Books

A Powerful Correlation

In Books, Secularism on 5 November 2009 with Comments Off

The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby

Yet inconsistencies abound even among the one third of Americans who say that they consider the Bible the literal word of God — not merely “inspired by God” but, from the serpent in the Garden of Eden to Jesus’ resurrection from the grave, an explicit blueprint handed down by the deity, with Part I going directly to Moses and Part II through Jesus to the twelve apostles. Even more Americans — four in ten — believe that God made man in his present form, in one distinct act of creation, during the past 10,000 years. There is something mysterious about the finding that Americans are more likely to believe in the creation account set forth in Genesis than they are to credit the literal truth of the whole Bible. Apparently many people accept the story that God created Adam out of dust and Eve out of Adam’s rib but balk at subsequent whims of the Supreme Being, say, sending a flood to destroy everyone on earth but one family or making a ninety-year-old woman pregnant by her hundred-year-old husband Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish people, and then asking Abraham to kill his only son. A similar inconsistency is apparent in polls showing that nearly two thirds of Americans believe in heaven but fewer than half believe in hell. It seems that the American tendency to choose from a cafeteria-style theological menu is not limited to Catholics.

Regardless of how fundamentalists fine-tune their beliefs, there is unquestionably a powerful correlation between religious fundamentalism and lack of education. Approximately 45 percent of those who have no education beyond high school believe in the literal truth of the Bible, while only 29 percent with some college — and just 19 percent of college graduates — share that old-time faith. Secularism, skepticism, and acceptance of mainstream science all rise with education; two thirds of college graduates, but only about one third of high school graduates, believe that living beings have evolved over time — with or without the guiding hand of a creator.

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The Worst Pseudoscientific Ideas

In Books, Secularism on 13 October 2009 with 1 comment

The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby

Forgotten in their original form but not gone, the worst pseudoscientific ideas emanating from the late nineteenth century are constantly being marketed under new brand names in the United States. Social Darwinism has never died: it manifested itself as a bulwark of eugenics until the Second World War; in the tedious midcentury “objectivist” philosophy of Ayn Rand; and, most recently, in the form of market economy worship that presents itself not as political opinion but as a summa of objective facts. All of the theories included in the general category of social Darwinism may be summed up in the immortal line uttered by the hero of Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943): “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is — ‘Hands off!’” Rand was an atheist, but Americans have managed to translate her social Darwinism into the language of faith: according to a recent poll, a majority mistakenly believe that “God helps those that help themselves” is a line from the Bible.

It is useful to recall that intellectualism was not always synonymous with liberalism, especially economic liberalism, in the American mind. The irreconcilable conflict between evolutionism and biblical literalism would probably have been sufficient to engender a permanent fundamentalist antagonism towards all intellectuals and scientists who disputed any part of the creation story in Genesis. But the fact that so many prominent intellectuals once used Darwinian evolution as an argument against all social reform provided yet another reason for populist fundamentalists to dismiss not only the theory of evolution but the rich intellectuals who seemed to be its most ardent proponents. [William Jennings] Bryan would no doubt have been astonished had anyone told him 1896, when he made his “Cross of Gold” speech, that by the end of the twentieth century, many Americans who shared his religious beliefs would ally themselves with the political party favoring the interests of the rich — and that the Social Gospel, enjoining Christians to help their fellow man, would be replaced by the conviction that the Lord helps those who help themselves (and that the Bible tells us so).

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Granting Religion Immunity

In Books, Secularism on 10 October 2009 with 1 comment

The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby

Misguided objectivity, particularly with regard to religion, ignores the willed ignorance that is one of the defining characteristics of fundamentalism. One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone’s faith — an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions. Both the Constitution and the pragmatic realities of living in a pluralistic society enjoin us to respect our fellow citizens’ right to believe whatever they want — as long as their belief, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But many Americans have misinterpreted this sensible laissez-faire principle to mean that respect must be accorded the beliefs themselves. This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. Millions of Americans are perfectly free, under the Constitution, to believe that the Lord of Hosts is coming one day to murder millions of others who do not consider him the Messiah, but the rest of the public ought to exercise its freedom to identify such beliefs as dangerous fallacies that really do pick pockets and break legs.

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Some Playful Stunt

In Books, Nonsense on 9 October 2009 with Comments Off

Generosity: An Enhancement (Powells)
by Richard Powers

From where I sit, the whole human race did something stupid when young — pulled some playful stunt that damaged someone. The secret to survival is forgetting. If evolution favored conscience, everything with a backbone would have hanged itself from a ceiling fan eons ago, and invertebrates would once again be running the place.

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Trapped American Secularists

In Books, Secularism on 8 October 2009 with Comments Off

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby

The fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans say they believe in God and (in much smaller numbers) regularly attend church does not mean that a coherent secularist message will fall on deaf ears. … [M]ost Americans, whatever their religious views, have a healthy respect for the constitutional principle of separation of church and state. And most oppose the religious right’s attempts to sacralize decisions. … The problem is that religious fundamentalists care more about religious issues than the rest of the public does, and they do more to see that their views are heard. They have dominated public discourse and have trapped American secularists between two poles. On the one hand, secularists are credited with exaggerated importance by those who have swallowed the argument that the nonreligious have already won the day; on the other, secularists are attacked (sometimes by the same people) as enemies of majoritarian, by definition religious, American values. The antisecularists cannot have it both ways. If secularists are in charge of everything, then America is not as religious as the religiously correct claim; if secularists are an insolent minority trying to erode the values of the majority, then they are not in charge of everything.

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