Civil Commotion

Albert the Pious went off today on yet another attack on pragmatism, the philosophical underpinning of science and engineering that makes what once seemed like miracles a commonplace.

But perhaps the most important thing for Christians to recognize is that pragmatism actually rules and reigns throughout much of America as the dominant understanding of truth and that helps explain what’s going on in so many college and university campuses and why so many people seem to have such a casual even subversive understanding of truth in terms of public conversation in public debate.

Notice: This is the complaint of a man who believes in a literal Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, a global flood, and all the rest of the long catalog of absurdities which comprise the Bible. But if you’re curious and want to know a little more about pragmatism and what the fuss is all about, I’ve written about this before.

Even if there are nuggets of history buried here and there, the gospels do not qualify as history because: (a) they are totally unsupported by contemporary documentation; (b) they were created by unidentified authors decades after the depicted events; (c) we have no clue what their sources were; (d) there are clearly many themes and elements borrowed/stolen from pagan religions. I could go on, but you get the picture. Even devout scholars hem and haw about the quotient of history in the gospels, but nonetheless manage to come up with justifications for still believing in Jesus,

The churches have failed utterly — and intentionally — to report these finding to the folks in the pews. The laity remains in the dark about the monumental labors of Bible scholars — and their discovery that the gospels fall outside the realm of history.

David Madison

Yep. There are many fine popularizers of Biblical research right now: John Spong, Bart Ehrman, Jonathan Kirsch, Elaine Pagels, and their books are well worth reading. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to have access to the research, or to understand it, and it is dispositive: Christianity is not true. Settled; there is no educated, intellectually serious dispute about it.

So happens that I operated a used bookstore literally across the street from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary for about two years, and I have an almost complete set of the textbooks then in use. Even any bright seminarian knows the Bible is full of bullshit — which doesn’t stop them from standing in their pulpits and howling and bellowing that the Bible is inerrant and totally true and God wants this and is pissed-off by that and on and on.

The clergy are the most intellectually corrupt class of men in society, and now their lies and manipulations are not concerned merely with fleecing gullible fools — who, after all, are always going to be fleeced by somebody — but are an existential threat to the country itself.

Lance Wallnau: Our Prayer Changed The Path Of Hurricane Irma

Starting last Thursday, right-wing preacher Lance Wallnau streamed a nightly series of videos on Periscope in which he commanded Hurricane Irma to change its projected path away from Florida by repeatedly and passionately ordering the storm to dissipate and turn out into the Atlantic Ocean.

That obviously did not happen, but that didn’t stop Wallnau from streaming a new video last night in which he declared that the prayers that he and his followers offered up had moved the storm and that its final path was due to “an amazing intervention of God.”

No wonder H.L. Mencken coined the term booboisie to describe the American voter.

• The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille [William Jennings Bryan]; if it fails, they will devour it.

• It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

• All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

• When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.

• To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

• If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

• The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud.

• Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

  True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. . . . They are free to shoot back. But they can’t disarm their enemy.

  The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us. . . . What should be a civilized man’s attitude toward such superstitions? It seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of contempt. If he admits that they have any intellectual dignity whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he pretends to a respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly, regardless of tender feelings.

• By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists?

• No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

• Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.

The branch of philosophy concerned with what we know, and how we know that we know it, is called epistemology — and the grotesque failure of the Republican Party into madness is at last causing some public discussion of it.

Political scientist Lee Drutman argues in a Vox essay that American politics is descending into what he calls “doom-loop partisanship.” Drutman notes that Americans have been “retreating into our separate tribal epistemologies, each with their own increasingly incompatible set of facts and first premises,” each heavily racialized, in which “[t]here’s no possibility for rational debate or middle-ground compromise. Just two sorted teams, with no overlap, no cross-cutting identities, and with everyone’s personal sense of status constantly on the line.”

Here’s an example of it that I’ve given in the past, but it bears repeating: When an engineer sits down to analyze a problem, or a design, every single line of the analysis has a pedigree. The Pythagorean theorem can be traced back to ~ 600 B.C., and the rest of the geometry can be traced back to Euclid’s Elements. The physics can be traced back to Isaac Newton, and so can the calculus. My specialty is soil mechanics, and every equation can be traced back to an observation made by a specific individual on a specific date, and then through a long series of follow-up experiments conducted by specific individuals on specific dates with specific observations; and then challenges, and more experiments conducted by particular individuals who have names, and with particular results.

For every single line of the analysis, there is a long, well-documented and debated continuum of observations, tests, refinements, more tests, more refinements.

But Holy Men, who can’t even prove that god exists, or that the Bible enjoys the authorization of the god they can’t prove exists, don’t think twice about going around claiming “God wants this” or “God condemns that.” Religion has no epistemic standards. None. That’s why they teach that faith — belief without evidence — is a virtue, and why religion kills people every single day even as the list of marvels created by scientists and engineers grows longer every single day.

With Jerry Falwell’s founding of the Moral Majority in 1979, conservative Christianity united behind a movement that had no epistemology, no way of knowing — and the Republican Party promptly whored itself to the movement. The political party that was once the home of education and achievement and forward-looking pragmatism became the party of mindless shibboleths. Indeed, the Republicans have become the political arm of, basically, a regional religious and racist movement — the old Moral Majority and the southern Dixiecrats.

I love the expression “tribal epistemologies,” but it isn’t actually accurate; the Republicans have abandoned epistemology, with the result that they have no intellectual standards whatever.