Religious Right Watch

Religious Right will go with Rudy?

Bob Altemeyer sees the leaders of the religious right going with Rudy Giuliani.

Put yourself in James Dobson’s, Jerry Falwell’s, Pat Robertson’s, and Richard Land’s, shoes right now.... You lead the most potent, sizeable,  zealous, manipulable voter bloc in the country, which you have cultivated with great care. And the best you can come up with as a candidate is Newt Gingrich! (George W. Bush, among his many failures, did not groom a successor. But how many aspiring dictators do?)
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What are your alternatives? Right now, it’s to get the best deal you can get for delivering your voters to Giuliani. Giuliani would then stand an excellent chance of being the next president.  A big presidential victory in 2008 could give the GOP control of the Congress again.
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We can write Falwell’s, Dobson’s, etcetera’s endorsement script right now, can’t we? "My friends, I have talked with Rudy Giuliani face to face about these things that his enemies are saying he believes in, and I can tell you those stories simply are not true. The old Rudy Giuliani is not the man running for president of our wonderful country now. We have to remember that through Jesus’s grace any of us can change, and this man is on the path to the Light. I looked him right in the eye and I asked him, ‘Do you support abortion? Do you support killing innocent children before they are born?’ and he said, ‘Of course not. I favor life, like almost everybody does.’... So the next time you hear someone saying something bad about this man, just don’t listen. Just don’t listen. Click the mute button and look away. They’re only saying it to confuse you."
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If you can’t get the rank-and-file worked up because of their admiration of Giuliani, you can sure as hell scare them out of their wits about the Democratic candidate. The fear card can trump everything else....

Spreading the false history of "Christian America"

I find it fun to follow whorls and eddies that mark the chaotic patterns of the interconnectedness of topics online. Follow the links and who knows where you might end up. Via SusanG's front page "Open Thread and Diary Rescue" on Daily Kos, I was led to Troutfishing's diary, "Fake History 'Bible Course' Now in 382 School Districts," which admirably shines a spotlight on "The National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools (NCBCPS), a stealth effort associated with the far right Council On National Policy," as examples of the religious right's efforts to spread a false historical narrative--a type of political propaganda, ideology-based and manipulative--in which America's founders intended the republic's laws and culture to forever expressly favor Christians and be influenced by conservative Christianity. Troutfishing:

Over the past two decades the creation of revisionist historical works claiming America's founders intended the US as a "Christian Nation" has turned into a booming cottage industry. Meanwhile, esteemed and tenured American historians at the nation's finest Universities have almost completely neglected to address the spread of a fabricated, mythologized Christian right historical narrative on America's alleged origins. That's a shame, because over the past several years a well funded, politically connected, organized effort  has succeeded at inserting its course curriculum featuring that fake history into possibly hundreds of American public schools from Texas to New Jersey.

As political propaganda, what this fake history concludes with is America's moral decline precipitated by our apparently ever-more vehement rejection of the founders' intentions for a Christian America: i.e., everything wrong in America today is the result of secular humanists' influence. Apparently, their influence even on the Supreme Court, since that body's decision that the devotional use of the bible is not permitted in public schools is would-be evidence these propagandists and false historians cite. (Devotional use of the Bible in school is correctly forbidden. Nonetheless, the academic study of the Bible is prudent, because the Bible has influenced politics, art, literature, music, and so very much else for centuries. That's why it's great that the comments following Troutfishing's diary led me to The Bible Literacy Project.)

And Troutfishing's diary included a link to Liars for Jesus, a book about the religious right's ongoing efforts to spread their false narrative. (The book is available through Amazon.com.)

Bashing helps nothing

The atheism/rationalism vs. theism/supernaturalism debate is something Religious Right Watch dips into occasionally, unlike more properly focused religious right-related sites like Talk To Action.

As might be clear from this blog, within the context of that debate--the atheism vs. supernaturalism debate--I find Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris mostly convincing in their defenses of rationalism and observations about the weaknesses of religious apologetics.

But, both authors become far less convincing when they enter the realms of politics. And that is what they do when they attack religious moderates and thereby disrupt coalitions standing against religious extremism.

I think Harris does this more vehemently. At the risk of sounding dismissive of Dawkins' harsh words about religious moderates, we can see him in Root of All Evil? engage respectfully with them. "Music to my ears!" he says to a liberal Anglican bishop who outlines for Dawkins liberal theological points. (We also learn in The God Delusion that Dawkins has friends and close professional colleagues who are religious moderates.)

But Dawkins' and Harris' argument that religious moderates, simply by believing some non-rational things, unwittingly "provide cover" for religious extremists makes little sense in light of the anti-extremism work engaged in--sometimes genuinely heroically--by many religious moderates, including many with Internet presences linked to by this site. (See the Lamp Lighters and Good Shepherd blogrolls just for a start. Read on Talk To Action or Street Prophets about valiant efforts to expose the religious right, including anti-moderate organizations, like the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), within mainline Protestant denominations.)

If religious moderates supposedly provide cover for extremists, then surely it's the case that harsh rhetoric--and it can get quite close to demonizing/dehumanizing rhetoric--against religious believers certainly helps the religious right. It does so in part by fostering division within the ranks of organizations, such as the Democratic Party, that to varying degrees include religious and non-religious members fighting against religious extremism and the religious right in particular.

Frederick Clarkson, a Talk to Action founder, expressed his concern and anger relating to Sam Harris' rhetoric against religious moderates in a good and very heart-felt diary. As he also commented there regarding the Democratic Party specifically:

What divides us is not religion and non-religion. Most religious and non-religious Democrats, have far more in common with each other than with the religious right and the GOP.  It is long past time to get over it and find better ways of talking with one another, and working with one another.

He is absolutely correct. And Harris' attacks on moderates don't help. In fact, they hurt. Rationalists and religious moderates need to be unified against religious extremists.

And one thing Frederick Clarkson and Talk To Action have always rightly championed is the important of the very nature of our discourses concerning religion and the religious right. The language and terminology used by Dawkins and Harris and others often fails to be adequately specific or considered.

I'm particularly troubled by this statement in a recent Harris piece on Huffington Post, which another Talk To Action founder, Bruce Wilson, brought to my attention: "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. . . ."

If Harris had stated that it may be okay to kill someone in self-defense because of their actions (e.g., killing a terrorist who is attacking his or her target), I would have agreed. And he does go on to mention self-defense; but, his original statement remains. Killing someone because of their beliefs? That is repugnant. There are religious extremists who endorse killing people just because of their beliefs. Harris finds that loathsome, I'm sure. But how is what Harris is advocating any different?

Also via Bruce, the Unitarian Universalist Association has a worthy examination of secularism and tolerance. It includes important observations, such as the fact that arguments against religion often uncritically proceed from fundamentalist definitions of religion, and only then is liberalism’s apparent inauthenticity the unsurprisingly result.

Still on the march

Exceprts from "Christianists on the March," a TruthDig report by Chris Hedges, author of the new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America:

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists." [Ed. note: photo of Adams at right]
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He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo....
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Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair.... The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him.
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The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic.... a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true—the very essence of the totalitarian state.  It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement.  And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.  We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial.
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Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck—who also used “values” to energize his base at the end of the 19th century....  Bismarck’s attacks, which...made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis’ more virulent...repression.

The Real Zeal?

"I have never really understood missionary zeal of any sort,” wrote a commenter on the blog Cosmic Variance in reaction to the zeal of both religious proselytizers and Dr. Richard Dawkins, a geneticist and the author of The God Delusion, a book that attempts to demonstrate both that the existence of God is exceedingly improbable (for all intents and purposes, effectively impossible) and that religion, on balance, is bad for humanity and the individual.

The idea of missionary zeal can be basically defined as the determination to convince other people of your own point of view. Since missionary is a word loaded with religious associations, I think a better term could be found, but I've not been able to come up with one. The best I can manage is "activist" zeal, a term I will use in this post interchangeably with "missionary" zeal.

Regardless of whether or not the commenter meant to imply that all types of missionary zeal are the same (and he may not have been implying such), I think it may be useful to point out that differences exist, of course, and that the lack of such zeal entirely in the world would carry consequences.

The activist zeal of a Richard Dawkins or a Sam Harris (pictured, right) is based on evidence that is verifiable; it is not based on theology.

Those who proselytize (such as many evangelical Christians), cite the pending eternal damnation of the souls of the un-converted (or in the case of some Muslims cite other things, such as the impurity or evil of non-believers) as the reason for their missionary zeal (or in rare instances their homicidal zeal).

Their reasoning, albeit ultimately circular, is sound within the supposed rules of their religious worldview that, in the first place, does not give physical evidence and scientific research as much weight when defining ultimate reality. Their reasoning about ultimate truth is often primarily based on claims or narratives in a holy book, as well as tradition or ancillary observations about their religious tradition. (E.g., the evangelical Christian may embrace as true the notion that Jesus was born of a virgin; his or her proof will be limited to biblical citations, though he may also note that this belief is hundreds of years old, or that millions of people believe as he does--the implications being that therefore the virgin birth is true.)

Those who have activist zeal for countering such a religion-based worldview, that is, countering a worldview in which religious faith trumps what the scientific process usually recognizes as evidence, include people like Richard Dawkins (pictured, right), who are usually philosophical materialists to some great degree. Sometimes they are called "free thinkers" or "rationalists." For the purposes of this post, I'm going with the term zealous "rationalists."

When the issue is the existence of God, zealous rationalists often note that the scientific evidence for God's existence is practically nil, and that non-scientific evidence cited by the religious can be unpersuasive not only because it is not scientific, but because even as non-scientific evidence it looks unremarkable if compared to other non-scientific beliefs, including those now debunked or simply very unpopular. (E.g., To a Christian, a zealous rationalist might point out that Zoroastrians, who are rare but exist in pockets in southern Iran and mostly among the Parsi in India, also believe in hell, and then ask, "So if that part of Zoroastrianism--which incidentally pre-dates Christianity and Judaism--is true, what invalidates all other aspects of Zoroastrianism? Why not be a Zoroastrian?" Or a zealous rationalist might point out that the same holy book that is held up as evidence for Jesus' virgin birth also implicitly endorses slavery and contains factual errors, such as the erroneous belief that the sun orbits the Earth.)

When the issue is the harm religion can do, rationalists usually cite studies or--less convincingly, I think--cite moments in world history that can suggest that religious beliefs can be a root cause of or justification for violence (e.g. the September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.), for the suppression of liberties or rights (e.g. the institution of slavery among Christians in the 1800's and before), or even simply for some torturous fears an individual might suffer (e.g., the fear of a gay adolescent that he or she is demon-possessed or destined to go to hell).

The zeal of either type--the religious person or rationalist—might be considered distasteful by some. Perhaps by most. Yet, if no one ever had such zeal, some (many?) things most of us now deplore, such as slavery or even smoking, might be with us still. Improvements in things such as human rights and public health have in many instances throughout history not occurred without zealous people--including those who based their advocacy on theological grounds.

(Images: a mobile disaster relief vehicle of the Salvation Army and Medecins Sans Frontiers, a.k.a, "Doctors Without Borders" at work in Sudan.)

Whether or not all zealousness, as activism, is seen as annoying, it's true that not all zealousness is the same, and it is difficult to find motivations for missionary/activist zeal among rationalists that is not more humanistic than motivations for missionary zeal among the religious. For instance, Richard Dawkins' zeal is based on liberal, Western, humanist ideals including the goal of limiting human suffering. Conversely, the proselytizing zeal of most religious people is based on concepts about an afterlife or admonitions written in a holy book. Even when the religious are zealous not about proselytizing but about social justice (e.g., caring for the sick) because of an admonition in a holy book, their subsequent laudable actions are no doubt being executed also by many people without religious convictions at all.

Based on the above observations, I believe one should be more inclined to genuinely thank Dawkins than not to do so, to believe that his form of "missionary zeal" is better for us all than the missionary zeal of the religious among us.

Naturalistic explanations for religious belief

In case you missed The New York Times Magazine article, "Darwin's God," here's a summary:

There's a debate becoming more vociferous between two schools of thought relating to naturalistic (scientific) explanations of religious belief.

One school of thought sees religious belief as a byproduct of evolutionary adaptations relating to cognitive abilities of homo sapiens. The other school sees religious belief an adaption itself--that is an evolutionary development that itself increases the chance for survival, not a result of other adaptations that once increased or now increase (or both) the chance for survival.

Proponents of the former--byproduct theorists--include geneticist Richard Dawkins of Cambridge University and anthropologist Scott Atran (photo at left). Proponents of the second--adaption theorists--include evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (photo below) of SUNY Binghamton.

For byproduct theorists, specifically religious belief (unlike language) is not itself a biological adaption, but other more basic cognitive functions are. For them:

The bottom line is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls--and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics..... [W]e are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing--whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death--are culturally shaped.

Or as Atran put it, religious thought involves "a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary use of everyday cognitive processes."

The more basic, "everyday," cognitive functions include:

1. Agent detection. For example, as a caveman you are benefited by an ability to presume and engaging in the presumption that

the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from.... If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.

2. Causal reasoning, that is, our ability to "impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever [we encounter], no matter how apparently random." And

3. Theory of mind (a.k.a., "folkpsychology"), "an understanding of ordinary people’s ordinary minds," that is, an understanding that other minds do exist beyond your own, and an understanding of what they're more or less likely to be thinking.

For adaption theorists, specifically religious belief is a biological adaptation: religion either once did or currently does (or both) offer a survival advantage.

One possible complication for the adaption theory is that it presumes that "group selection" is a mechanism of evolution--that is, it argues that evolution is operative not only at the level of an individual organism's chances for survival and, thus, the passing on of its genes, but also at the level of groups of individuals' chances for survival, and that there are ways at the level of a group by which an individual's chances for survival can be enhanced.

This argument relating to religion and group selection notes that, yes

[t]here are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources spent on rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain injunctions, the pain of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup struggle...the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others.

Adaptionists also see survival benefits, from religion, that would depend upon language.

If a particular selfless trait enhances a person’s reputation, spread through the written and spoken word, it might give him an advantage in many of life’s challenges, like finding a mate.

This sort of group selection theorizing even opens up the possibility that

a mixture of hardheaded realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most adaptive and that “what seems to be an adversarial relationship” between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that “keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel.”

Many basic observations stemming from research are agreed upon by adaption and byproduct theorists. For instance, that

when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

And that the "idea of an infallible God is comfortable and familiar, something children readily accept" and many adults, too, in part because: 1. god, as a concept, is a "minimally counterintuitve" agent (i.e., god is somehow not utterly unbelievable, unlike what studies show some other ideas to be--such as a "tree that talks and flies and time-travels"), and 2. the concept of god usually contains an emotional component insofar as the concept of god is associated with "the natural heightening of emotions that occurs in times of personal crisis.... [such as] when someone comes face to face with mortality" or the emotional component stirred up through religious ritual.

The article concludes:

No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.

Religious right ready for 2008 political resurgence

From "Evangelicals In Exile," by Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone, March 8, 2007:

[A]ccording to evangelical leaders and activists, most in the movement are determined to mount a massive counterattack in 2008 -- beginning with a no-holds-barred effort to reconquer the Republican Party and reignite the "culture wars" over abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. Rather than examining its own role in last year's electoral defeat, the religious right blames moderate Republicans for mounting a centrist campaign that failed to stir up voters on hot-button issues. As evangelicals see it, the party took them for granted in 2006, refusing to champion a "pro-family" agenda at the polls.
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[T]he religious right is redoubling its efforts to mobilize its political machine -- including tens of thousands of churches, hundreds of radio stations and two national television networks. The Family Research Council, a leading lobby for the Christian right, is planning a huge expansion on the Internet, including videos and podcasts, to reach millions in next year's election.
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The Christian right has been repeatedly proclaimed dead over the past twenty-five years, particularly after the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 -- only to rise stronger than ever.

"The reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated," says Carville, noting that the religious right's media empire and network of churches provide the Republican Party with a permanent national infrastructure. "If anybody thinks that they're not going to exert influence in the Republican nominating process in 2008, they're nuts."

Religious right: Hooray for HPV.... (It's easier than stoning)

On Salon.com, humorist and commentator Bill Maher tells gives a good assessment of the religious right's crusade against an HPV cancer vaccine. In short, "Activists don't want girls inoculated against HPV because they want sex to remain as scary as possible."

Maher:

These Christian groups aren't just against the HPV shot; they're against family planning and condoms and morning after pills -- they want to make sure sex is as dangerous as possible, so that kids know, if they sleep around and get an STD, that's God teaching them a lesson.