Accidental Historian

In which PZ Myers illustrates Geds' point for him...

I stuck a YouTube of Phil Plait's "Don't Be a Dick" speech in to the footnotes of Part 3 of the Perspective and Apologetics series.  Watch it if you didn't before and if you have time.  It's good stuff.

PZ Myers wrote up a response to the talk (and other responses to the talk) right after it aired.  His post included this bit:

One recent flashpoint in this argument was Phil Plait's talk at TAM 8, in which he asked a rhetorical question, "How many of you … became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?" And the Pharyngula switchboard lit up. Lots of people wrote to me via email or twitter, some gloating, some just unhappy, stating that Phil had just called me out.

No, he didn't. He didn't mention me at all. He opened up against a strawman New Dick, which is unfortunate, because there isn't anyone who fits that description in the skeptical movement. There are people like that elsewhere: drill sergeants and televangelists come to mind.(Emphasis mine.)

Here we cut to the core of the apologist problem.  Plait made the extremely reasonable observation that people don't like being called idiots and it's not a good strategy for encouraging change.  PZ's response was to say, "He's attacking someone who doesn't exist on my side.  But you know where those people do exist?  Over on the other side.

Plait's comments were pretty obviously rhetorical and intended to illustrate a certain type of exchange.  Just because there's no proof that anyone has ever walked up to somone and literally said, "You're an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard," doesn't mean that they don't convey that exact message.  Saying, "We don't do it, but the other guys sure as shit do," is rather, well, hypocritical.

Meanwhile, PZ put up a couple of posts today on Muslim and Jewish treatment of women.  In a post about women being segregated due to ultra-orthodox pressures at a conference on women's health he concludes with this:

Isn’t that typical? Whether it’s Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, the exclusionary extremists all rise to prominence and start imposing their superstitious nonsense on everyone else…while the more numerous moderates tremble and hesitate to speak out against folly, and start looking for compromises. You cannot build a better world when you start by compromising with idiocy.

This follows a quotemine from the original linked Globe and Mail article:

To be sure, not all sectors of the ultra-Orthodox community support these exclusionary tactics, explains Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a Hebrew University sociology professor and author of the recently published book Theocratic Democracy. “But most people are too afraid to speak out.”

That was the very last paragraph in the article, which also included these bits:

Several Israeli human rights groups have protested the men-only nature of the conference. While it is considered a private rather than a public forum, and therefore not subject to Israeli policies against discrimination, Puah receives considerable funding from the Health Ministry, these complainants point out.

and

At least two male Israeli doctors have withdrawn from making presentations at this week’s Puah event once they were made aware of the exclusion of women, or at least once public outrage over the exclusion became apparent.

I find it extremely hard to square this notion of a trembling mass of wimpy, frightened moderates afraid to speak out against the loud-mouthed extremists and the words "Several Israeli human rights groups have protested" and "public outrage over the exclusion became apparent."

Then again, that piece I linked to on Phil Plait's talk contained this bit:

There is a fair point being made, that there are multiple strategies that work to convince people to rethink bad ideas, and they don't all involve punching people in the face…and many of the best strategies do involve politely listening and criticizing. But I think the best ideas involve a combination of willingness to listen and politely engage, and a forthright core of assertiveness and confrontation — tactical dickishness, if you want to call it that.

This sounds extremely reasonable.  I think, too, that it's something Phil Plait would agree with, seeing as how he finished his speech with an illustration of dealing with a creationist student being argumentative, then politely listening to her arguments and telling her that her sources were based on false and/or outdated information and directing her on where to go to find scientifically rigorous info.  So I actually have no fucking clue why PZ had a problem with it, other than the perception that possibly a moderate wasn't trembling and hesitating to speak out against a loud-mouthed, exclusionary extremist in the atheist movement.  But, y'know, I could be wrong about that one.

And then there's his conclusion:

I don't, actually — it also seems like a dick move to try and associate a strategy with gender, since some of the most wonderfully dickish skeptics I know are female. But that's a separate issue.

Classy, PZ, really classy.  Way to redirect the conversation to an accusation of sexism because Plait used a common, colloquial term.  It's funny how at no point did he engage the substance of Plait's talk, choosing instead to assert that Plait was unfairly targeting a non-existent strawman and that the real, honest atheists/skeptics would never, ever egregiously misrepresent the words and attitudes of another person or group of people just to score a cheap shot and win applause.

Nope.  PZ Myers would never do anything like that...

Perspective and Apologetics, Part 4

I freely admit that one of my favorite moments after leaving the church was the day I realized, “Hey, I don’t have to go hang out with church people anymore.”  I didn’t have any real problem with church people in general, though.  I had a problem with certain people I used to go to church with who were, for lack of a better expression, total dicks.

One of the problems with religious meetings in general is that they function as a form of enforced community and homogeneity over a collection of people who quite possibly might have absolutely nothing in common.  It’s considered bad form, however, to point any of that sort of stuff out.  As such, the church ends up being a hotbed of low-key resentment and quiet backbiting.  Everyone’s supposed to be nice to each other, since otherwise Baby Jesus will cry.  If you’re going to call somebody out you’d better be prepared to do it in a Biblically-approved way (um, basically, you need lots of Bible verses) or get censured for pointing out that someone else is being a dick.

It’s easier to simply remain silent.  Or leave.  That is the true reason there’s so much movement between churches.  Group dynamics change constantly.  A key person leaves or a new person comes and now everything is thrown out of whack.  Two people get in a fight and stop talking and all of the sudden nothing can get accomplished.  One person constantly undercuts another person just to maintain their position in the social hierarchy and no one else notices or is willing to speak up.  These things happen in all groups, churches included.  But churches have an added level of difficulty, since everyone’s supposed to get along because Jesus.

There’s also the added level of change: that of theology.  People leave churches because they disagree with the teaching on a fairly regular basis.  In my experience, however, this is a secondary concern.  If people leave because they don’t like the theology it’s usually because something in the group dynamic has changed.  The big reason I’m aware of is usually, “Pastor So-and-So left/died and I don’t like Pastor New Guy nearly as much.”

For all the talk, meanwhile, of who is right, the churches that do the best job of bringing new people in are the ones where people feel, for lack of a more accurate term, welcome.  This was the not-so-secret of the success of the megachurch movement.  Smiling people greet you at the door and make sure you know that there are small groups you can join on Wednesday, prayer nights on Thursday, and special programs on Saturday nights.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong to this approach to Christianity.  Yes, it’s shallow, crass, and manipulative, but that’s pretty much how the modern American consumer culture works.  Willowcreek and Saddleback are less houses of worship than Best Buy with a totally different set of products.  The objective is to get people in and make them repeat customers.

In talking about a different – but related – subject on Tuesday, Ed Brayton said this:

I have made two arguments about this subject repeatedly over the years. The first is that there is not one Christianity, there are many — and just as many Islams. The Christianity of Bishop Tutu could hardly be more different from the Christianity of RJ Rushdoony, for example, and the Islam of Osama Bin Laden could hardly be more different from the Islam of Muqtedar Khan and many others. The fact that I think all variations of both religions are false does not mean they’re equally dangerous or destructive.

This is something that cannot and must not be ignored.  I think that most people are, at least on a visceral level, aware of the fact that not every proponent of a particular system of belief shares a mind with every other proponent.  But there’s a very human tendency to want to categorize people and put everyone of a certain category in to a monolithic bloc that you can either claim as your own or decry as your mortal enemy.

Former Conservative of the mysteriously named Confessions of a Former Conservative had this to say a few days ago in a post called “Categorizing:”

At one point in my life, I assumed that every atheist wanted to tell me how stupid and delusional I was and mock my beliefs. Why? Mostly because of internet trolls, Bill Maher[,] and Christopher Hitchens. Now most atheists do not fall into that particular group. Once I started talking to some atheists that weren’t actually a part of that group, I realized it wasn’t true.[1]

The problem with apologists is that they start out by introducing themselves according to the least-useful demographic information.[2]  Someone who is so invested in their beliefs, no matter what they are, will be overbearingly interested in sharing them with others, even those who have absolutely interest.  And the apologist will then judge those people who aren’t interested according to that apologist’s own framework of acceptable humanity.  If the witnessed-to has the temerity to disagree with or blow off the witness they then get tossed back in to that box of unreasonable people in [insert category here].

Since the apologist is so invested in their beliefs that they think you, random passer-by in the street, also need to know about it, chances are they won’t like you if you don’t agree with them.  The act of witness, then, is an act of self-reinforcement.  It can also be used to reinforce the in-group/out-group mentality of the not-fully-committed.

Witnessing is a high-pressure situation, both for the witnesser and the witnessed to.  For the witnessed-to it’s the act of being confronted by someone who insists on entering their personal space that causes the problem.  For the witnesser, though, it’s usually pressure to conform by making the act mandatory that causes problems.

I was heavily involved in outreach during my last few years of Christianity.  I was really good at it, so people kept asking me to do more.  The only problem was that I hated actually doing the witnessing part.  Instead I was the guy who tried to come up with ways to make other people feel comfortable with and good at sharing their faith.  It was, I suppose, hypocritical.

Still, it was helpful.  See, I pushed the idea of making friends, then demonstrating Christ to them so that they’d know Jesus’s love and whatnot.  I did this partially to avoid having to evangelize on street corners.  But I also did it because I was friends with non-Christians and I totally believed that the best way to get someone to change their view of something was to show them, day in and day out, that it was possible to get along with someone who disagreed with them.

This plan worked surprisingly well.

I was Outreach Coordinator of my college’s InterVarsity chapter.  The group was, to put it lightly, dysfunctional.  I’d even call it spiritually abusive.

I’d been cultivating friendships with the guys on my floor.  One was a pretty devout Christian of some non-pushy sort.  One was an open atheist.  Those two guys were, like, best friends.  The rest of them were all over the spectrum.  To this day I have no idea what most of them believed since I never got around to asking.

At the beginning of my second semester at Outreach Coordinator I knew the IV situation was intolerable.  I resigned my post and stopped going to almost all of the IV events (save a Bible study run by a friend).  I had two key levels of support when leaving: my church back home and my friends on my floor.  My pastor back home gave me all the cover I needed, basically by telling me that I didn’t have to stay in a place that treated me like shit.  My friends on my floor, though, gave me the confidence I needed to leave, since I knew I would have friends.

They went from being my cynically-declared “mission project” to being my safety net.

I didn’t leave the church then.  I still had a lot of leaving to do, really.[3]

I was ineffectual, at best, as a reluctant apologist.  When I left Christianity it wasn’t because someone put a copy of Hitchens’ god is not Great in my hands and called me an idiot for believing in the mythical sky fairy.  I figured my beliefs out on my own.  I did make a key realization early on in the process, though: there were people who were good people who also weren’t Christians.  I had absolutely nothing to offer them except some vague promises of an unproven eternal existence and the obvious sentence of a lifetime hanging around with intolerable, judgmental assholes.  That made it really hard for me to want to try to sell Christianity to anyone anymore.

Eventually I did read god is not Great.  I was not impressed.  I just saw Hitchens as an apologist and I’d had enough of that sort of bullshit to last a lifetime.[4]

--------------------------------

[1]I added an Oxford Comma to the quote, since it reads as, “Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens are (were) internet trolls,” otherwise.  I’m pretty sure that FC meant this to be a three-item list.  And I’m being pedantic because I’m a goddamn Oxford Comma apologist.

[2]I would also argue that it’s primarily their least interesting demographic category, at least on the atheist side.  Basically, if a belief can be reduced to a single sentence that contains fewer than ten words, i.e., “I don’t believe that god exists,” your belief is fundamentally uninteresting.  On the other hand, if your belief can be described as, “I am a member of the religion professed by 80% of my country’s population,” you’re also decidedly uninteresting.  In the former case the belief really doesn’t have much worth talking about.  In the latter case the belief is statistically meaningless.

[3]One specific moment later involved that same pastor who’d helped me leave IV pissing me the fuck off when I said I was leaving the church I grew up in for a more liberal church.  He said, “Oh, you’ll like it there.  They don’t teach the Bible.”

He later walked it back, told me it was a joke.  While I want to give him the benefit of the doubt I also want to know what, exactly, possessed him to choose to make that particular joke.

[4]There’s irony here, I suppose.  In decrying categorization of whole chunks of people due to their religious beliefs I’m offering a whole new category of “apologists.”  What can I say?  Sometimes categorization is useful.

Perspective and Apologetics, An Interlude

I don't want to leave Part 3 of the Perspective and Apologetics series hanging out in the wind by itself.  It comes across, I think (and hope), as combative.  There's a reason for that.  But it could also come across as scolding and/or whiny, which I'd rather avoid.

I'm hoping to get Part 4 up tomorrow, but I'm not sure if I'll have time.

Fortunately, Ed over at Gin & Tacos managed to write a post that I kinda wanted to write, except for my lack of desire to get bogged down in details.  He goes after Hitch, that late, lionized spokesman for all things atheist.  It's...well...Ed doesn't seem to feel any compunction to speak well of the dead.

Let's get one thing straight: I respected Hitchens for his eloquence, willingness to speak his mind, and absolute refusal to back down for the sake of convenience.  I also despised Hitchens for the fact that his refusal to back down meant that he often held and defended some absolutely awful positions.  I'm genuninely unhappy that he's one of the first people that non-atheists think of when they think of atheists, since he was belligerent, uncouth, and held some genuinely atrocious positions.

I'll let Ed spell it out:

At his worst, Hitchens was little more than an unusually eloquent drunk, a misogynist, xenophobe, and warmonger who seemed to take leave of his critical thinking skills when the question of scary brown foreigners reared its head. He described his pro-Western worldview as a matter of "defending civilization", but in practice it looked a lot more like garden variety Islamophobia (arguing that the Iraq War death toll was "not high enough") and neocon foreign policy frames. He argued that women are not funny in a manner that he considered unbiased, rational, and unemotional, but the end result was a rant worthy of any drunk in a bar ranting about his ex-wife. He painted Michelle Obama as a race-baiting militant out for Whitey on the basis of a paper she wrote in college suggesting that black students feel alienated on campuses that are almost entirely white. These are not the attitudes of a critical thinker – they are the knee jerk reactions of an old man quite comfortable with the social hierarchy that places white Anglo-Saxon men firmly at the top. We'd expect to hear such arguments from Glenn Beck, and we often do.

Hitchens was an apologist.  The subtitle of his most famous work, god is not Great, was "How Religion Poisons Everything."  The title or subtitle still get passed around on a regular basis.  He focused on the worst aspects of the behavior of the religious and then argued that the acts of the worst proponents somehow infected all the proponents.  His message may have been different, but his tactics were no better than a Pat Robertson or Bryan Fischer blaming natural disasters or the downfall of western civilization on atheists or the gays.  It was mere demagoguery and villainizing those outside the tribe.

Either way, go read Gin & Tacos.  It's pretty much exactly what I would have written on this subject were I not trying to be more general in my approach.

Perspective and Apologetics, Part 3

I love Christmas.  Okay, the last couple of years it kind of sucked on the “in 2010 I was stuck in Dallas and in 2011 I was living with family and holyfuckI’mtiredoflivingwithmyparents” levels.  But Christmas, in general, is something for which I profess a great deal of appreciation.  This is why I get annoyed with a certain sub-set of Christmas displays.  You know the kind.  They get displayed on public property and end up being the subject of all kinds of controversy and frothing at the mouth.




Yeah.  This kind.

Now, I have absolutely no problem with the idea of atheists, y’know, doing stuff in the public sphere.  I’m supportive in all ways (except monetarily) of a large number of the atheist billboards and bus ads I’ve seen.  The ones that I support are generally the, “Hi, we’re atheists and we’re your neighbors,” subset of the atheist ad campaign.  I consider something like this to be pretty innocuous and an overall good effort:




I consider something like this, on the other hand, to be a load of bollocks:




I separate all publicity in to three basic categories: awareness, advocacy, and apologetics.

Awareness, in this context, can be a net neutral or a net positive.[1]  Basically, I consider the net neutral to be things like, “Wear pink to fight cancer,” or anything involving setting your picture on Facebook to something else.  It’s just a silly thing that people do to make themselves feel better that doesn’t change reality one bit.  It can be a net positive, however, in the situation where someone who feels different and outcast can see an announcement that says, “You’re not alone,” and feel better.  I am all for this kind of awareness.

Advocacy can run the gamut.  It’s basically awareness with an agenda and the moral viability of the advocacy is directly related to the goals of the agenda.  I am, in short, in favor of atheists working to keep the Establishment Clause in full force because the state has no business in the activities of religion.  If atheists were advocating to push religion entirely out of the public sphere so as to outlaw religion and hunt down the religious, however, I would be against that particular ridiculous strawman.

Apologetics, in my humble opinion, are almost wholly negative at almost all times.[2]  Apologetics work to do three things: 1. establish in-group/out-group thinking, 2. establish superiority for the in-group, and 3. set up the opportunity to play the persecution card.  The persecution card, for the record, works in both directions.  If everyone dogpiles on you, you get to cry about being persecuted.  If everyone dogpiles on the now-Othered, you can use this to push that Other around.

This is the key place where the issue of perspective makes an impact on the question of apologetics.  In order for apologetics to ultimately work in the sense the apologist claims to want things to work everyone needs to share a perspective.  If they don’t it just becomes a masturbatory exercise in trying to call the other person a bigger idiot.

As much as the atheist movement, such as it is, wants everyone to believe they don’t engage in the same activities they decry, there’s plenty of assholery coming from godless apologists.  I’ve got a few theories as to why that is, too.

Most atheists who are prone to want to be involved in atheist outreach have three qualities in common: they’re intelligent, opinionated, and intellectually arrogant.  Arrogance is a requirement for all apologists.  If you’re going to go up to strangers and tell them, in effect, “You’re a fool for not agreeing with me about this issue,” you have to be arrogant.  Someone who lacks arrogance is going to lack to motivation to tell strangers they’re morons.  It’s that simple.

In general, too, atheists have reasoned themselves out of religion.  The average atheist’s backstory is, “I was a believer, then I started to study it and I realized it was crap.”  That’s an abbreviation, for the record.  My own backstory for this is a series of events over the course of a couple years.  The fact is, though, that to this day I know more about the Bible and Christianity than most people who would come to me and tell me I really need Jesus in my life.  I know what the Bible says.  I know what the history of Christianity is.  I know what the history of the Bible is in context.  I didn’t wake up one morning and say, “You know, I don’t believe this anymore.”  I spent a long time learning and studying and eventually drew a conclusion.

For a believer, then, to come up to an atheist and say, “You just need to read the Bible more/the right way/after praying for the proper perspective,” is incredibly arrogant on the part of the apologist.  The would-be atheist apologist, however, needs to realize that this exact same dynamic is going on from the other direction.  Regardless of the reality of, well, reality, the average Christian knows the Bible is real.  They know this as either a form of intellectual assent to an idea or a matter of default assumption, but reality as understood by your average Christian includes the fact of god and Jesus and death on the cross and that entire flibbertigibbet.

So to just walk up to a Christian and say, “Hey, you believe something stupid, you stupid stupidhead,” is incredibly annoying, offensive, and ineffective.  The terrible thing about that is that your average atheist knows this.  Why?  Because your average atheist has been bombarded by that exact message from the opposite direction.

Some atheist sign makers get this.  The Freedom from Religion Foundation tends to put out signs that stay on the awareness and advocacy end of the spectrum.  I’m totally on board with this one, for instance:




And I find this one amusing as hell:




Anyway, where was I?  Oh, right, intelligent, opinionated, and arrogant.

This is a toxic brew when it comes to any public discourse.  Someone who possesses all three of those qualities will tend to not give a shit about what other people have to say and instead just assert reality as he or she understands it and leave it at that.  I think that the fact that atheism is, by and large, a movement of the internet doesn’t help.  Atheists hang out on atheist blogs and discuss atheist things and make fun of the random wannabe evangelists who pop by from time to time to try to witness and then eventually they get out in to the real world and think the same exact style of argumentation and discussion that works on the internet will work with people in the street.[3]

The irony, of course, is that churches facilitate that exact same attitude among the faithful.  I knew a lot of people who literally did not know (or know they knew) a single non-believer.  They’d sit around talking about god and Jesus and how great the Bible was and theorize about how to get those non-Christians to admit they believe what they know to be true.

Then they’d find out that the vast majority of the time all their techniques didn’t work when confronted with an actual, honest-to-nothing non-believer.  Why?  Because they didn’t understand that, “You know the Bible is true, you’re just rebelling against god/still feeling hurt because of something/an unfortunate soul who hasn’t met the right kinds of Christians,” doesn’t actually make a lick of sense in reality.

Atheists need to realize this cuts both ways.  Nobody’s ever changed their mind when confronted by condescending, arrogant assholes who tell them what they actually know about the world.

One of the problems that then comes up, though, is that this idea gets wrapped up in a larger fight amongst atheists: the question of accommodationism.  Folks like PeeZed and the commenters over at Pharyngula tend to decide that this is a binary issue: either you’re an out, proud, and in-your-face atheist or you’re just bending over backwards to let the religious people have their say.  This is absurd.

It’s possible to be accommodating without being an accommodationist.  The issue boils down to what Phil Plait talked about in his now-internet-famous “Don’t Be a Dick” speech.[4]  It’s possible to stand up for science, rationalism, and truth without being a dick about it and if you manage to not be a dick about it when confronted with someone who disagrees you might just make some headway.  He came to this brilliantly obvious realization when he realized that he doesn’t like it when people are dicks to him and he doesn’t listen.

It’s…it’s not that hard, really.

It also helps to realize that perception and perspective matter far more than reality.  If you attack someone they’ll just dig in and fight back.  Quite frankly, atheists don’t need that.  They get enough crap in America as it is.

We need fewer apologists and more advocates.

-----------------------

[1]It can also be a net negative, but that largely depends on who is running the campaign.  The Nazis ran an incredibly negative awareness campaign on the Jews, to pick an easy example.

[2]I’m willing to accept an extremely wide definition for apologetics that can include any form of sales-related activity: ergo, if I tell you that Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers are an awesome band and you should listen to them that can be considered a form of apologetics.

[3]The two big counter-arguments that I know will come against this one are, “But we’re surrounded by Christians every day,” or, “But you just pointed out that most atheists were Christians in the past, so what the fuck, dude?”  That’s quite true.  But most people simply don’t talk about religion openly.  I had an entire conversation with a table full of religious people yesterday and we didn’t mention religion once.  Politics came up, but that’s because IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO NOT TALK ABOUT POLITICS IN AMERICA ANYMORE.  Bleh.  Religion, however, did not come up except for a guy who knows my parents asking, “So where do your parents go to church now?”  He didn’t even ask me where I go to church.

[4]Three-part YouTube of the speech.  It’s a half-hour, but it’s totally worth it:

Perspective and Apologetics, Part 2

I was standing in line at a coffee shop the other day…week…month, maybe.  Time seems to be flying of late.  A man barged in front of me and insisted that the barista give him a refill.  He had a fairly thick accent, so it took me a minute to realize that he was asking for Starbucks dark roast.

It took the barista a couple more repeats.  Finally she said, “I’m sorry, we don’t have that.”

The reason for that was pretty simple: I was standing in a Caribou Coffee.[1]

Mr. Starbucks begrudgingly took a refill of not-Starbucks coffee and walked away.  I stepped up to the counter, looked at the barista and said, “Wait, did you just apologize for not being Starbucks?”  She just kinda shrugged.

I’m sure that anyone who read my last post on this subject and/or the title of this one can see where I’m going with this.

Your average religious apologist wants you to apologize because he[2] is in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That’s really all evangelism amounts to.  You are walking around, enjoying your day and he pops out and says, “Did you know you’re a sinner?”  It’s really kinda cute, but in an, “Aww, bless your heart,”[3] sort of way. Your would-be evangelist is trying to get you to agree to terms, those terms being, “What you are doing is wrong because according to my interpretation of the world it is.”  That interpretation of the world is, of course, firmly grounded in the Bible as that guy understands the book.[4]  Or, at least, as he understands the Bible according to the few pages he’s actually read and how an accepted authority claims the Bible is laid out.

If you choose to engage Annoyie McEvangipants[6] he’ll try to get you to assent to his interpretation of reality.  If you don’t, he’ll try to get you to apologize for having the temerity of being in Caribou Coffee when he really fucking wants some goddamn Starbucks.  When it gets right down to it, I’m not sure what “apologist” actually means, but I’m pretty sure it ought to mean, “Dickbag who wants you to apologize for not being exactly like him.”

The fascinating thing about apologists, though, is that they don’t actually draw a line between, say, “Christian” and “Muslim” or “Christian” and “atheist.”  The line they draw is between “me” and “everyone else except maybe those people right over there.”  For instance, Tim Tebow and his dad are heavily involved in Christian missions to the Philippines, which is kinda weird when you consider that the Philippines have a long tradition of Christianity.  They’re 95% Christian, in fact, which makes the Philippines more Christian than America and its 80% Christianity.  The problem, though, is that the Philippines are overwhelmingly Catholic, which is the wrong kind of Christianity.

Statistically speaking, the Tebows are engaged in a worthless mission.  If they pull aside 20 people in the street in Manila, 19 of them are likely to be Christians.  That’s just how the math works out.  What makes that mission worthwhile (in the eyes of, um, someone, I guess) is that bit where the odds are also really good that most of those 19 Christians will be the wrong kind of Christian.  It’s this distinction that makes all the difference.

Christianity is all a big game of identifying the tribal markers.  You can even widen that out from “Christians” to “proponents of Abrahamic religious traditions” and say basically the same thing.  You can further widen that from “proponents of Abrahamic religious traditions” to “people who are religious and/or believe in some sort of higher power.”  A Baptist and a Catholic will agree that there’s a god and Jesus is the path.  A Methodist and a Shi’ite will agree that the Bible is the foundation of tradition.  An Orthodox Jew and a Hindu will agree that there is some sort of supernatural power keeping an eye on things.

The labels, however, matter.  The apologists want to be able to lie with statistics and that’s really hard to do if you only take the big or the small label.  If the apologist wants to push that there really should be prayer in school because it’s a Christian nation he needs that 80% number that includes Baptists and Catholics and Lutherans and Episcopalians and what have you.  If the apologist wants to push the breakdown of society angle, then he needs to go with the, say, 20% of society who are the exact same type of Christian and complain about all the non-his-type-of-Christian heathens out there ruining it for everyone.

This is where it gets convoluted.  Most people only see this interaction on a macro level.  Basically, this whole thing boils down to harnessing the wallets of the 20% of real Christians to remind the country that 80% of everybody is a Christian in order to marginalize and/or take away the rights of those poor saps who simply aren’t Christian at all.  It works at the local level, too, though.

If you see someone out in the street evangelizing there’s a pretty good chance that a church somewhere sent that person to that street.  At the very least that person is going to be getting the blessing of the church at some point, usually by showing up, delivering a message as an itinerant evangelist, and then asking the people in the pews for money.  This works on several different levels.  Big churches support missionaries.  The church I grew up in financially supported a whole bunch of missionaries and had a yearly missions week, wherein the missionaries came back and preached and let everyone know how great their work was and asked for money.  I also knew a guy when I was in college out in the vast cornfields of western Illinois who went to all the tiny, local churches and did special services where he talked about all his great missions work and then asked for money.

In case you’re wondering, the, “Asked for money,” bit is kinda key…

This whole system only works in a world where people believe that somewhere out there right now there are scores of people just ripe for the Christian harvest.  In reality, the apologist is actually that angry, confused man demanding Starbucks coffee in a Caribou.  Hell, depending on who he’s talking to he could be more akin to an angry man demanding Starbucks coffee in a library.

I want to unpack the attitudes of apologists.  I want to attempt to convey the perspectives of those who attempt to peddle their beliefs out in the public sphere.  It’s why I’m going to keep running the perspectives and apologetics posts.  It’s why I’m going to start looking at specific apologetics books.  I don’t so much care about the arguments themselves as the attitudes.

Oh, and I don’t intend to focus solely on Christian apologetics, either.  I won’t say I’ll be equal opportunity, but I’m sure as hell going to try.  The problem as I see it isn’t with Christians, it’s with apologists.

------------------------

[1]To the uninitiated: Caribou Coffee is a not-quite-national chain.  It’s basically Pacific Northwest, Midwest, and maybe a bit on the West Coast and East Coast.  I forget.  The primary benefit it offers over Starbucks is that it doesn’t sell over-roasted crap and call it “coffee.”

Given a choice I’ll take a good independent coffee shop every time.  After that I’ll take Caribou, Dunkin’ Donuts, or LavAzza (that might be Chicago only, I’m not sure).  Given a choice between Starbucks and no coffee, I’ll take no coffee.  That said, for Frappucino-type stuff it’s kind of a wash, but you’re not really buying such things for the coffee, anyway.

[2]I’ma use the masculine gender pronoun in this one BECAUSE IT’S EASIER, OKAY?  Gosh, leave me alone, Steve.

[3]For the uninitiated, “Bless your heart,” is Texan/Southern for, “Fuck you, sancho.”

[4]All such discussion needs to be based in this simple fact.  The evangelist is saying that the world is X because the Bible says X, but what he’s actually saying is that the world is X because he thinks the Bible says X.  This is how there are approximately 14 more Christian denominations than there are Christians in the world.[5]

[5]Not intended to be a factual statement, but intended to be humorous hyperbole.  Deal with it.

[6]You, of course, don’t have to.  A couple Fridays before Christmas I was about two steps behind my sister as we crossed State Street in Chicago.  Some guy popped out of the early-Friday-afternoon-Christmas-on-goddamn-State-Street crowd and said to her, “Excuse me, can I ask you something about your hair?”  She said, “No,” and just kept walking.  This was the correct response, but by the same token if he’d popped out and done the same with me and I wasn’t busy hanging out with my family I would have totally said, “Sure,” because it would have been amusing as hell.  There was zero doubt in her mind or mine that this was some evangelist and he would have had nothing worthwhile to say but managed to be a major annoyance.

The 2012 State of the Blog: Preview Time

So let's start up my Nook and see what sort of books Geds has on his mind these days.




Ah, this is quite the lovely mix.  There's Killing the Buddha: a Heretic's Bible, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Great Gatsby, a random book about Byzantium, Craig Ferguson's Between the Bridge and the River, Dave Eggers' Zeitoun and...

Oh my god, what's this?  Four Lee Strobel books on apologetics?  What the...?  What are you and what have you done with Geds' Nook?  Quick, someone go find Geds and tell him someone else has been stealing his Nook and buying Christian apologetics books, possibly in an attempt to ambush him in to the faith or something.  This is bad.  This is really bad...

Actually, it's not.  And I'm sure you already knew that my first two paragraphs are a transparent and pointless jibber-jabber that were intended to operate as an awful introduction BECAUSE YOU'RE SMART, THAT'S WHY.

Anyway, in my first 2012 State of the Blog post yesterday I mentioned that I'd be spending more time talking about apologetics and starting up a new series I call On Disagreement.  My first On Disagreement post will be hitting tomorrow morning, so be looking forward to that (or, y'know, don't).  It occurred to me that discussions of apologetics and disagreement might just dovetail nicely.  So I decided that this year I'm going to spend some time looking at Christian apologetics.

This, admittedly, is something that's been done to death.  For the most part, at least where I've seen, it's always been as part of an argument against the apologetics themselves.  My goal is to try to look at the apologetics in terms of what they tell us about how the apologist sees the world.  One of the things that tends to get missed in a lot of these discussions, at least that I've noticed, is the realization that Christian apologists actually believe what they say.

I chose Lee Strobel to start this project on the basis that he was the first person I thought of after C.S. Lewis.  Back when I worked at a Christian book store Strobel was a big hit with his Case for Christ book and his schtick of being a skeptical journalist using all of his mad newspaper reporter skillz to find the actual truth of the whole Jesus story.  Since I stopped working at the Christian books store about ten years ago he's apparently gone on to repackage his Case for... book some nine times.  He's turned it in to a kids book or three.  He's split out shorter versions like, The Case for a Resurrection, The Case for Christmas, and The Case for Easter.  The nice thing about those shortened versions is you can now get the Nook version for, like, 2 bucks.

I downloaded a bunch of samples last night and will probably eventually look at The Case for a Resurrection in full.  But here's a gem from the sample, y'know, to whet your appetite:

It didn't take long for me to conclude that the truth or falsity of all world religions -- and the ultimate meaning of life itself -- comes down to just one key issue: did Jesus, or did he not, return from the dead?  The answer to that fundamental question would settle everything.

It's gonna be a bloodbath.  Stay tuned.

Perspective and Apologetics, Part 1(?)

I went to church on Christmas Eve and lived to tell about it.  The last time I was in a church with an actual service of some sort going[1] before that was the summer of 2008 and I was there for a wedding.  I kind of suspected I’d spontaneously combust.  I, um, I did not.

I know, right?

Anyway, I actually kinda like the whole church on Christmas Eve thing.  I always have.  It’s especially nice at my parents’ church, since it’s all about singing old songs with traditional arrangements and brass and choral music and whatnot.  I’ve always liked candlelight, too.  That might seem weird, but just go with it, okay Steve?  Gosh.

Church involved the traditional reading of Luke 2, which was fascinating to me.  For the uninitiated, Luke 2 is the story of Joseph and Mary heading to Bethlehem in order to do their bit for the census and Mary giving birth and laying Jesus in a manger.  It’s entirely possible that Christmas Eve was the first time I’ve really encountered that passage since I left the church.  I was amazed by it upon this encounter, however.

The whole story is such transparent bullshit.  Seriously.[2]

The setup itself doesn’t make a lick of sense.  A census that requires someone to go back to his hometown in order to register would be massively disruptive to basically everyone.  Considering that the Roman Empire spanned the better part of the known world and it’s inherently possible someone in the military or a trader or a minor governmental functionary could have been born in, say, Gaul and living in, say, Anatolia at the time that person would have had to make an extremely dangerous journey that would last months in order to simply raise his hand and say, “Hey!  I’m alive!”

I think I’ve pointed out that problem on this very blog in the past, but there are several other things that occurred to me while reading it this time.  Here’s a not-exactly-exhaustive list of problems I have with the whole thing:

1.  I’d always kind of handwaved the return to Bethlehem as Joseph going home to be counted.  That’s kind of how everyone seems to do it.  But the Bible just says he did it because he “was of the house and family of David.”  That wouldn’t make the journey the equivalent of me returning from Dallas to Chicago for the 2010 census, but me going from Dallas to Cleveland because that’s where my dad is from even though I’ve never lived in Ohio.  Although since David’s house was actually started several hundred years prior to the “events” of Luke 2, it’s more like me having to return to Wales to be counted, because that’s where my great-to-the-fiftieth-power grandfather was from.  That detail, meanwhile, creates another problem.

2.  They go to Bethlehem so Joseph and Mary can be counted because Joseph is of the house and family of David.  But Jesus was supposed to be a descendent of David.  Joseph wasn’t actually the father of Jesus, so Mary would have to be the descendent of David, which would mean that Joseph and Mary were doing the incest thing (not completely unwarranted speculation, given the time period, but also not exactly a great argument).  The genealogy in Matthew 1 makes it pretty clear that Jesus was descended from David through Joseph, however, which makes the incest argument somewhat more distant.  So, basically, in order to harmonize the idea of Joseph and Mary heading to Bethlehem in order to place the birth of Jesus in the City of David, the Bible totally destroys the idea of Jesus being a descendant of David.  It would have been way easier to just place Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem in the first place.  But that destroys one other bit.

3.  Jesus was, according to Christian thinking, the fulfillment of a whole fuckton of prophecies.  Isaiah 9 mentions the Prince of Peace coming from Galilee, for instance.  Another prophecy from Micah put his birth in Bethlehem.  I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything about being born in a stable, but who the fuck knows, amirite?  The problem is that in order for Jesus to fulfill all of the various prophecies he would have had to be, well, about twenty different people.  Apologists will say, “See!  That’s proof that it’s impossible for Jesus to have been anything but the Messiah!”  Jews would, for the record, disagree with that and say something like, “You just took a bunch of stuff out of context and spun a crazy story about it.”  The Jews, for the record, are right.  But we don’t just have to trust them, we have history to back this up.

Luke 2 name checks Quirinius as the governor of Syria when Augustus called his infamous census.  Josephus, the Jewish historian, actually does mention this in connection with a minor Jewish revolt and the formation of the Zealots, who really friggin’ hated the idea of a census because there was this one part of the Bible where David called a census and it pissed Yahweh off.  I would argue that the Zealots were more pissed off about the bit where the census was the first step in the Romans making sure they got all the taxes they were owed by the Judeans, but, really, when has anyone in history ever used religion as cover for a revolt on purely secular grounds?  That’s crazy talk.

Quirinius and his census happened in 6 CE, right after Judea was added to Syria.  This, for the record, is a fascinating wrinkle that I never noticed.  In the space between the Maccabeean Revolt (140 BCE) and the coming of Pompey and Roman power (63 BCE), Judea enjoyed various levels of home rule and/or complete autonomy.  In 40 BCE the Roman Senate gave Herod the Great complete control over Judea.  Herod the Great, though, was supposedly the dude the 3 Wise Men met on their way to give the baby Jesus the first ever Christmas presents and the villain of the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, when he ordered every child under 2 killed, thereby forcing Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to flee to Egypt to fulfill yet another prophecy.  This comes up in Matthew 2, for those who are wondering.

Herod the Great died in 4 BCE.  Does anyone other than me see the problem?  If Quirinius’ census forced Joseph and Mary to “return” to Bethlehem in order for Herod the Great to kill a bunch of babies in order to force Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt, that 10 year gap is a huge problem.  That, however, isn’t the big wrinkle that I’ve never noticed before.  I think I’ve even mentioned that problem in a post in the past.

The simple solution to that problem is that it was a different Herod.  Ol’ Herod the Great had sons, after all.  One was in charge of Galilee and the other took over Judea after 4 BCE.  So he could have been the murderous bastard who killed a bunch of cute little babies in order to cement his position as the official King of the Jews (as selected by the Roman Senate…).  Here’s the wrinkle: go back to Quirinius.  His census came in 6 CE after Judea was added to Syria for governance purposes.  Why did this happen?  Because Herod Archelaus, the other potential villain of the 3 Wise Men story was fired by the Romans in 6 CE for incompetence.  Quirinius was given Judea and told to take a survey and start taxing the Judeans after the only other Herod who could have ordered the death of Jewish babies in Bethlehem was taken out of the picture.

That’s a massive plot hole, I’d say.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the census in question was one of Augustus’s censuses that he called in 28 BCE, 8 BCE, and 14 CE or a different local census and Luke just got confused.  That seems to be the consensus I’ve seen amongst the “historians who don’t want to give up on the Jesus story’s veracity” set.  That is, of course, possible.  But the whole bit where it calls the Bible’s historical accuracy and relevancy to the carpet makes it much harder for the apologist.  It also draws attention to the fact that the whole story is an attempted harmonization of a whole bunch of different, disconnected prophecies that were strung together as a post hoc Argumentum ad Jesus as Christos.

-----------------

Oddly, this brings me to a little poem Fred Clark linked to before Christmas.  It’s a tongue-in-cheek addition to the famous parable of the six blind men and the elephant.[3]  Our wordsmith adds in a seventh verse to John Godfrey Saxe’s poetic interpretation of the story:

The seventh man of Indostan
Just listened to them brawl,
And sighed, “These fools cannot agree,
Their minds are far too small.
From their dispute it’s plain that there’s
No elephant at all!”

This…this isn’t clever.  It is, however, instructive.  Our wordsmith has decided that it’s okay to disagree over the nature of god because it’s not possible to fully understand god due to human perspective.  That’s the entire point of the original story, after all.

To our initial collection of blind men, however, has been added an atheist.  This fellow is a smug  bastard who hears everyone arguing over the nature of the elephant and makes a completely unwarranted conclusion that the argument itself implies his fellows are arguing over nothing.

Unfortunately for anyone who thinks this makes sense, Carl Sagan answered the argument already.[4]  It would be possible for the seventh blind man to walk up to the elephant and touch the damn thing and realize that, yes, something is there.  So the seventh blind man ends up looking not only like a smug bastard, but also an idiot.  As such, our friend the would-be poet is saying, “Atheists are really stupid, neener neener.”

He doesn’t consider the possibility that someone who doesn’t believe that there’s no god could possibly have arrived at that belief from an intellectually rigorous place.  His entire argument boils down to, “Non-religious people hear religious people arguing and decide that means religious people are wrong.”  This is an incredibly arrogant and, dare I say, narrow minded approach to the non-religious.  It’s especially arrogant when approaching actual atheists.

Your average apologist relies on stringing together post hoc arguments and relies on everyone accepting the same premises that he or she has already advanced.  As long as you, say, just accept the idea that the Biblical account of Jesus’s birth was historically accurate that’s fine.  You can even handwave past the bit where Matthew’s account and Luke’s account cannot possibly exist in the same universe.  That requires everyone involved to still agree with the basic premise about the Jesus story, however.  Someone who looks beyond the story to the context and says, “Wait, all of this stuff looks like it was just kind of thrown together and it doesn’t make any sense at all,” isn’t going to be swayed by being told that they don’t believe because they’re hearing different religious people argue about the nature of god.

That’s why the apologist and the non-believer talk past each other.  They inhabit two completely different universes.

------------------------

[1]My storytelling guild meets in a church.  I don’t think that counts.

[2]I’ll bet you didn’t see THAT coming.

[3]Quick refresher for those who don’t want to follow the link: Six blind men are taken to an elephant.  Each touches a different part and says, “Ah ha, the elephant is like _______________.”  They then proceed to argue about the nature of the elephant even though they are all correct and also all completely wrong.

[4]For those who don’t want to follow the link: it’s Carl Sagan’s famous story of the invisible dragon in the garage.  Basically, someone comes up to you and says there’s a dragon in their garage.  You say you can’t see it, so they say it’s invisible.  You go up to touch it but they say it’s incorporeal.  Every attempt to prove the existence of the dragon isn’t met with actual proof, but further dodges.