Re: Anti-Christian bias To "X": First, it is no problem to concede that the anti-science views of some Christians are indefensible. However, there are other factors to look at and we need to remember that far from all Christian believers regard science unfavorably. And among those who are critical, this ordinarily is selective. There is no shortage of Christians who are active in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Where there is opposition is in anything to do with evolution and anything to do with Freud. Maybe you can also add astronomy to this list but that is less clear. You don't need to guess that I regard this kind of opposition as horribly dysfunctional. It is intellectually dishonest and it is stupid. But isn't it questionable to put faith in science? What is the alternative? Faith in "common sense" that is often wrong? Faith in Biblical inerrancy when the Bible, true as it often is, nonetheless contains all kinds of demonstrable errors of fact? Faith in what else? Intuition? We all know that, while intuition may produce valuable insights, it, too, can be fallible, sometimes ridiculously so. Science isn't perfect but it is self-correcting. There isn't a better choice available to us. There nonetheless is a problem: Some things are called scientific that are no such thing, such as the attitudes of Leftists which are imagined to rest on enlightened -viz scientific- premises. However, Left wing attitudes, although some may be scientific in this sense, are at least half as unscientific as anything gets. The glaring inconsistencies of Leftists make this abundantly clear. Consider how Leftists are, if anything, pro-Islam. There is almost no criticism at all from the Left directed toward Muslims or Islam. Almost all anti-religion criticisms made by the Left are anti-Christian in character or, in the past 25 years or so, increasingly anti-Jewish / anti-Semitic. And anyone who does criticize Islam is usually smeared as a bigot by Leftists. Yet of all religions on earth, all 'orthodox' forms of Islam are the most opposed to everything the Left says it stands for and believes in. Pick any social issue, women's rights, homosexuality, evolution, abortion, sexual freedom, and Muslims either are very nearly as strong on the issue as Evangelicals or true-believer Catholics, as is the case for abortion, or they are even more 'strict,' as is the case for homosexuality or women's rights. When it comes to free speech, this has become identified with conservatives in our era. The Left is now strongly opposed to free speech. Hence groups like the SPLC that define all conservative views as forms of "hate speech" and groups like the ACLU that fight against the rights of religious believers to express themselves in the public sphere. Meanwhile, on the supposedly benighted Right, while sometimes this is grudgingly, there nonetheless is defense of free speech rights at least some of the time. A good example of this is how Christina Hoff Sommers has been treated, a professional woman with a great deal to say that is well worth hearing who, by her own definition, is a "classical liberal," viz a free speech liberal, yet who cannot get published in Left-leading periodicals but is published in conservative journals. And on the issue of science, just how pro-science is the Left? The war against sociobiology is led not by Rightists but by Left-wingers who will defend to the death each and every muddle-headed or grossly simplistic assumption of gender feminists even if it means denying the truths of evolutionary biology. And who has led to charge against vaccines? Left-wingers. The speciality of Rightists is opposition to fluoridation of water. Which is to say that assuming an "enlightened" Left-derived position on issues of the day may not be enlightened at all. You are free to offer criticism of religion, and why not? But if close to 100% of your critique is directed at Christians and close to 0% is directed against Muslims no-one is supposed to notice the discrepancy? By every objective measure, Muslims are far worse on every issue identified by "liberals" as important than are any Christians you can name, yet Muslims get a free pass??? What the hell is this? Which does not count specifics like the fact that all orthodox Buddhists are anti-abortion; after all Buddhism is all about the sanctity of life. Yet 100% of opposition to "pro-life" people is directed against Evangelicals and Catholics? What the hell is that ? ----- Finally, there is the question of how someone criticizes religion. You can, of course, focus all your attention on truth claims of the Bible or of Christian believers more generally. This approach can have value. But personally, I freely admit that the Bible contains mistakes. I think a number like 500 mistakes would be fair enough. Its just that I also think that the Bible includes many, many truths and, for me, there is an obvious choice when considering maybe 5000 truths in the Bible vs its 500 errors. I prefer not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In any case, the issue of truth claims, while it is an essential part of any meaningful critique of religion, is only one way to look at the issue. Sometimes it makes far more sense to look at the functions of religion, what faith -or a life of faith- means for individuals and communities. What are the effects of faith? And what are the effects of the alternatives to faith? By and large, religion, most religions, anyway -this excludes Islam- are helpful to people, provide them richer more meaningful lives and put them in touch with other people in beneficial ways. My argument isn't that any faith tradition is perfect. None are nor can any possibly be perfect. However, the outlook to take that makes the most sense to me is similar to that toward the Bible. Namely, yes, sometimes religion is dysfunctional. Just think of the idiots that often inspire Evangelicals at the voting booth. But then I think of the idiots who inspire Leftists, like perhaps the most incompetent and dishonest president in US history, Barack Hussein Obama, and I can't find a good way to tell you which kinds of choices are objectively worse. Religion is imperfect but is far more good than otherwise and all alternatives to religion that I know about are worse than religion by any objective measure. It is as simple as this. Billy ================================ Ahead of the Trend August 23, 2015 Bigotry in numbers: Why so many academics look down on evangelicals By David Briggs
One finding I would most like to share after more than a quarter-century of traveling throughout this country reporting on issues of faith is how similar people are in their basic desires and ambitions. Talk to people of faith of all ages in any region of the U.S., and what they are basically searching for is a sense of transcendent meaning that provides hope, optimism and purpose in the face of the struggles associated with being human. They want to become better versions of themselves, more caring and loving friends, neighbors, parents and spouses. And they see in their faith both the support networks and community rituals and the interior resources such as prayer and meditation a path to a better life. Yet there remains a disconnect in popular culture, and in many media and academic settings, between the preoccupation with the most radically polarizing figures speaking in the name of religion and what goes on in your neighborhood church, synagogue or mosque. That disconnect would be comical if it were not so damaging to some of our most vulnerable populations. So why do we have so many signs of becoming an increasingly polarized nation, where we are willing to apply negative stereotypes to entire groups of people, whether they are atheists or evangelicals, Muslims or blacks? It is not because such indiscriminate attitudes have a strong basis in science. Behavioral and social scientists increasingly are finding evidence of how individual characteristics – a person’s image of God, the depth of their prayer lives, the number of friends they have in a congregation – transcend faith categories in predicting the impact of religion in people’s lives. A recent study indicating widespread bias toward conservative Christians by college and university teachers provides some possible answers. The unpleasant truth supported by this and other research: It is easier to judge people we do not know, and inhibitions about expressing prejudice tend to fall away if enough of your colleagues have the same beliefs. Selective bias Those who teach in higher education are relatively OK with some religious groups, according to a study based on a 2012 online national survey that drew 464 complete responses. Asked to assess religious groups on a “feeling thermometer” of 1 to 100, Jewish people, mainline Protestants and Catholics all achieved an average score of 65 or higher, researchers led by University of North Texas sociologist George Yancey reported in an online article in the journal Sociology of Religion. Next to the bottom, just slightly above fundamentalists, were Protestant evangelicals with an average score of 48. Based on the rankings and other survey responses, researchers Yancey, Sam Reiner and Jake O’Connell classified nearly half of the participants as “ conservative Protestant critics,” those with negative attitudes toward evangelicals. The greatest sin of evangelicals: A perceived intolerance toward the academic critics own political views and belief systems. “They tend to be intolerant of others with different points of view or political positions,” one health care professor said. An English professor said evangelicals were attempting “to change the U.S. from a secular to a religious state.” In contrast, just 17 percent of the academic respondents were classified as “theological definers,” a group describing conservative Protestants in more neutral, academic terms. Substituting hostility with more scholarly assessments made a major difference in attitudes, researchers noted. Thus, while critics gave evangelicals an average score of 41 on the feeling thermometer, theological definers gave an average score of 63. Of course, bias among majority groups or those with higher degrees of status, power and influence is not limited to any one social or professional group. Just how much we judge many minority groups is easily seen in national surveys where atheists and Muslims tend to fall toward the bottom in terms of trust and acceptance. The work of Yancey and other researchers, however, is helping to provide a greater understanding for such polarization. For example, the study of academic attitudes toward conservative Protestants suggests some more universal grounds for bias: They are not like us: Research has indicated academics in general are less religious and more politically liberal than most Americans, and that conservative Protestants are substantially underrepresented on university faculty. Conservative Protestants are also viewed as being less educated and low status, separate from the elite status aspired to by many academics in higher education. In several ways, conservative Protestants may be considered the “quintessential out-group for academics,” Yancey, Reimer and O’Connell noted. Don’t know them, don’t want to know them: In the study, the harshest academic critics of conservative Protestants were the ones with the least contact, and least likely to seek to establish relationships with evangelicals. Those who took a more neutral academic approach were most likely to have evangelicals in their social network. “Despite bad press, my (many) dealings with evangelical Protestants remind me that most of those with whom I’ve worked sincerely try to lead lives marked with loving kindness and good will,” one “theological definer” reported.. Easy to pick on, harder to defend: The study also found academic critics felt free to use harsh, emotional language when describing conservative Protestants; more neutral observers largely confined themselves to academic, dispassionate assessments. The open hostility of critics “may produce a silencing effect which keeps conservative Protestants ‘in the closet,’” study researchers said. Another set of new studies suggests that belonging to a tightly knit and unified group not only tends to legitimize prejudice against others, but also gives permission to be openly hostile to those opposed by a majority of their own group. Membership in a group where bias is acceptable appears to give individuals a license to “express prejudices they would otherwise keep to themselves,” researchers from the London Business School and New York University reported. The good news is attitudes can change. But change requires humility. And intellectual humility, the ability to understand the limits of one’s own knowledge and to be open to new ways of understanding, seems to be in short supply, even, or perhaps in some cases especially, among academics. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
