reserved for mystics. And they are likely to be bathed in love and approval from the surrounding group, which mirrors their experience of God.
The otherworldly mental state that I refer to as the domain of mystics is known in clinical settings as a "transcendence hallucination", but this term fails to reflect how normal and profound the experience can be as a part of human spirituality. The transcendence hallucination is an acute sense of connection with a reality that lies beyond and behind this natural plane. It typically lasts for just a few seconds or minutes but may leave profound impression that lasts a lifetime. For a Christian it may be interpreted as an encounter with a supernatural person -- Jesus, or an angel. A fan of the paranormal might be convinced of an encounter with space aliens or ghosts. More often, the person has a disembodied sense of connection accompanied by intense feelings of joy, wonder, peacefulness or alternately terror, depending on the context.
A transcendence hallucination can be triggered by neurological events like a seizure, stroke, or migraine aura; or by a drug such as psilocybin, but it also can be triggered by over or under-stimulation of the brain. Some mystics from the past have described or even drawn these events with such impressive detail that a diagnostic hypothesis is possible. Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval mystic created scores of drawings that show the visual field distorted in keeping with a migraine aura.
In modern times, author Karen Armstrong describes the seizures that she first thought to be triggered spiritually. In discussing an altered state known as Kundalini awakening, one migraine sufferer commented, “I usually don't follow any of the mystic/esoteric stuff, but I must say it is kind of strange to see all my symptoms lined up like that outside of a western/medical context." I should emphasize, though, that these altered states don’t depend on some kind of neurological damage or pathology. They can be unforgettable, peak experiences for normal people, long sought by those who care about the spiritual dimension of life. Sensory deprivation, fasting, meditation, rhythmic drumming, or crowd dynamics have all been used systematically to elicit altered states in normal people.
Such a powerful experience cannot go unexplained, and being meaning makers, humans immediately begin interpreting altered states. “Lacking understanding and with no reliable method for investigating the phenomenon, people through the ages have grappled imaginatively with their experiences, looking to some higher order and ascribing these abrupt changes in awareness to a source outside the body. They have been explained as messages from beyond or gifts of revelation and enlightenment, personal communications that could only be delivered by a universal being of infinite dimensions, a cosmic force that comprehends all space, time and earthly matter.”(Conway, 30)
In a conversion context like missionary work or revival meetings, from the moment snapping occurs, religious interpretations of the experience are provided. These explanations become the foundation stones on which whole castles of beliefs will be constructed. The authorities who triggered the otherworldly experience are trusted implicitly, which gives them the power to now transform the convert’s world view in accordance with their own theology.
The conversion process, as I have described it sounds sinister, as if manipulative groups and hypnotic leaders deliberately ply their trade to suck in the unsuspecting and take over their minds. I don’t believe this is usually the case. Rather, natural selection is at play. Over millennia of human history, religious leaders have hit on social/emotional techniques that work to win converts, just as they have hit on belief systems that fit how we process information. Techniques that don’t trigger powerful spiritual experiences simply die out. Those that do get used, refined, and handed down.
Conversion activities can be harmful, primarily because they go hand in hand with exclusive truth claims and tribalism. But with few exceptions the evangelists, from mega-church ministers to “friendship missionaries” genuinely think they are doing good. After all, they have their own born again experiences to convince them that they are promoting the real thing. Conversion feeds conviction, and conviction feeds conversion. What decent person wouldn't want to share the secret to healing, wholeness, and happiness?
Essentials:
Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change.
Sharon Begley. "Your Brain on Religion," Newsweek May 7, 2001.
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[20090617. Added References] This article explores the Social Impact of Poor Biblical Information and Data Quality focusing on two of the sixteen IDQ dimensions, Understandability and Interpretability and provides a method for scoring them relative to other fields.
How does one measure the success of a Philosophy or Religion?
There are "positives" and "negatives" to almost everything, including philosophies. I will consider Religions philosophies because they are methods of deriving, among other things, how we should behave and what we should value. Philosophies can be measured by their success. Their success should be measured by how "trustworthy" and "reliable" they are. Measurements of their "reliability" and "trustworthiness" should be dependent upon how consistent or reproducible the results are. Some philosophies have become so reliable that they have become a science and some have splintered, become obsolete, and neglected. I agree with some who say that Epistemology is one the neglected philosophies. However, in my view, Epistemology is one of the most important endeavors humans can undertake, and I think it is thriving under other names, such as Law, Statistics, Measurement, Science, Artificial Intelligence, Informal Logic and Information and Data Quality Research.
How Recipes are similar to Religions and Philosophies.
Virtues, Morality and Truth Seeking are areas where Religion and Philosophy overlap. It can be summed up as "What is the right way to live?". We can rephrase this question to derive an analogy as "What is the right way to do something?". This is how Recipes, Religions and Philosophies are similar. Once someone has an Epiphany, or a "Good Idea" or a "Good way to make a sauce" they can write it down so it can be learned, reproduced and used as a basis for other things. Once it gets recorded once, it will be read (consumed), interpreted and acted upon to behave in a certain way. The measurement of how successful the Recipe, the Religion or the Philosophy should be is how easy it is reproduce the results or how well it consistently reflects real world states.
The success of Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depends on how easy they are to Understand and Interpret.
My Grandmothers cooking was widely regarded as being some of the best cooking in the area. Not only the family loved her cooking, the Church "Pot-Lucks" eagerly awaited what she was going to contribute next. In her last years, we tried to get her recipes written down, but we were largely unsuccessful. She didn't use recipes. She used her intuition. When she said to add something as a "pinch", "little bit", "dash" etc. it meant nothing to us. When she said "do this until it makes a noise like...", it meant nothing to us. Her terms were too ambiguous for any of us to take a recipe dictated by her and recreate what she cooked. One person, a neighbor, was successful in getting some recipes made from her and built a local catering business out of it. She sold it when she wanted to retire.
Christianity is split up into an heirarchy of denominations and one explanation for that could be that it has a low score in the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability.
Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depend on concepts, described by language. It is possible for a word to describe a concept, but sometimes the word depends on the context. Sometimes when you are translating concepts between languages, some languages don't describe a concept in the same way as another language and some languages are missing words for concepts that exist in another language. When this happens, then error creeps into the understanding and interpretation of concepts. A word is used to generally approximate a concept and then it is read (consumed) by another mind through a network of cognitive biases and prior knowledge and stored away categorically in biological storage media, the brain. There is a lot of room for error and ambiguity which leads to poor understandability and interpretability. Interpretability depends on Understandability, so if the information is hard to understand, it will be hard to interpret.
What does Understandability and Interpretability Mean?
The definitions of "Understandability" and "Interpretability" from the Total Data Quality Managment literature are as follows.
Understandability (Ease of understanding):
The extent to which data is easily comprehended.
Interpretability
The extent to which data is in appropriate language, symbols, and units and the definitions are clear.
Interestingly, intepretability plays a very important role in Imaging. I got the following defininion of "interpret" from the field of Military Imagery from answers.com
Military Imagery
"(DOD, NATO) Suitability of imagery for interpretation with respect to answering adequately requirements on a given type of target in terms of quality and scale.
a. poor -- Imagery is unsuitable for interpretation to answer adequately requirements on a given type of target.
b. fair -- Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target but with only average detail.
c. good--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in considerable detail.
d. excellent--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in complete detail."
["interpret." Military and Associated Words. US Department of Defense, 2003. Answers.com 04 Jun. 2009. http://www.answers.com/topic/interpretability]
And from Data Warehouse Literature
"the extent to which the data warehouse in modeled effectively in the inforamtion repository and how well maintained the Data Lineage (where the data come from)", "Fundamentals of data warehouses" By Matthias Jarke, Maurizio Lenzerini, Yannis Vassiliou, Panos Vassiliadis
- How easy the queries can be posed? How successful are they?
We all know what an Interpreter is.
When you don't speak the language you need an Interpreter, but "interpret" also has specific definitions in other fields such as Mathematics and Logic.
In the Total Data Quality Management literature the Information and Data Quality dimensions are organized into four categories. The catagories are
- Intrinsic IQ,
- Contextual IQ
- Representational IQ:
- Accessibility IQ:
Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Most of the IDQ dimension have clear cut metrics and methods for deriving a score but Understandability and Interpretability are more subjective and require surveying people and analyzing their answers using weighted averages and whatever is common between them. For example if there are two witnesses to a crime.
Witness 1: It was a Black Car.
Witness 2: It was Blue Car.
Using a what is common between them, we can say it is a car. Using a weighted average, without further questioning, we can say that it was more likely a car than a truck so we can give more weight to the car.
1. Car
2. Truck
and we can say that the blue car from witness two was probably a darker shade of blue so we give more weight to darker colors.
1. Dark Blue
2. Light Blue
An example using Christianity is that they all believe in Jesus Christ.
How they define Jesus is another topic.
Quantifying The Understandability and Interpretability Score For Christianity
Since I don't have a survey prepared and don't have the time to randomly select 1000 Christians from random points around the world, It seems to me that one ROUGH way to quantify the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability would be to assume that a Christian denomination represents an interpretation of Christianity and to take the total number of Christian denominations and use that as the denomenator, and use the number one to represent Christianity in the following manner.
Just to keep it simple, lets say that there are only two denominations of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant (but we really know there are more)
Christianity/Total Number of Denominations = some percent or score.
so plugging numbers into that, it would be
1/2 = .5 or 50%
So Protestants and Catholics each get a score of .5 out of 1.
Note, that if there were only one denomination of Christianity, the score would be 1. So one is the perfect score. Also note that this method can be used for other things besides Christianity to enable COMPARING the relative scores of Interpretability and Understanding in different fields. If we were a sociology class, we could do it with a newspaper article and survey students about it. Additionally and more importantly, this type of thing is done as part of the reading comprehension portion of some standardized tests.
To derive a score for each denomination of Catholicism and Protestants you could do the same thing, and the number would come out even smaller as you would then have a percentage of a percentage. For example, taking the score for Protestants, and plugging it back into the equation, and assuming a ridiculously small number of protestant denominations would give us a formula as follows
Protestant Score/Total Number of Protestant denominations = Protestant denomination score
so lets assume only two protestant denominations and plug that into the formula as follows
.5/2 = .25
So now each protestant denomination gets a score of .25 out of 1. The more denominations there are the lower the score becomes, justifiably.
As we can see, the scores for Understandability and Interpretability come out pretty low, and that is reflected by the fact that only ~33% of the world is christian and that ~33% is subdivided into smaller denominations.
Who has the right Understanding and Right Interpretation? Who Knows? How are any of them Justified in saying they know anything about "What is the Right Way To Live?".
They are NOT justified, yet they act as if they are, and make decisions that impact society as a whole.
The key problem with information that is not easily understood and interpreted is Ambiguity.
Ambiguity is derived from poor definitions of terms, leading to unreproduceable results. The information is not mapped properly to real world events and objects. The information does not accurately represent the real world.
There are plenty of examples in the real world that depend on non-ambiguous information to produce consistent results.
Mapping
Medicine
Safety
Logistics
Engineering
Recipes
Mathematical models
United nations
and I'm sure you can think up a lot more on your own.
So now, without further delay, I present to you.....
THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF POOR BIBLICAL IDQ
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
[Wikipedia should not be considered authoritative but it is a good place to start.]
Inhumane Treatment Of Others
- Anti-abortion violence
- Torture as means to a Justifiable End
-- Torture in the Past
-- Church Attendance And Torture Approval, Valerie Tarico
- Witch hunts
-- Children Are Targets Of Nigerian Witch Hunt, Lee Randolph
-- Causes and Sociology of Witch Hunts, Wikipedia
-- The Terrible Christian Legacy of the Witch Hunts, John Loftus
- Exorcism
-- Exorcism, Wikipedia
-- A Call For The Scientific Investigation of Exorcism, Lee Randolph
- Mental Illness in the Middle Ages
--History Of Mental Disorders, Wikipedia
- Slavery
-- Christianity And Slavery, Wikipedia
-- Slavery And Religion, Wikipedia
- Address To The Colored People, Robert Ingersoll
- Slavery? NO WAY...NONE!
- Manifest Destiny, Exploration and Conquering
-- Manifest Destiny, Wikipedia
-- The Protestant Atrocities: Manifest Destiny and Slavery, John Loftus
- Heresy, Blaming the victim, Wrong Interpretation, "Not Real Christians" when obviously, if they don't get it, its not their fault. The information is of poor quality.
-- Christian Heresy, Wikipedia
-- List Of People Burned As Heretics, Wikipedia
-- Arianism, Wikipedia
--- Inquisition
--- Inquisition, Wikipedia
--- Words From the Inquisition: "Convert or Die!, John Loftus
- Crusades
-- Crusades, Wikipedia
- Behavior, Sin, Biological Bases of Behavior.
-- Link to Many Articles on this topic by Lee Randolph
DENIAL OF ESTABLISHED KNOWLEDGE
- Human Origins and or Evolution
-- Twenty Reasons Why Genesis and Evolution Do Not Mix, Answers in Genesis
-- Answers in Creation, Christian site that generally refutes Answers In Genesis
-- Debunking Creationism
- Faith Healing
-- Court Rules Faith In God And Prayer As Child Abuse, Harry McCall
UNHEALTHY PSYCHOLOGY
Self-Esteem
-- Is Self-Esteem Contrary to Christianity, Christian Article
- Martyr Syndrome
-- Overcome Martyr-Syndrome, WikiHow
- Co-Opts Humans Natural Flawed Reasoning Algorithms
-- List Of Cognitive Biases
MORE ABOUT THE IDQ DIMENSIONS
In the Total Data Quality Management literature the IDQ dimensions are categorized as follows. Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Intrinsic IQ:
Accuracy (Free-from-error), Objectivity, Believability, Reputation
Contextual IQ:
Relevancy, Value-added, Timeliness, Completeness, Amount of Information
Representational IQ:
Interpretability, Understandability, Concise Representation, Consistent Representation
Accessibility IQ:
Access, Security
"Quality Information and Knowledge", page 43. Huang, Lee, Wang. Prentis Hall PTR
IDQ REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDED READING
Information and Data Quality (IDQ), Newest to oldest
* Journey to Data Quality, 2006, from Amazon
* Data Quality Assessment, 2002
* Information Quality Benchmarks: Product and Service Performance, 2002
* Quality Information and Knowledge, 1999, from Amazon
* AIMQ: A Methodology For Information Quality Assessment, 1997,
Direct Download, may not work
Download from link on the site
* Beyond Accuracy: What Data Quality Means To Consumers, 1996
* Anchoring Data Quality Dimensions in Ontological Foundations, 1996
//////////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied To The Bible, oldest to newest
1. How Accurate is the Bible?
2. Applying Data and Information Quality Principles To The Bible
3. Applying IDQ Principles of Research To The Bible
4. Overview of IDQ Deficiencies Which Are Evident In Scripture
5. Jesus As God From IDQ Design Deficincies
6. "Son of Man" As Jesus From IDQ Deficiencies
7. IDQ Flaw of Meaningless Representation In The Bible
8. Accuracy In Detecting The Spiritual Realm Using "Triangulation"
9. As You Celebrate The Horror of Easter
10. Where is Jesus's Diary? Information As A Product, Not A Byproduct
11. Social Impact Of Poor Biblical IDQ
///////////////////////////////////
Triangulation, oldest to newest
* "Triangulation", University of California, San Francisco, Global health Sciences
* "Triangulation", Wikipedia
///////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied, oldest to newest
* National Transportation Safety Board information quality standards
* Thank Sully!
* Information Professionals Caught Not Checking Sources
//////////////////////////////////
Rebuttals to Criticism of its application to assessing the Bible, oldest to newest
* IDQ Flaws Relevant To The Holy Spirit
* Cooking The Books To Avoid IDQ Principles
* Accuracy In Detecting The Spiritual Realm Using "Triangulation"
* Christians Must Be Agnostic
This review is late, way late! The release of
Religulous was on October 1, 2008 and only now am I getting to review it. Why is that? Because down in the south where I live, even we movie critics couldn’t get it because we’re in the Bible Belt and most theatres wouldn’t carry it. We have the always tolerant, loving, and nonjudgmental Jesus-courters to thank for that. What I had to do to finally get a demo copy of the film was quite disgusting. It involved me in the back seat of a 1996 Buick Skylark getting down and dirty for 35 minutes with a tranny hooker named Philecia.
Okay, now that I made you chuckle, I’m about to turn the floor over to a real comedian, Bill Maher, creator of the hilariously offensive documentary. Being an avid and outspoken atheist myself, it would be biased of me to put a grade on Religulous unlike the rest of my reviews at holmansmoviereview.com. To say that I agree with Maher’s conclusions should be obvious. So, I’m sitting this one out and letting Bill Maher do the promoting of godless activism for right now.
Maher’s travels for the project took him to Israel in Megiddo, the Mt. of Olives, to Italy to the Vatican where he was thrown out, to the Netherlands to visit a weeded-out “God” junkie, and to some other places in the United States (including the Mormon Temple in Utah where he was bounced from the property) to get feedback on those coats of many colors called God and religion.
What’s the problem with the world? The problem is religion and timing: “Before man figured out how to be rational and peaceful, he figured out nuclear weapons and how to pollute on a catastrophic scale,” says Maher. It is the intolerance generated by religious convictions that gives man the false assurance that he is right and cannot be wrong.
Maher makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and sometimes you even want to sympathize with them. Take, for instance, a chapel for truckers in North Carolina where Maher stops in to ask some questions. Within minutes of filming, one of them says: “You start disputin’ my god, then you got a problem.” But the problem with people like that is not disputing God. There’s no critical thinking going on. “I’m promoting doubt.” Maher says. “The other guys are selling certainty, not me.” How should we think? We should learn from our mistakes and realize that nobody has all the answers: “History is just a litany of getting shit wrong.” And “Religion is dangerous because it allows people who don’t have all the answers to think that they do.”
Dr. Francis Collins, one of the world’s leading DNA experts, is questioned on his adhering to Christian convictions while 93% of all scientists in the National Academy of Sciences are either atheist or agnostic. I would like to have seen more of the interview with Dr. Collins, which I felt was a bit too heavily edited.
Other interviews were gut-busting-ly funny, sometimes to the point of being awkward, like Maher’s interview with “ex-gay” pastor John Wescott. Just watch, and if you don’t cringe, I’ll give you a dollar! Democratic senator Mark Pryor is on tape admitting that the earth might be 5,000 years old. The creationist movement’s Ken Ham is interviewed just after a shot of a triceratops with a saddle on it.
After getting booted from the Vatican, Maher’s interview with a crotchety old priest is a gem. Being questioned about the church’s condemnation of sinners to Hell, the priest says: “That’s all nonsense. That’s the old Catholic church.” Well, that’s good to hear!
Brilliantly incorporated archived footage of political coverage, televangelists, and world events gives the presentation an extra-outrageous appeal. One of those is of Kirk Cameron and his usual spewing forth of ignorance, this time on making converts. The believer must “learn to circumvent or go around the person’s intellect.” Yep, that’s what the religious must do to convert anyone. If you think about it, it all falls apart. Don’t think! Just believe!
Religious idiocy is cleverly exploited as Rabbi Schmuel Strauss is interviewed. The man works for The Institute of Science and Halacha, inventing products that allow for modern conveniences without breaking the Sabbath. A phone is showcased that can dial itself. If you put a stylus in a number of the number you want to dial, the phone will stop inhibiting dialing at the number, which it tries to do automatically every second, so as to not violate one of the 39 prohibitions set by modern Jewish leadership against pushing buttons, and therefore, allowing the use of a phone on the Sabbath. Things get more comical with a wheelchair propelled by air thrust to avoid anyone having to push it on the Sabbath.
Maher interviews Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda, a man with 100,000 followers worldwide who believes himself to be the second incarnation of Christ. A radical Muslim Aki Nawaz is interviewed, a man who raps about and openly believes in suicide bombings, and upholds the death threats made against Salmon Rushdie.
On faith, Maher says “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.” And “Those who preach faith and enable it and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders.” It is religion that destroys mankind. “Religion must die for mankind to live.”
The conclusion is that religion is crazy – crazy funny – but mostly just crazy. Religious people are crazy. Their religion makes them that way. Religulous is about getting the world humble enough to admit that anyone can be wrong—adored religious saints and their holy books alike. If the things religious people believe were found in any other book, they’d be denied and called fairy tales. But since those things are in the Bible, they’re given a pass on conforming to rationality. None of their proponents know what they are talking about and have no more certainty in answering life’s big questions as their fellow religious loudmouths or your local “I’ll believe it when I see it” village atheist.
Religulous is 100 minutes and 56 seconds of realism with comic relief where Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others all get roasted. Spliced in with the interviews are charts, facts, and movie clips that will probably have you rolling laughing. The open-minded and non-fundamentalist religionists are encouraged to see the film as it will provide great entertainment. If you are a closed-minded, straight-laced fundamentalist, run. But if you do decide to see it, be prepared to throw a shoe at the screen.
(JH)
[Written by John W. Loftus] Evangelical New Testament scholar
Dr. Scot McKnight has written a very interesting book on conversion theory, called
Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy (with Hauna Ondrey, one of his “finest students”). Here is my review of it:
In this book the authors have written four detailed chapter length studies of people who have converted: 1) away from the church to agnosticism/atheism; 2) away from the synagogue to the church, 3) away from the Catholic church to evangelicalism; and 4) away from evangelicalism to Catholicism.
McKnight argues that all conversions go through the same process, and even if none of them are identical, they fall into similar patterns. (p.1). His goal is to describe the conversion process with hopes that the patterns that emerge can be used to explain them, with the further goal that scholars and pastors “will work out the implications of conversion theory in the pastoral context.” (pp. 231-236). He writes: "If mapping conversion theory shows anything…it shows the need for grace, humility, and openness to one another as we listen to and learn from one another’s stories. The sincerity of each convert’s (often opposite) experience underscores the need to learn from one’s another’s experience rather than denounce the other’s experience.” (p. 236)
While most of us here at DC describe our leaving the faith as a “deconversion,” (which is the usual nomenclature) McKnight argues instead that leaving the Christian faith follows the same pattern of conversion itself. Deconversion stories are about "leaving from," instead of "coming to," but a deconversion follows the same process as a conversion. He writes: “All conversions are apostasies and all apostasies are therefore conversions."
McKnight quotes approvingly of John Barbour in his book, Versions of Deconversion, that there are four lenses with which people see their own conversion stories:"they doubt or deny the truth of the previous system of beliefs; they criticize the morality of the former life; they express emotional upheaval upon leaving a former faith; and they speak of being rejected by their former community.” (pp. 1-2)
Since he deals with several of the Bloggers here at DC (with some notable exceptions in Dr. Hector Avalos, Joe Holman, and Valerie Tarico) let me focus on this particular chapter of his as an example of what he does in the rest of the book (pp. 7-61).
In his first chapter he provides an “anatomy of apostasy,” and he includes most of the recognized apostates and debunkers, including me (who’s story he highlights), Ed Babinski, Ken Daniels, Harry McCall, Charles Templeton, Robert M. Price, Dan Barker, Farrell Till, and many others.
McKnight observes there is almost always some sort of crisis for the person. “Each, for a variety of reasons, encountered issues and ideas and experiences that simply shook the faith beyond stability.” “Guilt,” for instance, “drove Christine Wicker, a journalist, who covers the religious scene in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the faith (seen in her well-written memoir, God Knows My Heart). For us apostates there was also a crisis of “unnerving intellectual incoherence to the Christian faith," and he quotes me as saying: “I am now an atheist. One major reason why I have become an atheist is because I could not answer the questions I was encountering.”
There are five major elements that are combined to cause the adherent to question the viability of his or her faith, McKnight claims.
One) Scripture became part of the problem for us. McKnight writes of Kenneth Daniels that “while on the mission field, he became convinced the Bible could not be inerrant or infallible, walked away from the mission field and became an agnostic.” Of Farrell Till, he “became a skeptic and at the heart of his departure from orthodoxy was a critical approach to Scripture.” Of Ed Babinski, whom he said is “an indefatigable recorder of those who have left fundamentalism,” his problem “was the Bible’s record of Jesus’ predictions and Paul’s own expectations that he think did not come true that undid the truthfulness of the Bible. He pursued every angle he thought necessary to support his faith but his doubts could not be satisfied. ‘I became,’ he confesses, ‘disenchanted with Christianity in toto, and became an agnostic with theistic leanings.’”
McKnight, who is a conservative himself, seems to lay blame for our rejection of the Bible because we held to “a rigid view of Scripture.” When we “encounter the empirical evidence of the sciences, particularly concerning evolution and the origins as well as development of life as we now know it, a rigid view of Scripture collapses….For some the whole ship sinks.”
Two) The empirical realities of science also demolish our faith, he notes. Ed Babinski was “completely devoted to a six-day creation theory” but eventually “became disillusioned with Christianity and the Bible because of the lack of evidence for what was considered so central to the faith – the scientific accuracy of a simplistic theory of creation.” McKnight opines that “a simplistic theory of origins, along with special pleading theories that are designed to explain away that evidence, when combined then with knowledge of the ancient Near East parallels to both the creation accounts and the story of Noah’s flood not infrequently are the collision point for many who leave the orthodox Christian faith.”
Three) The behavior of Christians is another factor in our apostacy. McKnight: “For many, the failure of Christians to be transformed by the claimed grace of God and the indwelling power of the Spirit obliterates the truthfulness of the Christian claim.” Robert Price gained an insight while attending a lecture by Harvey Cox, McKnight pens. Price is quoted as saying: “As I looked at the secular students gathered there, I suddenly thought, ‘Listen, is there really that much difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’?’ I had always accepted the qualitative difference between the ‘saved’ and the ‘unsaved.’ Until that moment … Then, in a flash, we were all just people.”
Four) The traditional Christian doctrine of hell is another factor. McKnight points out that “belief in hell has led some to contend the Christian faith is inherently unjust and morally repugnant,” such that his judgment leads him to think the Christian doctrine of hell is “far more fundamental to those who leave the faith than is normally recognized.” Then he quotes me as saying: “The whole notion of a punishment after we die is sick and barbaric. The whole concept of hell developed among superstitious and barbaric peoples, and tells us nothing about life after death.”
Five) Apostates also reject the God we actually find in the Bible, who is vindictive, hateful, racist, and barbaric--my words.
There are other reasons, McKnight admits. There is the problem of religious diversity in which it’s hard to dispute that “one’s faith is more shaped by one’s social location than by one’s personal choice.” Then there is the problem of evil which causes many to leave the faith. Of course, I’m surprised that these last two reasons are not highlighted as reasons in their own right, especially since I highlight them in my book. But at least he mentioned them.
Another suggested reason for our defection from the Christian faith comes out of nowhere, with no evidence for it at all, and guided more by McKnight’s theological persuasions than anything else. His next suggestion is not helpful to a scientific investigation of conversion theory, which I take it, is one of his aims—to merely describe the conversion process. His next suggestion is based, not on anything he’s read, but on his “own intuition,” and even admits he “did not find anyone speak in this way.” He furthermore does not find this a factor in any other conversion stories in his other three chapters, which shows his theological biases. He suggests that “the demand put on one’s life by Jesus, by the orthodox faith and by a local church’s expectations can provoke a crisis on the part of the person who wants to go her or his own way. I am suggesting that behind some of the stories is a desire to live as one wants, to break certain moral codes that are experienced as confining, and that were either forgotten when telling the story or were an unacknowledged dimension of the experience.” Indeed, “one might summarize the entire process of leaving the faith as the quest for personal autonomy, freedom and intellectual stability. These factors seem present at some level in nearly all the stories I have studied.”
Christian professor Ruth A. Tucker who wrote the book Walking Away From Faith: Unraveling the Mystery of Belief disagrees with this. In a talk to a Grand Rapids, MI, Freethought group (which I have also spoken for) Professor Tucker listed five myths about people who have abandoned their faith (note # 4):1) "They are angry and rebellious." She found virtually no evidence for this. Rather, people felt sorrow, initially. They experienced pain, not anger. 2) "They can be argued back into faith." Because the person leaving his/her faith has carefully and painstakingly dissected the reasons behind this major worldview change, the Christian who proffers apologetics is more likely to convert into non-belief in such an exchange. 3) "Doubters can find help at Christian colleges and seminaries." This is not seen to be the case. 4) "They abandon their faith so that they can go out and sin freely." Tucker pointed out that too many people who profess faith sin more often than non-believers and that this argument was not a motivational issue in de-converting from faith. 5) "They were never sincere Christians to begin with." She has come across example after example of the most earnest and devout of evangelical, fundamentalist believers who became non-theists. Dan Barker was mentioned as just one of these erstwhile believers.
McKnight goes on to discuss the “advocates,” meaning those who go on to debunk the faith they left. He finds in us an “animus” in the “constant diatribes” of ours, from Charles Templeton’s “white-hot prose” to my whole book, to Harry McCall resorting “to caricature,” or even to Dan Barker, whom he claims has much “less rancor but still finding a need to tell that story in Losing Faith in Faith.” “The ‘anti-rhetoric,’ or the rhetoric that is so negatively against what they formerly believed, is both a characteristic of all kinds of conversion but especially those whose ‘conversion’ is leaving orthodox Christianity. Not all, however, are as white-hot in their antipathy to orthodoxy.” Of course, if he actually read my book, or my posts on DC, he should know I have no rancor towards Christians and that I treat my opponents respectfully. I suspect he feels the sting of our arguments rather than those other conversions he details in the other three chapters because he is simply a Christian believer, and we argue against his faith.
McKnight does acknowledge people should not minimize the anguish we apostates have when going through our crisis of faith. It is not an easy process. It is agonizing. Quoting Dan Barker he writes: “It was like tearing my whole frame of reality to pieces, ripping to shreds the fabric of meaning and hope, betraying the values of existence. And it hurt bad. It was like spitting on my mother, or like throwing one of my children out a window. It was sacrilege. All of my bases for thinking and values had to be restructured. Add to that inner conflict the outer conflict of reputation and you have a destabilizing war.”
McKnight also sees an interrelationship between us. Ed Babinski’s “fine collection of stories of those who have left the faith demonstrates an interlocking relationship at times – Babinski himself was influenced by William Bagley and by Robert Price while others were influenced by Dan Barker. There is presently, then, a connection for those who are reconsidering their faith, a connection that is filled with folks who have already traveled that path, know its rocks and its cliffs and who can guide the pilgrim away from faith.”
The internet is also an important facilitator in our apostasy, McKnight understands. While doubts are not to be expressed publicly in the churches, the internet is another matter entirely…”many find their way to the multitude of sites, like Positive Atheism or Debunking Christianity, where one can hear arguments against the orthodox faith and apologies for alternative systems of thought and meaning."
In the end, those of us who walk away from our faith find a sense of relief and independence when we finally decide to leave it all behind us. McKnight tells us that at some point we just had to decide, and sometimes it meant giving up our positions in life to gain the needed relief. He writes: “Harry McCall, a biblical scholar who voluntarily chose to leave Bob Jones University…chose to abandon his faith because ‘Jesus is so obviously a product of human imagination coupled with arbitrary faith that I chose to simply acknowledge the obvious rather than remain religious.”’ Robert M Price is an example of someone who found his relief akin to being “born again”: “I had to swallow hard after twelve years as an evangelical, but almost immediately life began to open up in an exciting way. I felt like a college freshman, thinking through important questions for the first time. The anxiety of doubt had passed into the adventure of discovery. It was like being born again.”
McKnight finally recommends Lewis Rambo’s book Understanding Religious Conversion as “required reading for every minister and theologian.”
This is a good, well researched book. I liked it very much. In one way it shows that those of us who have converted away from Christianity are not alone when we factor in the many other people who are also being converted to different theological positions. People change their minds, that’s all, and many of us do it.
I regularly encounter pseudo-skepticism -- reflexive doubt in response to criticism of credulous belief -- on the question of how the legend of Jesus could have developed in the period between Jesus' death and the writing of the synoptic gospels. Many Christians just don't see how or why such fantastic inventions arose from the crushing disappointment of the crucifixion of the man they supposed the Messiah (assuming here, arguendo, the historicity of Jesus and his crucifixion by the Romans at around the time commonly supposed)? "Why would these people die for a lie?" goes a common retort.
That's a fair question, even if it is offered pseudo-skeptically. But I don't think it's nearly as difficult as Christians commonly suppose. Even granting the dubious claims that all of Jesus disciples except John died a martyr's death (and indeed, this is precisely the kind of narrative we might expect as a later bit of legendary embellishment), we need not suppose a deliberate, coordinated conspiracy of lies is demanded of the situation. Rather, we need only look to the social capacity and disposition toward legend-making.
Inevitably, the pseudo-skeptic demands an example. I've suggested the legend and folklore of King Arthur, and pointed to the invention of "Newton's apple" by Voltaire as casual examples of the tendency to mythologize and embellish real people and events that capture our passions and imaginations. Reading a bit about Andrew Dickson White this week, intrigued by his provocative phrase "an asylum for Science", used in reference to his ambitions for Cornell University, a school he co-founded, I came across White's book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (which title I believe is familiar to me from the words of Bertrand Russell?). In the book, White recounts the case of Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits, patron saint of missionaries, and the man the Catholic church credits with converting more souls to Christianity than any other since Paul.
White's book (which can be read here, or at Google books complete with footnotes here) has a chapter on Xavier, in which he details the progression and development of legends -- miraculous legends -- about Xavier in the aftermath of his death. Here is why White chose to examine the case of Xavier:
"We have within the modern period very many examples which enable us to study the evolution of legendary miracles. Out of these I will select but one, which is chosen because it is the life of one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of humanity, one whose biography is before the world with its most minute details - in his own letters, in the letters of his associates, in contemporary histories, and in a multitude of biographies: this man is St. Francis Xavier. From these sources I draw the facts now to be given, but none of them are of Protestant origin; every source from which I shall draw is Catholic and Roman, and published under the sanction of the Church. " [1]
White provides his basic claim for the chapter here:
"During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers of letters, which were preserved and have since been published; and these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly all the features of his life. His own writings are very minute, and enable us to follow him fully. No account of a miracle wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any contemporary document. At the outside, but two or three things occurred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by himself and his contemporaries, for which the most earnest devotee could claim anything like Divine interposition; and these are such as may be read in the letters of very many fervent missionaries, Protestant as well as Catholic."[2]
White continues with an example:
"For example, in the beginning of his career, during a journey in Europe with an ambassador, one of the servants in fording a stream got into deep water and was in danger of drowning. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed very earnestly, and that the man finally struggled out of the stream. But within sixty years after his death, at his canonization, and by various biographers, this had been magnified into a miracle, and appears in the various histories dressed out in glowing colours. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed for the safety of the young man; but his biographers tell us that it was Xavier who prayed, and finally, by the later writers, Xavier is represented as lifting horse and rider out of the stream by a clearly supernatural act. "[3]
(emphasis mine in both quotes above)
According to White, Xavier is both quite keen on identifying diving providence, but claims or even mention of miracles is conspicuously missing from his writings. Not only are miracles absent from Xavier's own accounts, the man who knew Xavier best, fellow Jesuit and historian of the order Joseph Acosta, positively denies the presence of miracles in the Jesuits' missionary enterprise of the time:
"But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no longer produce apostolic results ``lies in the missionaries themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles.'' He then asks, ``Why should our age be so completely destitute of them?'' This question he answers at great length, and one of his main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the illiterate; and hence that ``in the early times miracles were necessary, but in our time they are not.''[4]
Over the course of the decades following Xavier's death, admiring biographers and sponsors for Xavier's canonization produced a rapid "evolution" of miracles and supernatural works that got attached to Xavier, increasingly fantastic as time went by. Here, White recalls the situation 70 years after Xavier's death:
"In 1622 came the canonization proceedings at Rome. Among the speeches made in the presence of Pope Gregory XV, supporting the claims of Xavier to saintship, the most important was by Cardinal Monte. In this the orator selects out ten great miracles from those performed by Xavier during his lifetime and describes them minutely. He insists that on a certain occasion Xavier, by the sign of the cross, made sea-water fresh, so that his fellow-passengers and the crew could drink it; that he healed the sick and raised the dead in various places; brought back a lost boat to his ship; was on one occasion lifted from the earth bodily and transfigured before the bystanders; and that, to punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the offenders in cinders from a volcano: this was afterward still more highly developed, and the saint was represented in engravings as calling down fire from heaven and thus destroying the town.
The most curious miracle of all is the eighth on the cardinal's list. Regarding this he states that, Xavier having during one of his voyages lost overboard a crucifix, it was restored to him after he had reached the shore by a crab.
The cardinal also dwelt on miracles performed by Xavier's relics after his death, the most original being that sundry lamps placed before the image of the saint and filled with holy water burned as if filled with oil.''[5]
This is just a small sample of the inventory provided by White in the chapter. What is striking is not just the breadth and depth of the body of legend associated with Xavier in the years following his death, but the "whole cloth fabrication" of the stories. For most, and possibly all of the miraculous accounts given later, there doesn't even seem to be the "seed" used for later embellishment, but a kind of ex nihilo creation of a miraculum vitae for Xavier (one can feel the account of the crab returning Xavier's crucifix resonating with Paul's miraculous survival of the viper's bite on Malta in Acts).
The import of the example of Xavier, and the spontaneous appearance and evolution of miracles attributed to him should be obvious to the Christian, to the pseudo-skeptic; given a couple decades, and a cult following, the invention and development of miracle accounts -- accounts of fantastic miracles -- isn't implausible, or even novel, and relevant examples are found right inside the history and culture of Christendom itself.
I do note that White's book is now well over a hundred years old, and as science proves, a lot can be discovered over the course of a hundred and more years. I've done some googling on this, but have not found anything that indicates that White's claims in the book have been overturned by the discovery of new evidence from Xavier's writings or reports by his contemporaries that substantiate the miracles later attributed to him. If readers are aware of such a case, I stand to be corrected. But as it is, I commend the case of Xavier and his admirers to the pseudo-skeptic, as a vivid historical example of "legendation" in action, the kind of inventions and embellishments we see accounting for the death of Jesus circa 30CE and the legend of Jesus emerging over the next 50-60 years.
[1] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (Prometheus Books, 1993), lib ii, cap XIII, p. 5.
[2] ibid., p. 6.
[3] ibid., p. 6.
[4] ibid., pp. 9-10.
[5] ibid., pp. 14-15.
Dr. Hector Avalos responds to Dr. Weikart in what follows:
One of the main goals of Intelligent Design creationists is to undermine the theory of evolution by arguing that it can have catastrophic human consequences. This, of course, involves a fallacious logical argument from consequences. Whether a theory has good or bad consequences is irrelevant to whether that theory is true.
But, this logical fallacy has not deterred Intelligent Design creationists who use it to instill fear of evolution in the public. One of the latest attempts in this fear-mongering effort is the pro-Intelligent Design propaganda film,
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which paints Darwinism as the main, or only, factor in the Nazi Holocaust.
April 21, 2008, the headlines read:
Orthodox groups clash in Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
Christians fist fight at Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre,
Police breaks off clash at Church of Holy Sepulchre,
Priests exchange blows over religious rights,
And about 180 other headlines...[just visit google news and enter "church of the holy sepulchre"]
For stories about previous brawls at that "holy site" keep reading. There's also some interesting related news and opinion. (Paul Manata and Victor Reppert may want to take note; or better yet, J.P. Holding and James White; or J.P. Holding and Steve Hays)...
EARLIER FIGHT AT HOLY SITE
Six Christian denominations jealously guard their rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, so when one denomination moved a chair into a spot claimed by another, it was a declaration of war (a violation of the “status quo” law as enshrined in a 1757 Ottoman declaration). About eleven monks were taken to hospital after being hit by rocks, metal rods and chairs that they threw at each other.
Christian monks from rival denominations [Ethiopians and Egyptian Copts] have been warring for more than a century over the roof of the shrine which the Ethiopians call the “House of Sultan Solomon” because they believe the biblical King Solomon gave it as a gift to the Queen of Sheba. The Ethiopians lost control of the roof during an epidemic in the 19th century which enabled the Copts to take over. But in 1970, during a brief absence by Coptic priests from a rooftop chapel, the Ethiopian clerics returned and have been squatting there ever since. An Ethiopian monk huddles in the corner of the chapel day and night to guard the squatters’ claim. The Egyptian monk, who has been living with them on the roof since the 1970 takeover to assert the Copts’ rights, decided to move his chair out of the sun during a hot Jerusalem day. “They (the Ethiopians) teased him,” said Father Afrayim, an Egyptian Coptic monk at the next door Coptic monastery. “They poked him and brought some women who came behind him and pinched him,” he said. Each side accuses the other of throwing the first blow in the fist-fight and stone throwing that ensued. Police eventually broke up the brawl but by all accounts many of the protagonists were already wounded.
Reuters, July 29, 2002
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ANOTHER FIGHT AT HOLY SITE
Greek Orthodox and Catholic Franciscan priests got into a fist fight at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, Christianity’s holiest shrine, after arguing over whether a door in the basilica should be closed during a procession. Dozens of people, including several Israeli police officers, were slightly hurt in the brawl at the shrine, built over the spot where tradition says Jesus was crucified and buried. Four priests were detained, police spokesman Shmulik Ben-Ruby said. Custody of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is shared by several denominations that jealously guard territory and responsibilities under a fragile deal hammered out over the last centuries. Any perceived encroachment on one group’s turf can lead to vicious feuds, sometimes lasting hundreds of years.
Monday’s fight broke out during a procession of hundreds of Greek Orthodox worshippers... Church officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that at one point, the procession passed a Roman Catholic chapel, and priests from both sides started arguing over whether the door to the chapel should be open or closed. Club-wielding Israeli riot police broke up the fight…
In 2003, Israeli police threatened to limit the number of worshippers allowed to attend an Easter ceremony if the denominations did not agree on whom would lead the ceremony… But a year earlier, the Greek patriarch and Armenian clergyman designated to enter the tomb exchanged blows after a dispute over who would be first to exit the chamber.
Associated Press, 2004
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CATHOLIC MARCHERS TURN ON GLASTONBURY PAGANS
Local pagans were pelted with salt and branded witches who “would burn in hell” during a procession organised by Youth 2000, a conservative Catholic lay group. The Magick Box, a pagan shop on the route of the march, was also singled out and attacked. Maya Pinder, the owner of the shop, said: “We’ve had to hear comments such as ‘burn the witches’, we’ve had salt thrown in our faces and at our shop, people were openly saying they were ‘cleansing Glastonbury of paganism.’ It was as if we had returned to the dark ages. This is hugely damaging to Glastonbury… it is hard enough to trade in Glastonbury as it is, if you were to take away the pagan element it would be a dead town.” The Somerset town is known for having a large population of resident and visiting pagans.
The archdruid of Glastonbury, Dreow Bennett, said: “To call the behavior of some of their members medieval would be an understatement. I personally witnessed the owner of the Magick Box being confronted by one of their associates and being referred to as a bloody bitch and being told ‘you will burn in hell.’”
Father Kevin Knox-Lecky of St Mary’s church said that after meeting representatives of the pagan community he had decided not to invite Youth 2000 to the town again. He said: “A family appeared who we don’t know, who were very destructive not only in the town and to the pagan community, but were also swearing at our parishioners as well.” He said the majority of Catholics taking part in the procession had been well-behaved and respectful of the pagans. The retreat was organised last week to mark the 467th anniversary of the beheading of the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Richard Whiting, and fellow martyrs. Youth 2000 describes itself as “an independent, international initiative that helps young adults aged 16-35 plug back into God at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church.” It was set up 10 years ago by a disenchanted Catholic barrister who wanted a return to the traditional teachings of the church for young people.
Charlie Conner, the managing director of Youth 2000, said: “There were several incidents that happened that same weekend that were linked to people who had come to Glastonbury for the retreat. This was in direct contravention of the general spirit of Youth 2000 and its express instructions. The young man who was fined was not in fact registered on the retreat, although he did attempt to attend it. Youth 2000 does not condone or encourage this kind of behaviour from anyone. We fully agree that differences on matters of faith cannot and should not be resolved by any kind of harassment.”
A spokesman for Avon and Somerset police confirmed a youth had been arrested at Magick Box on suspicion of causing harassment, alarm or distress. Two women were also given cautions and warned about their future conduct.
Thair Shaikh, “Catholic marchers turn on Glastonbury pagans,” The Guardian, UK, Nov. 4, 2006 www.guardian.co.uk
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MARK TWAIN’S EXPERIMENT
Consider my experiment. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk [Muslim] from Constantinople; a Greek Orthodox Christian from Crete [Greece]; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahmin [Hindu priest] from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
Man is the only animal that has religion, even the True Religion--several of them.
Mark Twain, “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” 1896
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A VERSION OF MARK TWAIN’S EXPERIMENT
In the middle of the 20th century in the eastern European country of Rumania (that was communist at the time), anyone whom the government considered “anti-communist” was imprisoned. In one case ministers of different religions were imprisoned together in the same close quarters:
“In the hour which the priests’ room had set aside for prayer, Catholics collected in one corner, the Orthodox occupied another, the Unitarians a third. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had a nest on the upper bunks; the Calvinists assembled down below. Twice a day, our various services were held: but among all these ancient worshippers I could scarcely find two men of different sects to say one ‘Our Father’ together. Far from fostering mutual understanding, our common plight made for conflict. Catholics could not forgive the Orthodox hierarchy for collaborating with Communism. Christians of minority beliefs disagreed about ‘rights.’ Disputes arose over every point of doctrine. And while discussion was normally conducted with genteel malice, as learnt in seminaries on wet Sunday afternoons, sometimes tempers flared.” [Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, In God’s Underground (London : W. H. Allen, 1968), p.218, 232)]
Their “quarrels...came to a halt” only after loudspeakers were put in their cells that blared communist slogans day and night, and they were forced to attend lectures advocating communism. That was when the priests and ministers “learned that all our denominations could be reduced to two: the first is hatred, which makes ritual and dogma a pretext for attacking others; the second is love, in which men of all kinds realize their oneness and brotherhood before God.” But if the communists had not added those blaring speakers and forced them to attend lectures, would the pastors and priests have all joined together against their common enemy and “learned” how to avoid “disputing over every point of doctrine?”
E.T.B.
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“EQUUSTENTIALISM” BY EMO PHILIPS
(Excerpts from his 1985 comedy CD for Epic Records, E=MO2)
Emo: I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!”
Jumper: “Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
Emo: “Well, there’s so much to live for!”
Jumper: “Like what?”
Emo: “Well...are you religious or an atheist?”
Jumper: “Religious.”
Emo: “Me too! Are you a Christian, Jew, or something else?”
Jumper: “A Christian.”
Emo: “Me too! Protestant or Catholic?”
Jumper: “Protestant.”
Emo: “Me too! What franchise?”
Jumper: “Baptist.”
Emo: “Wow! Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?”
Jumper: “Northern Baptist.”
Emo: “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
Jumper: “Northern Conservative Baptist.”
Emo: “Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist or Northern Conservative Reformed Baptist?”
Jumper: “Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist.”
Emo: “Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Eastern Region?”
Jumper: “Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region.”
Emo: “Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?”
Jumper: He said, “Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.”
Emo: And I said, “Die, heretic!” And pushed him off the bridge.
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But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!
Denis Diderot (1713-1784), cited in Against the Faith by Jim Herrick
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Men have gone to war and cut each other’s throat because they could not agree as to what was to become of them after their throats were cut.
Walter Parker Stacy (1884-1951)
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There’s a tendency [in religion] to declare that there is more backsliding around than the national toboggan championships, that heresy must be torn out root and branch, and even arm and leg and eye and tongue, that it’s time to wipe the slate clean. Blood is generally considered very efficient for this purpose.
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
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Religious tolerance has developed more as a consequence of the impotence of religions to impose their dogmas on each other than as a consequence of spiritual humility.
Sidney Hook, The Partisan Review, March, 1950
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The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they’ve realized they can’t get away with it.
W. H. Auden, in Alan Arisen, ed., The Table-Talk of W. H. Auden (1990), quoted from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations
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EVERYONE’S A SKEPTIC
(ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE’S RELIGION)
Millions of Hindus pray over statues of Shiva’s penis. Do you think there’s an invisible Shiva who wants his penis prayed over--or are you a skeptic?
Mormons say that Jesus came to America after his resurrection. Do you agree--or are you a doubter?
Florida’s Santeria worshipers sacrifice dogs, goats, chickens, etc., and toss their bodies into waterways. Do you think Santeria gods want animals killed--or are you skeptical?
Muslim suicide bombers who blow themselves up in Israel are taught that “martyrs” go instantly to a paradise full of lovely female houri nymphs. Do you think the dead bombers are in heaven with houris--or are you a doubter?
Unification Church members think Jesus visited Master Moon and told him to convert all people as “Moonies.” Do you believe this sacred tenet of the Unification Church?
Jehovah’s Witnesses say that, any day now, Satan will come out of the earth with an army of demons, and Jesus will come out of the sky with an army of angels, and the Battle of Armageddon will kill everyone on earth except Jehovah’s Witnesses. Do you believe this solemn teaching of their church?
Aztecs skinned maidens and cut out human hearts for a feathered serpent god. What’s your stand on invisible feathered serpents? Aha!--just as I suspected, you don’t believe.
Catholics are taught that the communion wafer and wine magically become the actual body and blood of Jesus during chants and bell-ringing. Do you believe in the “real presence”--or are you a disbeliever?
Faith-healer Ernest Angley says he has the power, described in the Bible, to “discern spirits,” which enables him to see demons inside sick people, and see angels hovering at his revivals. Do you believe this religious assertion?
The Bible says people who work on the Sabbath (Saturday) must be killed: “Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 31:15). Should we execute such people--or do you doubt this scripture?
At a golden temple in West Virginia, saffron-robed worshipers think they’ll become one with Lord Krishna if they chant “Hare Krishna” enough. Do you agree--or do you doubt it?
Members of the “Heaven’s Gate” commune said they could “shed their containers” (their bodies) and be transported to a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp Comet. Do you think they’re now on that UFO--or are you a skeptic?
During the witch hunts, inquisitor priests tortured thousands of women into confessing that they blighted crops, had sex with Satan, etc. then burned them for it. Do you think the church was right to enforce the Bible’s command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18)--or do you doubt this scripture?
Members of Spiritualist churches say they talk with the dead during worship services. Do you think they actually communicate with spirits of deceased people?
Millions of American Pentecostals spout “the unknown tongue,” a spontaneous outpouring of sounds. They say it is the Holy Ghost, the third god of the Trinity, speaking through them. Do you believe this sacred tenet of many Americans?
Scientologists say each human has a soul which is a “Thetan” that came from another planet. Do you believe their doctrine--or doubt it?
Ancient Greeks thought a multitude of gods lived on Mt. Olympus--and some of today’s New Agers think invisible Lemurians live inside Mt. Shasta. What’s your position on mountain gods--belief or disbelief?
In the mountains of West Virginia, some people obey Christ’s farewell command that true believers “shall take up serpents” (Mark 16:18). They pick up rattlers at church services. Do you believe this scripture, or not?
India’s Thugs thought the many-armed goddess Kali wanted them to strangle human sacrifices. Do you think there’s an invisible goddess who wants people strangled--or are you a disbeliever?
Tibet’s Buddhists say that when an old Lama dies, his spirit enters a baby boy being born somewhere. So they remain leaderless for a dozen years or more, then they find a pubescent boy who seems to have knowledge of the old Lama’s private life, and they anoint the boy as the new Lama (actually the old Lama in a new body). Do you think that dying Lamas fly into new babies, or not?
In China in the 1850s, a Christian convert said God appeared to him, told him he was Jesus’s younger brother, and commanded him to “destroy demons.” He raised an army of believers who waged the “Taiping Rebellion” that killed 20 million people. Do you think he was Christ’s brother--or do you doubt it?
James A. Haught, “Everyone’s a Skeptic--About Other Religions” [Originally delivered as a talk to Campus Freethought Alliance, Marshall University, Huntington, WV, July 12, 1998] http://www.infidels.org/secular_web/feature/1998/skeptic.html
(Eugene Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 2007). To illustrate our point, we shall examine almost every sentence in a section titled, “Jesus Frees Slaves,” and found on pages 144 to 148 of that book.
