Mr. Moderate

The postmodernist creed is defined by “incredulity toward metanarratives” and “the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation,” asking “Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” “[A] metanarrative (sometimes master- or grand narrative) ‘is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience.’” In simpler terms, postmodernism denies the possibility of useful generalizations and also denies even the possibility of deriving any legitimate conclusions that might be drawn from bulk analysis of data. Since the end goal of scientific inquiry is all about deriving metanarratives and conclusions of that sort, it can be reasonably asserted that postmodernism is committed to the destruction of scientific thinking.

The fundamentalist creed can be summarized as a belief “that human existence is innately sinful but offers redemption and eternal peace in heaven - thus representing a belief in a universal rule and a telos for humankind.” The fundamentalist thus asserts an extremely specific and highly detailed metanarrative which the fundamentalist asserts must be believed exactly as stated without variation, in spite of the fact that many variations clearly exist. The fundamentalist similarly denies the legitimacy of scientific inquiry on the grounds that any knowledge obtained from scientific inquiry will necessarily either duplicate the metanarrative of the Holy Bible or else it will not, and in either case such knowledge is at least useless and possibly dangerous. Thus, the fundamentalist is also profoundly committed to the destruction of scientific thinking.

My personal metanarrative is predicated upon scientific inquiry as the sole possible producer of legitimate beliefs, and that the foundational belief produced by scientific inquiry is that all living things are ethically obligated to survive, and to ensure the survival of as many diverse forms of life as possible. (See HERE for more.) Needless to say, I believe that my personal metanarrative is the only sane belief system of the three I present in this post.
Continue reading ‘Competing Metanarratives’ »

I have written two recent posts, one about the lost art of logic and the other about young Earth insanity, where I discussed a recent poll reported in USA Today that claimed 66% of Americans now believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” In this third post about that same poll result I’m going to discuss the long-term implications for this rise of fundamentalist religious belief in our nation’s population. What it really amounts to is a national death wish, as such beliefs require the abandonment and rejection of scientific thinking. This leaves science to “those other countries” which have no religious restrictions on scientific advances, most importantly nations like China. As China becomes the leading scientific power over the next few decades, it will take over the leadership of the world, and will eventually be in a position to dictate its policies to the west, including the United States.

Is this what you folks really want to see happen? Do you want to abandon the world to a Chinese hegemony of scientific power?
Continue reading ‘America Rejects Science; Adopts Suicide Plan’ »

I wrote yesterday about the lack of logic it requires to simultaneously believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, and that God created humans much as we are today at one time in the past 10,000 years. It would seem from the USA Today poll that roughly 22% of all Americans believe both ideas to be definitely or at least probably true. Yesterday’s post was about the total illogic involved with that 22% of Americans believing both ideas to be true.

In this post I would like to take seriously the idea, expressed in that same poll, that 66% of all Americans believe “that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Ever since Bishop Ussher produced his Bible chronology that “deduced that the first day of Creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday October 23, 4004 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, near the autumnal equinox,” back in the 1650s, people who desired to take the Bible literally have asserted that no fact produced by science can possibly contradict the idea that God created everything that now exists about 6,000 years ago. Some modern young-Earth creationists, disturbed at chronologies of Egyptian civilization that seem to be unbroken to much earlier dates, have accepted that Ussher might not have computed everything exactly right, and they are willing to push back the creation of the universe to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, but no further than that.
Continue reading ‘Young Earth Insanity’ »

I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college.

Sting, Wrapped Around Your Finger

There is some debate over exactly what St. Thomas Aquinas meant when he wrote: “hominem unius libri timeo” — “I fear the man of a single book”. On the one hand, it is felt that a man of a single book has limited knowledge and limited horizons. “Having read so little he is quite at at the mercy of his one book!” On the other hand, it might also mean “that a man who has thoroughly mastered one good book can be dangerous as an opponent.” Luckily, we need not resolve this matter as both statements are true of the Christian fundamentalist. Such a person “of one book” (The Holy Bible) is both limited in knowledge and horizons and is also a dangerous opponent as they have no way to recognize error or defeat and thus plow onward incessantly, even when all around them ought to recognize the mistake(s) they have made.
Continue reading ‘Fundamentalist: Homo unius libri’ »

If you want to win over an undecided person to your point of view, do you make up the most-outlandish accusation you can think of and then toss it out to convince your listener that your point of view is the best? If you do that often enough, you will lose respect among rational people. Propaganda has its uses when you need to control masses of unthinking people who have no access to the truth. But if you keep tossing out propaganda and getting found out, you will end up with no credibility at all, even when you are right. This is like “the boy who cried wolf” syndrome.
Continue reading ‘Right-Wing Bigotry’ »

Jerry Falwell is dead. It is enough to make me wish I believed in Hell. It is in the moments following a significant death that we come to contemplate the life of the departed and to wish them everlasting existence in one of two places: eternal pleasure or eternal torture. Falwell set a high bar for those who would wish to outdo his outrageous comments. CNN had this paragraph in the story it posted:

Many now remember him most for outrageous statements he made after leaving the Moral Majority — in 1999, his house organ the National Liberty Journal warned parents that the Tinky Winky TV character was secretly gay and morally dangerous; in 2001, he blamed the September 11 terrorist attack on “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.”

How many of you Christians out there believe that your God would deliberately kill 3,000 Americans because the folks mentioned above were trying to secularize America? Is that the way your God works?
Continue reading ‘Fallwell: Hate & Discontent’ »

For the past decade, evangelical Christians, disgusted with the moral morass they saw in Washington, DC, have voted solidly for the Republican Party. So long as the issues considered by these Christians were narrowly defined as the 3-Gs, Gays, Guns, and God, evangelical Christians were easily roped into voting a straight Republican ticket.

Recently, however, a split has developed between the far right and the more-moderate factions within the evangelical community over global warming in particular. But that tentative split on environmental policy is just the first crack in a logjam of issues that have long divided America, such as the teaching of evolution in our schools (the “more-moderate” evangelicals have no issue with that, a position identical with that of the Roman Catholic Church) and the place of science education within our hierarchy of knowledge (the radical right wing decries reliance upon “science” as “just another opinion” not entitled to any real respect as it is clearly “anti-God”).
Continue reading ‘Evangelicals Split From The Right?’ »