I know the question invitetes an unrestrained rant but instead of a blunt denunciation, I am going to try provide a thoughtful critique--a scalpel instead of a bludgeon. Not all of Christianity is equally bad. There are postmodern, secular and Humanist versions of Christianity that are benign and even positive. But there are fundamentalist versions that, in my view, are completely wrongheaded and socially destructive. It is my hope to offer a critique of Christianity that will enlist the former to oppose the latter. So, please bear with me on the length; I trust you will find it both interesting and important.
Will the real Christianity please stand up
One of the temptations in attacking Christianity is to tar everyone with the same brush. When you do, it makes you look ill-informed and tends to diminish your critique in the eyes of the very person you hope to persuade. For example, you can’t hold modern Protestants responsible for the cult of the saints, the reverence for relics, the Crusades or the Inquisition, since they broke away and have distanced themselves from the Catholic Church. You should be aware that even the Catholic Church has moderated its positions. Since Vatican II, it has adopted a postmodernist theology that is compatible with science and an increasingly pluralistic world. Jean Paul XXIII doubled the number of Catholic saints, not to increase its stock of holy knucklebones, but to acknowledge those who have dedicated their lives to social justice and to redefine sainthood in those terms. It would be a mistake to overlook these attempts to correct the errors of the past, especially when there are other areas that are much more deserving of criticism, such as the Church’s on-again, off-again flirtations with fascism (under Pope Pius XII and Benedict XVI).
The Jesus Movement. Originally, Christianity was never intended to be a worldwide religion, lasting for any length of time. Historians (relying on textual analysis) tell us that Jesus was responding to a crisis within Judaism, and that in setting himself forth as the "Messiah," he was offering himself as a spiritual alternative to the collaborationist Sadducees and the hypocritical Pharisees, in what was to be a spiritual deliverance from the corrupting effects of the Roman occupation. In this respect, Jesus saw himself as squarely in the tradition of the prophets, as he preached against the seductiveness of the Roman worldly values of love of wealth, power, and status. However, the Jesus movement was for Jews only. If non-Jews benefited from this, it would be in a clearly secondhand way, like dogs fed on scraps fallen from the table. Jesus believed that the world was about to end "any day now." So, he exhorted his followers to sell or give away what they owned, to come follow him, and not to worry about tomorrow.
Egalitarian Christianity. What nobody saw coming was that Christianity’s critique of Roman corruption would be widely appealing to underdogs throughout the empire. In this respect, the real founder of Christianity was St. Paul, since it was he who founded and ministered to non-Jewish communities all across the empire. These communities were communal and communist in nature as people from all walks of life donated their property to the Church and lived as virtual equals in brotherly love. Given their belief in the impending end of the world, they began to live, literally, as if there were no tomorrow. And, as a result, there was a prevailing sense that "anything goes." Even the Jewish communities began to fall away from kosher laws, until a fateful meeting between St. Peter and St. Paul made it an "official" part of the New Covenant. The radical egalitarianism of the early Church demanded a social conscience that is highly subversive even now, but especially in a slave holding society held together by brute force.
Of course, there was no "scripture" in these early centuries. St. Paul’s letters to the early Church were intended to address problems specific to these communities, such as the importation of temple prostitution, the keeping of slaves for sexual purposes, or any other excess of the "anything goes" attitude that might conflict with their communal ethos, or cause the community to fall into disrepute with the secular authorities. The idea that St. Paul’s letters were intended to be Scripture, much less the inerrant Word of God, would have struck St. Paul as absurd. For one thing, St. Paul expected the world to end tomorrow or the next day. For another, there was no need for scripture in the early Church because the people living in these communes believed that Christ was literally present and living with them in Spirit. Indeed, the four gospels represented four separate and competing traditions within the early Christian movement. (Note the number of red dots and crosses in the figure above. If St. Paul intended his epistles to be scripture, then why didn’t he keep copies; why didn’t more of them survive?)
Hierarchical Christianity. It was not until the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, when the (then still pagan) Emperor Constantine locked the church fathers in a compound and wouldn’t let them out until they came back with a single unified creed. The result was that several authentic writings, and the views of the less powerful apostolic traditions were left on the cutting room floor. To claim that this exercise in blatant political interference somehow produced an "inspired" scripture that can be taken as the inerrant word of God, is utterly ridiculous and leads to no end of mischief.
Ironically, Christianity was not Constantine’s first choice as a state religion. Earlier, he considered and rejected the much older and more venerable religion of Mithraism and it’s worship of the Sun/Fire god Ahura Mazda. He also considered the astrological religion of the Chaldaens. Constantine also retained the office of Pontifex Maximus (the pagan pope) and he never got around to being baptized until many years later. In fact, his influence over the proceedings at Nicaea more or less put him in the position of the first Christian pope. Up until that point, there had been no unified Catholic Church, no Church hierarchy, no established orthodoxy, and relatively little Church property. Constantine did not actually declare Christianity the official religion of the empire, so much as he withdrew state funding from pagan temples and gave it instead to Christian churches. Suddenly, everyone was angling to become a Christian and receive financial favors from the state.
The divinity of Christ, which was not widely accepted up until then, became a point of Christian orthodoxy, necessitating a permanent hierarchy of priests to intercede between Man and God. Likewise, elements of Zoroastrianism--i.e., a belief in angels and demons, saints and halos, the association of the lamb with Christ, a resurrection after three days, and an apocalyptic final struggle between "Good" and "Evil"--all became incorporated into Christianity. As a reward for Constantine’s efforts, the empire was plagued by sectarian infighting until the Emperor Julian took back Church funding some 50 years later. By this time, however, the Church was capable of generating its own income.
Millenarian Christianity. Seduced by the wealth and trappings of status and power, the Catholic Church hierarchy embraced the very values that early Christianity rejected. Orthodoxy became the foundation of Church power. And to preserve orthodoxy, Christianity began to actively disparage reason, encourage the uncritical acceptance of evidence, promote superstition and magical thinking, and incite fears of sin and damnation. Fears that the world was ending appeared to be realized by the collapse of Rome and the intensely brutal period of early Feudalism that followed. But still the world refused to die. Then, no less than 6 comets were observed between 975 and 1005, the first and last of which were accompanied by major famines. Each was taken as a sign that the incorruptible heavens were breaking down, spilling God’s vengeance on a world that was incontestably brutal and grim.
Y1K anxieties continued to course throughout Christendom for another four hundred years, touching off pious movements in which people tried to repent by adopting practices that were more austere than the Church. Processions of self-flagellating men wandered the countryside (spreading the black death, along with rumors that Jews were poisoning the wells). People simply picked up and set off on pilgrimages or crusades without proper preparation, ending up starving to death or succumbing to banditry. Heresy swarmed throughout the medieval world, as people sought to become more holy than the church. And the Church accommodated them, right up to the point they began to believe that because of their austere practices, they had become more holy, and therefore more deserving of Church property than the Church. At which point, the kings men would be sent in to kill all the heretics. Each famine, plague and failed crusade renewed Y1K anxieties, setting off a search for the "evil ones among us" who allegedly brought this misfortune. By the 14th Century, any crop failure, stillbirth, or premature death was enough to set off a witch-hunt, pogrom, or some other form of scapegoating.
Protestant Christianity. The Church, always in need of money to support the opulence of Rome, capitalized on these anxieties by selling papal pardons. But, rather than allaying people’s anxieties, this hyping of indulgences only served to make people more anxious about sin and damnation, especially when the obvious corruption of the Church began to undermine people’s confidence that it could truly expiate sin. Martin Luther, for example, was completely obsessed by sin, and felt tormented by the Devil to the point of insanity. What he proposed in 1517 was nothing short of revolutionary. Namely, that the pope and the priesthood could not remit penalties that they did not impose by canonical law; that sin could be repented by oneself if one’s heart was sincere; and that faith alone could secure salvation.
The problem was, without a priest to absolve them, how could they be sure that they were sincere enough? And, with respect to faith, how could they be sure that they really believed? In time this unrestrained second-guessing of sincerity settled into an intense self-loathing and a doctrinal belief in Man’s "total depravity." Likewise, doubt came to be seen as the perpetual enemy of faith; and the expiation of doubt came to be seen as an obligation, even if it entailed a dogged willingness to believe the impossible, setting the stage for the "deep and totalistic commitment to belief" that we know today as fundamentalism.
In the meanwhile, Protestantism explicitly opposed Catholic orthdoxy and the authority of the pope. Saints, relics, fancy religious vestments and iconography receded in importance in the austere Protestant churches, along with a wide array of related superstitious beliefs and observances. As literacy and bibles became more widespread, scripture became a touchstone of religious observance. This promoted an interest in reason, learning, and understanding things according to one’s own lights--anything but blind faith. When the Age of Enlightenment came, many minds were prepared to break away from theistic religion altogether and follow the path of science and reason. They sought to understand their Creator by studying His Creation--in naturalistic as opposed to supernatural terms. Their efforts were handsomely rewarded by a comprehensive science and potent technology. Our founding fathers established a secular society based on a democracy founded to realize certain "inalienable" human rights, which were believed natural to and inseparable from the human spirit. Liberal mainstream Protestant denominations were able to find ways of interpreting scripture in creative ways that minimized any conflict between faith and reason. And even the Catholic Church eventually came along.
Modern Christianity. As the industrial revolution progressed, secular society grew; people remained nominally Christian but became less and less religious. The functions of the extended family were spun off into the economy. People no longer made their own clothes; they bought factory made. Families no longer cared for their sick; they sent them to doctors and hospitals, which grew into an economically and politically powerful medical sector. (Doctors took advantage of this political power by outlawing midwifery and abortion in the 1840s. At that time, however, it was purely a matter of economic self-interest.) Food production, like everything else, was industrialized and transformed into a commodity. Even people and their skills were transformed into labor commodities. And, once commodified, impersonal market forces uprooted them from their communities and their traditions in order to serve the demands of finance capital. The extended family which, up until that point, had always been a unit of production, was ground down to its nucleus, which then became a unit of consumption. The family became a "haven in a heartless world." As capitalism matured, mass marketers began to strip mine the human psyche in order to find anxieties that could be used to sell people products. "Feeling socially insecure? Buy our toothpaste and our detergent and turn your stuff ’Whiter than White.’" As a result of all this consumerist brainwashing, people became more individualistic, more materialistic, more narcissistic and self-absorbed.
People went to work, earned their money, and bought everything they could afford, but they still felt alienated, hollow and unfulfilled. A great many turned to modern psychology, which recast age old spiritual complaints in secular, naturalistic terms. Nietzsche, the existential philosophers, Freudian and Jamesian psychology, recast the human condition in understandable human terms--terms that rendered Christianity somewhat obsolete. Indeed, the modern and postmodern understanding of Christ is that Jesus was entirely human--a kind of walking, talking Kantian categorical imperative (which I will explain below). People began to understand their lives in terms of realizing their full potential. Self-realization and self-fulfillment became a primary duty, such that people were no longer content to remain duty-bound in bad marriages. People began to put their own welfare ahead of religious "principle." Indeed, people came to believe that they had a right to be happy. Mainstream denominations blended pastoral counseling with psychological counseling, to help people navigate the alienation that comes from being reduced to an economic commodity, and the soul-deadening effects of consumerism. (The picture above is the mall of a megachurch, which applies mall architecture and mass marketing techniques to religion. The result is a kind of pop religion that is to religion what pop music is to music.)
Postmodern Christianity. Unfortunately, happiness is a temporary condition. To experience it, one must continually set and realize new goals. Consequently, people began to experiment with hedonistic lifestyles, drugs, New Age mysticism, paganism, Eastern religions, social activism, science and Humanistic philosophy, before settling into a kind of contentment, and a "whatever floats your own boat" tolerance of others. With the advent of the Information Age and the Internet, capitalism has kicked the strip mining of the human psyche into high gear. There is no longer any sexual fantasy so nasty, bizarre or taboo that it cannot be transformed into a marketable commodity that somebody is willing to pay for. In fact, marketing imperatives demand that pornography achieve a new level of "nasty" every six months.
You are also invited to completely accessorize your lifestyle on eBay. Want to show others that you are a friend of the planet, there is a whole host of recycled and Energy-Star(Tm) products. If you are gay, there are whole neighborhoods filled with gyms, tanning salons and clubs that will cater to your sexuality. If this does not completely satisfy your desire for a sense of community, you can subscribe to MySpace or Askville. If you crave an authentic religious experience, you can book a retreat, a pilgrimage, a guru, or a prayer weekend of your choice.
Perception and reality, the original and the fake, the medium and the message, the commodity and the need it satisfies, the virtual, the simulated, the real and the hyperreal are all continually morphing into one another in the postmodern world. Umberto Eco, in his Travels in Hyperreality, describes a waxworks depiction of the Last Supper, rendered in exquisite detail. The figures are rendered so realistically and in such vivid color, and presented with such theatrical lighting, dramatic narrative buildup, and musical fanfare that create an effect that is "more real than real." This illusion is enhanced by a strategically placed faded photograph of the "original" Last Supper by DaVinci--which is itself an imaginary depiction of an event, drawn second and third-hand accounts, of something which may or may not have actually occurred. One could easily take this experience of the hyperreal as an authentic religious experience. After all, who is to say that it isn’t? On the other hand, one can take this insight into the multilayered nature of the real and the hyperreal to deconstruct people’s sense of the "spiritual," especially as concerns the carefully choreographed and slickly packaged theatrical presentations that pass for worship in the nation’s megachurches. (When Eleanor of Aquitaine commissioned the first Gothic Cathedral in the 12th Century, St. Bernard vehemently disapproved on the grounds that all that artwork distracted from worship; now that style of architecture almost automatically places one in a prayerful mood; but many deem it almost oppressively "churchy.")
Postmodernism seems completely antithetical and threatening to True Believers--and it is. It seems hopelessly relativistic and uncertain--and it is. Nonetheless, it is not as morally adrift as it may first appear. Postmodernism is thoroughly anchored in Humanistic values, such as a deep respect for human dignity, a regard for the evolution and survival of the species, the well being and self-realization of the individual, a commitment to good faith, pluralism, reality testing, social justice and accountability through reason. Unfortunately, postmodernists suffer from the defects of their virtues. They are ideologically committed to tolerance--often expressed as a multi-culturalist regard for the validity of diverse and exotic points of view--so much so that they tend to turn a blind eye to those who are implacably hostile to their values, and who will trade upon their tolerance while they try to destroy it. Also, if the truth be told, the postmodern sensibility tends to be a bit self-absorbed, complacent and dilettantish. Their hypercritical self-reflection, their acute sense of irony and absurdity tend to work against the formation of strong opinions, and the sorts of commitment necessary to sustain serious organizing. It may take a radicalizing event, like the repeal of Roe v Wade, to snap them out of it, but I am hoping an eye-opening critique will suffice.
Fundamentalist Christianity. Right-wing Christian Fundamentalism, as we encounter it today, is a uniquely 20th Century American phenomenon with its roots in the Antebellum South. By 1830, repentance of sin, born-again conversion, and biblical inerrancy had become the regional foundation of faith. When Northern abolitionists attacked slavery, Southern preachers marshaled their own scriptural defense, citing passages (e.g.., Exodus 20-21, Matt 10:24, Ephesians 6:5-6, etc.), that acknowledged or appeared to support slaveholding. This interpretive combat raised the religious stakes in both regions. The United States in the mid-19th Century was arguably the most churchgoing nation in the world, "bristling with exceptionalist faith and millennial conviction," in the words of Kevin Phillips (see American Theocracy below). These doctrinal disagreements helped define the regional differences that fed the separatism that eventually shouted for succession.
(Pentecostal snake-handlers demonstrating their faith --->)
To quote Mitchell Snay in The Gospel of Disunion:
The way Southern clerics understood the relationship between religion and politics is key to understanding Southern separatism. ... They sanctified slavery with an elaborate scriptural justification of human bondage, a slave-holding ethic to guide the conduct of Christian masters, and a program to bring the Gospel to the slaves. The transformed the meaning of sectional controversy into a larger struggle between orthodoxy and infidelity. Through clarifying the boundaries between religion and sectional politics, Southern clergymen essentially translated the political conflict into religious terms.
When war finally came, citizens on both sides had convinced themselves that their side was to be the God’s vehicle for the redemption of mankind. The South in particular identified with Biblical Israel because of their image as a more prayerful people than Northerners--and because they shared the Israelites’ consciousness of being the people of a small beleaguered nation surrounded by enemies. Because of its theological weight, Scripture could not be abandoned when the Confederacy experienced disheartening reverses and eventual defeat. They compared their suffering with God testing Job, and concluded that this testing it was all part of "God’s greater design." To reinforce their self-esteem, Southerners recast their lost war using half-truths and exaggerations; they established a mythology of Lost Cause; in which they remained God’s chosen people who, like the Israelites, would enter the promised land if they would keep His commandments and covenants, among which was fealty to their nobel cause. Baptized in blood, they would be redeemed if they kept faith and walked in the old ways--which they resolved to do. Southern churches became bastions of White Christian identity, and used the power of the pulpit, Sunday schools, seminaries and church publications to organize the reassertion of White Supremacy after Reconstruction.
In many respects, the present resurgence of right-wing religious activism is a continuation of this old conflict. This is not to say that Born Again Christians necessarily understand their religion in those terms, any more than postmoderns can articulate their philosophical backstory. Nonetheless, there is an implicit fusion of Born Again religion and ballot box politics which, after a long period of quiescence, is politically reasserting itself nationally along with a resurgent South. Many Born Again Christians are consciously fighting a "cultural war" against the encroachments of secularism, humanist values, naturalistic science, tolerance of diversity, and "liberalism," which they lump all together as "atheism." But this cultural war has its roots in the Civil War, and in a backward-looking, authoritarian, patriarchal, and slave-holding ethos.
The entertainment-oriented megachurches present a friendly, non-threatening face to those who are questing and experimenting, or who want to "come home" to a more firm spiritual center. Those who are successfully indoctrinated are fed to more radical "hardcore" churches who demand a more taxing commitment, and are more stridently militant. At the center of the web are the interlocking associations, the lobbying groups and the Republican Party coordinating committees. Behind these are the Neocons, the Dominionists, the Christian Reconstructionists, the Christian Identity movement, and others pressing for a theocratic America based on Biblical principles. These latter groups, like Battle Cry, envision a more "muscular" and violent Christianity that is engage in an apocalyptic all-out war of Good against Evil. Their mega-events, often pitched to young people, employ the kinds of regimented spectacle more in keeping with a Nazi political rally than a Christian service. (Picture above is a Battle Cry rally in Amherst, MA.)
Why Born Again Christians Can Not Be Intellectually Honest
The process of becoming "Born Again" consists of being inducted into a separate reality where one consciously purges oneself of all doubt and accepts certain articles of faith--the existence of a supernatural God, that Scripture is the literal Word of God, and that one can be "saved" by faith alone--as Absolutely True. This is a kind of go-for-broke, all or nothing conversion experience, in which one wagers one’s life, one’s soul, and one’s sanity on the proposition that one’s particular set of religious beliefs are Absolutely True. One then awakens into a "new reality" founded on these "eternal certainties."
Unfortunately, this is a different reality than the rest of us live in. And any clarity of mind that comes from possessing Absolute and immutable Truths comes at a terrible price: One must jettison everything that doesn’t fit--reason, feelings, facts and, ultimately, the ability to distinguish one’s religious fantasies from the reality that the rest of us inhabit. In other words, the Believer comes to inhabit a God-centered universe in which reality emanates from God the Creator, rather than existing unto itself. In this alternate reality, the truth of things is only "testable" through reference to Scripture--which is the God-centered world reputedly revealed to us by God Himself. Thus, if the Bible says a great flood covered the whole earth and submerged the mountains, then that is the Absolute Truth, the bedrock of reality, which even science must agree. To disagree is not only to contradict reality, but to oppose God. In this respect, the Believer is not only unhinged from the reality that the rest of us live in, he is hostile to it.
Data Blindness. Professing to know what other people merely believe with Absolute Certainty requires a high degree of mental tenacity, especially when one lives in a scientific culture in which the whole fabric of reality stands in contradiction to a supernatural Creator. The Born Again Believer must not only ignore, deny, and rationalize away all kinds of scientifically verified facts, he must studiously avoid any knowledge or curiosity about them in the first place.
This single-mindedness eventually leads one to a kind of "data blindness" in which one literally can not see facts which contradict one’s belief. For example, someone recently asked the question, "What would you do if God told you to kill your child (like Abraham and Isaac)? All four Born Again Believers ignore the same salient information that a more reality-based person would have--like the child’s suffering; how they were going to explain their actions to the police; and the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison. Each of them assumed that this is a spiritual test--not of their moral integrity, or their love for their fellow man--but a test of their Faith (which they all believe is the sole requirement to their salvation). As a consequence, they were all willing to place a demonstration of their Faith above the life and welfare of their child, above human laws against murder or, indeed, above any other human consideration.
And, they were all so absolutely certain they were correct, that they took offense at the suggestion that it is reprehensible or unchristian to murder your children. Rather than conceding that others might find child murder or human sacrifice just a bit problematic, they went on the attack and tried to change the subject by claiming that they felt victimized and "insulted" by their critic’s outrage. In this respect, Believers are not only tonedeaf to the moral concerns of others, they literally live in a different moral reality.
True Believers don’t read scientific reports or consult experts of any kind. They don’t think or worry about facts; they go with their guts, and they pray to God that their guts are correct. While this may work for interpersonal relationships, but it is absolutely disastrous for social policy. Religious conservatives are completely data blind to studies showing that preaching "abstinence only" results in earlier sexual experimentation and teen pregnancy than providing kids with comprehensive sex education. Likewise, there is data blindness with respect to the complete ineffectiveness of the War on Drugs, even though it costs roughly $50 billion per year.
Analysis Paralysis. There is a natural human tendency to stop puzzling once one has found an answer to one’s question. But, when one believes that one already has the answer, questioning stops prematurely before disconfirming evidence can accumulate, or before the questioning even begins. For example, one of the Believers who went on record as saying he would kill his child if God ordered him to offered the following rationale in his defense: He reasoned that because God is "all-Knowing" and "all-Good," it must surely be in everyone’s best interest for him to kill his child. Earlier he mentioned that first he would have to be sure that it was "really" God, and not just an hallucination. However, his analysis stops at a crucial point. If God were really all-Knowing, He would know whether Abraham (or he) would go through with the order, so there is no need to test him. Secondly, if God were really all-Good, He wouldn’t traumatize both the parent and the child with such a bloodthirsty demand. In short, this putative "God" doesn’t meet either criterion, and should be dismissed as an hallucination. So, why doesn’t our Believer see this? In a very real sense he can’t see it, because if he presses his analysis to its logical conclusion, he would have to conclude that Abraham, who was operating on the same information, was wrong to agree to sacrifice Isaac--and that would contradict Scripture. So, he subconsciously derails his analysis in order to keep this contradiction from surfacing into awareness.
If you ever wondered why arguing with a Believer involves so much doublethink, its because their data blindness acts like a defense mechanism. It paralyzes any line of reasoning which leads to a conclusion that contradicts their beliefs. Studious ignorance, data blindness, cognitive distortions, analysis paralysis, wishful, shoddy and magical thinking become unavoidable when you attempt to force reality to fit a preconceived reality. Consider, for example, the truly bizarre explanation that the Young Earth Creationist’s offer for the Grand Canyon and the earth’s fossil record: the former was cut, and the latter was laid down, during the 40 days and 40 nights of Noah’s great flood.
Nowhere is analysis paralysis more prevalent than in the religious right’s assessment of what’s wrong with the country. For them, its "the decline of the family," which they attribute to abortion, divorce, homosexuality and a permissive "ungodly" society which tolerates these things. Never mind the economic forces that have thoroughly transformed the family, or our materialistic mass-market culture, or the almost nonexistent social safety net. Somehow, allowing gays to marry is ruining marriage for everyone else. Somehow, allowing people to abort genetically deformed fetuses is bringing the country down. Its not that there is any factual cause and effect connection between any of these things and actual harm to the family; its the notion that each of these things represents a kind of "sin," a kind of moral pollution that builds up and invites God’s wrath on the righteous and unrighteous alike. These also happen to be easy scapegoats--people, who do not fit into the Believer’s scheme of things, and who can be demonize and liquidated without a qualm, like a cancer or a virus. They are also convenient distractions from the country’s real problems--their Born Again leader and his oilmen cronies looting the country by charging $4 a gallon for gasoline.
Moral Autism. Born Again folks do not have the same kind of conscience as the rest of us. They do not understand the "Golden Rule" and principle of reciprocity the way the rest of us do (as a Kantian categorical imperative). Rather, they only understand the correctness of their actions in terms of whether or not they coincide with Scripture, which they regard as Law. They attempt to follow the spirit of the law in a manner in which they imagine the legislator would approve. In Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative, the legislator is the moral self, and all men are legislators; in the Born Again formulation, the legislator is God. In other words, the moral legitimacy of an action does not depend on whether it is palatable according to the "Golden Rule," but whether it is in conformity to a law issued by a duly constituted authority, in this case Scripture. Thus, True Believers cease to live according to Kantian principles, or conscience, and console themselves with the thought that because they have given themselves over completely to God, they are morally correct to kill their children when God tells them to.
The result appears to be a kind of mild psychopathy; a lack of empathy, and a tone deafness to the moral claims of one’s fellow man. To the extent that they see morality as god-given, True Believers disparage and reject human-centered values, such as human rights and civil liberties. Many Born Again folks are of the belief that majorities have the right to force their beliefs and values on minorities. As a consequence, they see nothing wrong with school prayer and other similar displays of faith. It simply does not occur to them that such things are awkward or even offensive to nonBelievers.
When you believe that you and you alone hold the Ultimate and Absolute Truth, how can you possibly treat other people as if their viewpoints are just as valid as your own? And, how can you possibly hold yourself out to others as willing to engage in intellectually honest dialogue when when you never had any intention letting your own beliefs be questioned? In this respect, dialogue becomes an insincere pretense for evangelizing people whose views the Believer never intended to seriously consider.
Born Again Personality Disorder. A personality disorder is characterized by "rigid and on-going patterns of thought and action, informed by an underlying belief system consisting of fixed fantasies." It is a configuration of the person’s character and, as such, it is not particularly amenable to treatment. There is no official diagnosis as such, but maybe ther ought to be.
True Believers appear to display an inordinate number of personality disorder characteristics. For example, there are narcissistic elements, such as grandiosity (where things are cast in momentus and biblical proportions); a lack of empathy; a preference for "principle" over people; and an instrumental use of other people for one’s own ends (i.e., killing one’s children in order to secure their own salvation). There are histrionic elements, such as evangelical attention-seeking, including a need for public displays of piety; quoting scripture or "witnessing" in socially inappropriate settings; and shallow, exaggerated or stylized emotions (Prayzz JAY-zuz!). There are borderline elements, such as extreme "black or white" thinking; antisocial elements, such as a pervasive disregard for the rights of others; obsessive-compulsive elements, such as a rigid conformity to rules, moral codes, and excessive orderliness; avoidant elements, such as social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy (i.e.., the feeling that one is a depraved sinner), extreme sensitivity to criticism or negative evaluation, and avoidance of social interaction outside of cult-like Christian circles.
Cognitive Distortions. I don’t know if anyone has tried to quantify it, but I seem to encounter more cognitive distortions when I debate with True Believers than with anyone else. Absolutist beliefs seem to lend themselves particularly easily to false dichotomies and all-or-nothing thinking. For example, if you are not in favor of Born Again religion then you must be a god-hating atheist. There is also an inordinate amount of hysterical, leaping to conclusions, and "slippery slope" type of reasoning; such as, "if we allow gays to marry, then we would have to allow polygamy, sex with children and bestiality!" Likewise, they tend to attribute their own motives to others. For example, one can present a long, well-documented factual case, and the True Believer will simply dismiss it as political "spin." For example, they will say things like, "The Theory of Evolution is wrong because it was ’made up’ by god-hating scientists who are trying to discredit God."
Another cognitive distortion is called "Disqualifying the Positive." This is a categorical and arbitrary denial that there is anything positive in something. For example, Believers will often assert that homosexuality is "just wrong." Why? "Just because it is." If pressed, they will cite scripture. You can cite scripture back; it makes no difference because their minds are made up. This works hand in glove with another cognitive distortion called a "mental filter" in which the person will single out one disturbing detail and ignore everything else. For example, when pressed to say what is wrong with homosexuality, they will bring up NAMBLA, ignoring the fact that this tiny unrepresentative group is as much despised in the gay community as it is elsewhere.
There is a similar cognitive distortion called "overgeneralization," in which one takes isolated cases and tries to make wide generalizations based on them. For example, one person I was debating on homosexuality, after bringing up NAMBLA, tried to assert that most, if not all, homosexuals were child molesters, based on anecdotal cases and a couple of seriously flawed studies he had dredged up on the Internet. I tried pointing out the flaws in the study (self-reported data, an atypical volunteer sample), but it made no impression. As far as he was concerned there were studies that supported his assertion, and there were studies that supported mine; there was no real truth to any of it; it was all just political "spin." And, in his view, the truth of the matter would ultimately be decided by majority public opinion. For him, the only truths were the preconceptions he started with. Science was just a body of contrary opinion, of equal or lesser weight than his own. When you live in a world where conventional reality testing is irrelevant, all facts become opinion; reality ceases to be what it is; it becomes what you want it to be.
Another cognitive distortion is called "personalization," which is the misattribution of causation. An example would be, attributing hurricane Katrina to God’s wrath, presumably to punish New Orleans for its "wickedness." Every good outcome becomes "proof" of God’s favor; every bad outcome becomes a "test" that is part of "God’s greater plan." There is also "magnification" and "minimization," or the inappropriate understatement or exaggeration of the way people or situations truly are. If a Believer prays for a parking space and their prayer is answered, it magnifies the glory of God and confirms the power of prayer. If their prayer goes unanswered, then it only confirms what an unworthy and wretched sinner they are. Finally, there is "emotional reasoning," this is making decisions and arguments based on how you feel about things rather than what they are. For example, when I told four believers that I thought that it was reprehensible of them to be so willing to kill their children if God ordered them to do so (after all, they could have begged for the child’s life or just said "No"), they took it as an insult.
Another cognitive distortion is "labeling." Rather than considering people in flexible and nuanced terms, one assigns a label that fixes them in absolute and unalterable terms. Hence describing oneself as a "loyal conservative" and one’s opponent as a "liberal" is a thought-stopping technique that relieves you of having to reflect on your actual positions, by reducing them to an "us" versus "them" proposition.
Dog-whistle politics. People who do not engage in conventional forms of reality-testing, and who take pride in living in a religious fantasy world, are extremely vulnerable to cynical political manipulation. Dog whistle politics is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. It begins with an appropriation and redefinition of the common language. According to Chris Hedges:
"Dominionists and their wealthy, right-wing sponsors speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past. They engage in a slow process of "logocide," the killing of words. The old definitions of words are replaced by new ones. Code words of the old belief system are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Words such as "truth," "wisdom," "death," "liberty," "life," "love" no longer mean what they mean in the secular world.
"Life" and "death" mean life in Christ or death to Christ, and are used to signal belief or unbelief in the risen Lord. "Wisdom" has little to do with human wisdom but refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the system of belief.
"Liberty" is not about freedom, but the "liberty" found when one accepts Jesus Christ and is liberated from the world to obey Him. But perhaps the most pernicious distortion comes with the word "love," the word used to lure into the movement many who seek a warm, loving community to conter their isolation and alienation. "Love" is distorted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those who claim to speak for God in return for the promise of everlasting life. The blind, human love, the acceptance of the other, is attacked as an inferior love, dangerous and unworthy."
Take, for example, how the radical Right has turned the term "liberal" into a virtual swear word--a term of opprobrium every bit as hate-filled as words as our more traditional racial and sexual slurs. The repetitive use of the word "Liberal" as a term of derision, as a catch-all designation for the hated "them," a linguistic brush to tar and feather the waivering, dissenting or the rebellious "us."
Once hijacked the word becomes divorced from its original meaning. When those in the movement speak of "Liberalism" it no longer speaks about the traditional concepts of American liberty as used by Liberals in advancing Liberalism--the liberty to express divergent opinions, to represent other ways of believing and being, the liberty of individuals to seek and prursue their own goals and forms of happiness, and to resist government intrusion in their personal lives. When used by the religious Right the term "liberty" refers to fealty to "traditional values," which is a code word for values promulgated by "the Spirit of the Lord" and an unquestioning patriotism to the national government, which is presumed to be its chosen instrument on earth.
Liberty, in a linguistic twist worthy of George Orwell, is perverted to mean submission to a theocratic authoritarian state. This state promotes a "Christian" order which is to be preserved according to a "Biblical" justice in a transformed, reinvigorated and purified legal system. In this respect, the movement is able to preserve the appearance of law and respect for democracy even as its leaders condemn their opponents as "atheists," "nonbelievers" or "secular humanists" and consign them to moral and legal oblivion. Here, "justice" becomes hijacked so that it no longer advances the universal rights and dignity of man, but the protection and promotion of "Bible-believing Christians." Justice thereby becomes perverted to carry out injustice under the appearance of law and order.
"Elite" is another poisoned word that now refers to anyone who can still think straight, who is educated, or anyone who subscribes to reason, reality testing, and a scientific worldview. The unspoken implication is, that "elites" are forcing their unpopular views on common people, who actually know better.
Sarah Palin, whose church is the dominionist-leaning Assemblies of God, is a walking talking dog whistle.
http://dogemperor.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/29/1803647-sarah-palin-dominionist-stalking-horse The GOP can not openly admit that it is racist, even though it is no secret that its members on the Supreme Court have been uniformly hostile to the interests of Blacks, and that the GOP targets Blacks in its various election-rigging schemes (see Palast’s Armed Madhouse and Overton’s Stealing Democracy). Sarah Palin is a stand-in for Mike Huckabee, who is a theological descendant of Southern slave holders, the KKK, and the church going White Supremacists of the Old South. Palin’s status as a mother has particular symbolic value among groups like the Christian Identity movement, who exhort white women to have as many children as possible in order "to check the decline of the White race." If Palin looks and sounds like poor white trash, so much the better; every redneck will see her as one of their own. And if Obama or the "media elite" are perceived as "beating up on her," even better still, because this plays into the humiliation and resentment that True Believers feel because they are so often ridiculed by mainstream folks for being out of step with reality.
The War Against Reality
Humiliation and resentment lend themselves to powerful fantasies of revenge, especially when one is already unhinged from reality and not a critical thinker to begin with. As long as a group sees itself as a beleaguered minority, they are content to remain politically apathetic and disengaged. But, once the same people begin to feel a strength in numbers, they become politically aggressive. This is one of the reasons for the proliferation of megachurches. Apart from being extremely profitable, they provide a sense that one is part of a mass movement--and visible proof that, to the uncritical eye, suggests that they are in a majority. They also provide crowd experiences that can be mistaken for "spiritual" experiences--i.e., a loss of ego and inhibition, and a resulting sense of self-transcendence, communion and "we-feeling" that can induce a person to willingly accept indoctrination. Should there ever be mass demonstrations, they will be well conditioned, well rehearsed, and more easily moved to violence than someone unaccustomed to joining, following and hanging out in a crowd.
The Assault on Science. Most Evangelical Christians are decent people who are in it for the love, the fellowship and the entertainment. But there is a small, well-financed, determined, politically connected hard core who have an agenda. From the shadows, they write the strategic plans and the talking points that slip quite readily into the minds of people who have no particular ideas of their own. Consider the Creationist debates here on Askville. Virtually none of the arguments offered are original to the people who advance them. Rather, they are taken from websites whose sole purpose is to feed the rank and file plausible sounding arguments, which they really are not intellectually equipped to independently evaluate (or they wouldn’t use them). At the center of this network is the Design Institute, which is funded by a group of wealthy right-wing capitalists.
Unfortunately, the Creationist challenge to Evolution has nothing to do with the soundness of the underlying science. It is a public relations campaign which seeks to divide and polarize Christians, in order to turn them against secular society. Christians are being told that Evolution is "against God," and that the science which supports it is "materialistic," and "atheistic." And, as a result, many well-meaning Christians are studying their apologetics, girding themselves for battle, and throwing themselves into a campaign to smear and discredit science, without pausing to consider what effect a decline in science would have on their lives or our country’s standing in the world. The Evolution debate, as it is currently being waged has nothing to do with reforming science, or even about defending the faith against "atheism," but instead, it serves a larger hidden political agenda.
This agenda is articulated in the Wedge document, a key Discovery Institute document which many of those who espouse Creationism are not even aware of, but whose tune they nonetheless march to when they debate Evolution. The wedge strategy describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to "defeat [scientific] materialism" represented by evolution, "reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," and to "affirm the reality of God." Its goal is to "renew" American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian, namely evangelical Protestant, values.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf
The document sets forth the short-term and long-term goals with milestones for the intelligent design movement, with its governing goals stated in the opening paragraph:
- To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies.
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To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
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There are three "wedge projects," referred to in the strategy as three phases designed to reach a governing goal:
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Phase I: Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity,
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Phase II: Publicity & Opinion-making, and
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Phase III: Cultural Confrontation & Renewal.
If science can be discredited, critical thinking, and reason itself are not far behind.
Stealth Tactics. The real cautionary tale about the Discovery Institute and its Wedge strategy is what happened when a few True Believers felt emboldened enough to make an end run around the Supreme Court’s 1987 ruling prohibiting the teaching of Creationism in public schools. In 2003, a newly elected member of the Dover school board in Pennsylvania sought to introduce Creationism to the local high school’s science curriculum. The school board voted down the requested text book, but sixty copies mysteriously appeared and the Librarian was ordered to process them in. One of the families caught wind of what was going on and filed suit in federal court, in effect putting Intelligent Design, Creationism, the Discovery Institute, and school board on trial. The PBS series NOVA did a documentary about the trial called, "Judgment Day": http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html
It is well worth watching because it explains what a scientific theory is, what "facts" and "evidence" are, and it shows how the Theory of Evolution has withstood the test of 150 years of intense scientific scrutiny. It also examines the case for Intelligent Design, as presented by the Discovery Institute as an alternative theory to Evolution. The Discovery Institute put on their best case for Irreducible Complexity and were soundly rebutted on all counts.
The school board’s main defense was that Intelligent Design was a scientific theory, proposed by the Discovery Institute, which maintained that it was a secular scientific institute. The school board claimed not to have known that Intelligent Design was Creationism repackaged and not a scientific theory. They lied. The Discovery Institute also lied under oath about being a secular institute. The plaintiffs not only presented the Wedge document, they also found drafts of the book just before and just after the 1987 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the teaching of Creationism on constitutional grounds. Before the decision the text referred to Creationism and Creationists, but afterward, they were replaced by "Intelligent Design." There was even a passage in the "after" version where their "find" and "replace" function only partially replaced Creationism with Intelligent Design.
But the really alarming thing about all this is that during the trial there was another round of school board elections. The pro-Creationist candidates, attempting "cultural confrontation and renewal" smeared their opponents as "atheists" and "against God." Plaintiff’s families were hounded with death threats. A mural depicting the stages of Evolution was stolen and burned. Even the judge in the case received death threats after he ruled. The spokesmen for the Discovery Institute were completely unapologetic about having lied under oath with the intention of circumventing the Constitution. Their only regret was that they had misjudged the historical moment, and had made their move before they could be sure it would stick.
Segue to Fascism. Hannah Arendt, in attempting to fathom the depths of evil expressed in the holocaust, came up with the phrase, "the banality of evil," in order to explain the behavior of Adolph Eichmann, whose trial she covered in Israel. Eichmann did not directly participate in any of the killing himself. Rather, he was a bureaucrat who organized and then ordered hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths, giving rise to what Arendt calls a "desk murderer." Eichmann was not a psychopath, a thug or a monster, but he was an authentically shallow man, who thought almost entirely in ideological catch phrases, self-invented cliches and a myopic, bureaucratic "officialese." He was a joiner, a conformist and a follower who had little or no ability to think for himself. And this, Arendt theorizes, is how masses of ordinary people get swept up into organized movements that commit genocides and atrocities without apparent moral qualm. They stop thinking and begin following orders.
Arendt describes a particular laxity of conscience in Eichmann that she deems characteristic of fascism--which is the same laxity of conscience that any Born Again True Believer experiences: Eichmann did not understand the "Golden Rule" and principle of reciprocity the way the rest of us do. Rather, he saw himself as acting according to a "higher" law framed in terms of what Adolph Hitler would approve, rather than in terms of what his fellow man would approve, or what he would approve if he were in their place. In other words, the moral legitimacy of an action does not depend whether it is palatable according to the "Golden Rule," but whether it is in conformity to a law is issued by a duly constituted authority. Thus, when Eichmann claims he "was only following orders" in carrying out the Final Solution, he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, or conscience, and consoled himself with the thoughts that he no longer "was master of his own deeds," or able "to change anything."
One sees this same kind of thinking in True Believers who, in receiving the "Word of God" through Scripture, come to believe that they are participating in a "higher" morality, founded upon Absolute Truths and held with Absolute Certainty. From their "morally privileged" point of view, no other valid points of view are possible; it no longer matters what other people think. If others do not accept the beliefs imposed upon them, it is only further proof of their wickedness. Life becomes a perpetual war, generally conceived as a war of "good" against "evil," and a war that is inclined to consider "final solutions." In such a war, the ends justify the means. One’s opponents, being Evil itself, can be regarded as inhuman or subhuman, and can be harassed, persecuted, and even exterminated without a qualm. Indeed, once True Believers command the power of the state, the result is fascism.
What You Can Do About It
First of all, take Born Again Fundamentalism seriously; take it seriously enough to really understand what it is all about. Second, do not assume that if you leave them alone that they will leave you alone. The longer you put off confronting them, the further they will drift out of reality as you know it, and the harder they will be to deal with later. Third, do not assume that they are at all committed to reason, honesty, or fair play. People who live in a god-centered reality tends to believe that they are only accountable to God; so they tend not to observe the same standards of rationality, or have the same scrupulous regard for evicence as the rest of us. Someone who believes that they posses the Ultimate Truth has long since stopped reality testing in any serious way. The only way they can live in a whimsical universe, populated with mythological creatures, and driven by a petulant judgmental supernatural personality, and not be torn apart by cognitive dissonance, is to live in a haze of unreality. People who believe in divine intervention instead of natural cause and effect, tend to become accustomed to seeing reality not as it is but as they would like it to be. They tend to regard the scientific reality-tested world the rest of us live in as a kind of fiction perpetrated in order to confound them. As a consequence, they tend to demote scientific facts to mere conjectures; logical reasoning tends to become just another form of rhetoric; and life becomes a contest of opinion and partisan "spin." This is not a principled metaphysical position; this is a wholesale rejection of reality as we know it. And an important part of that reality is our common morality.
What doesn't work. It is useless to debate the existence of God with a True Believer, because the whole point of the Believer’s existence involves taking God as given. Likewise, it is useless to demand proof for any article of faith, because the whole point of Faith is to apprehend belief without recourse to proof. Their belief system is internally self-consistent, and self-reinforcing--God exists because Scripture says he does, and Scripture is valid because God says it is. Criticizing their belief system as being "circular" or "solipsistic" carries no weight with them because they don’t see the world outside their solipsism as real.
One of the things that makes this internal confirmation so air tight is the conviction of many Believers that they have a personal relationship with God. They know He exists because they talk to Him and can feel His presence. Are they completely off their rockers? No. But this does not mean that they correctly interpret this "felt presence." There is a naturalistic psychological explanation: Our brains are equipped with mirror neurons that allow us to construct working models of other people’s minds, based on projections of our own. These can become detached and take on a life of their own. If you have ever had a heated argument with someone that ended prematurely and then continued the argument in your head, you have experienced this phenomenon. It’s also possible to construct other personalities, and endow them with a moral sensibility and a voice. There are all sorts of books on the market that purport to teach you how to talk with God (such as, Walsch’s Conversations with God), how to communicate with fairies, how to communicate telepathically with your pets, how to channel, etc. and they all employ basically the same method--let your mind go blank, focus on the entity, mentally call out to it, and let it come to you.
It would be a mistake to belittle and dismiss these experiences as the person talking to an "imaginary friend." The fact that they are imaginary, and not "really" God, doesn’t necessarily make them any less spiritually valid. People have quite interesting and valid conversations with these "presences;" you just can’t claim that these are the same God from person to person and from culture to culture. They may not be "real" in a concrete sense, but they are real in the sense that a simulation is real. Thus, when Believers refer to their conversations with God, they are having subjectively real conversations, only the God they experience is a simulacrum in the holodeck of their imaginations. Believers generally place a high value on being "god-centered," so they cultivate this "felt presence" so that it occupies more and more of their attention. In some cases, Believers come to prefer these relationships to relationships with living human beings. Indeed, as the Believer grows more "god-centered" the "presence" grows more palpable; its voice grows louder and it becomes more bossy. It literally takes on a life of its own.
Believers often reason that if being "god-centered" good, more is better. Unfortunately, in trying to take it as far as they can, they defer and subordinate their own authentic needs to the needs of this internalized Entity until they become estranged from their own personalities. The type is easy to recognize: their affect flattens, they positively bristle with cognitive distortions, their relationships become hollowed out and instrumental, and they act like automatons programmed by their dogmatic beliefs. If you have ever had a conversation with a True Believer and felt as though you were talking to a Scripture-quoting robot, you have encountered the type. One of the important things to know about such people is that the more estranged they become from themselves, the less they are capable of understanding the interior lives of others. As a consequence, they become insensitive to the needs and rights of others, and do things that seem out of touch, like preaching the Gospel as if you never heard such a thing before; or which ae inappropriate, like pressuring non-Believers to join them in prayer, "witnessing" to strangers, or threatening non-Believers with hellfire and damnation.
Believers often appear willfully ignorant, obstinate, and exasperatingly illogical. But, it is useless to belittle and ridicule them because of it. Rejection only drives Believers further into their belief system. Indeed, abuse tends to feed into their perception that they are "preaching among the heathen," transforming their evangelizing into an exquisite form of martyrdom which they endure for the glory of God. It also feeds into their belief that their Faith sets them apart and above others. After all, if their beliefs were so easily believable, the Believer’s Faith wouldn’t be at all remarkable. So, the scoffing rejection of "heathens" and "infidels" becomes a kind of hair shirt worn with pride--a perverse kind of "reality testing" in which the scorn of the non-Believer becomes a measure of the specialness of their belief. Its all part of the drama that they live for.
Seek a respectful dialogue. First, it's important to realize that not all True Believers are the same. Some are much more into it than others. Some are genuinely interested in exploring the beliefs of others in order to hone their arguments and clarify their own beliefs. So, if one is appropriately respectful, it is possible to establish a genuine dialogue. Indeed, it where there is mutual respect, it is possible to become friendly adversaries, and to get down to the presuppositions that underlie your respective positions. When you get to this point, the temptation will be to withdraw to your respective ivory towers and seethe with hatred toward one another. But, if you can overcome this, the dialogue becomes exceedingly worthwhile and productive.
The deeper and more sincere your friendship, the greater chance you have of reaching one another. Your goal should not be to convert the other, but to find common ground. The longer you can keep the dialogue going, the better your chances of engaging your partner in reality as we know it. Here, the medium is the message. By engaging in rational argument, one rebuilds an implicit commitment to rationality, which is the foundation of intellectual accountability and honesty, and a bridge back to reality.
Deconstruct propaganda. True Believers are not interested in arguing cases on their merits. They are addicted to fantasy. And, in fantasy, everything is perfect; all wishes are fulfilled. You are safe, secure and never alone. You are also always right. You don't have to study hard to know anything because God will send you a sign; and as long as you do what you are supposed to, God will provide. True Believers assume that science and other forms of secular scholarship are also belief systems held together by tenaciously held faith. And there is a grain of truth in this: people who subscribe to a scientific world view take it on faith that other people have tested and repeatedly confirmed the truth of the things they believe. Moreover they have done so using techniques that are reasonable and repeatable. In well-settled areas of science, this is a justified belief--but as the True Believers see it, it is still "just" a matter of belief. We believe "this" based on scientific investigation and they believe "that" based on scripture; and since neither side recognizes an independent means of sorting out what is "really" true, the True Believer regards science as a matter of opinion and belief.
Hence, the True Believer's stock in trade is rhetoric, propaganda and political spin. Believers are indifferent to facts and evidence, except to the extent these can be rhetorically spun. Therefore some of the most effective arguments to use against Christian Fundamentalists is a deconstruction of their rhetoric. For example, when I first pointed out the existence of the Discovery Institute's Wedge document and presented it as a sinister example of right-wing dog whistle politics, rather than address my argument on its merits, the other side tried to laugh it off by dismissively labeling me a "conspiracy nut" who sees a "vast right wing conspiracy" when there is none. I never said it was a conspiracy, so in my response I pointed out how they used this handy rhetorical trope both to misrepresent and marginalize my position in one deft succinct phrase. In another instance, I expressed outrage at four Believers who said that they would kill their children if God told them to. They accused me of having "missed what they said." When I asked them just what part of murder and human sacrifice did I miss? They accused me of being "nasty" and "insulting," calling it my "major malfunction." One rule of thumb in constructing these kinds of political attacks is that you accuse your opponent of the very thing you are guilty of. So if your candidate is a coward with a suspect war record, that's exactly what you accuse your opponent of. (Kerry's swift boat above.)
Its important to learn this verbal jujitsu and the dog whistle vocabulary. All they really have are hackneyed rhetorical tropes, like "there you go again," "looks like you drank the kool-aid," "tax and spend liberal," "god-hating atheist" "whacko nutjob," etc. etc. Meanwhile, they wrap themselves in the mantle of patriotism, or in religious sweetness and light. Calling your opponent on these rhetorical devices and analytically deconstructing them accomplishes several positive aims: 1) it robs them of their power; 2) it exposes the intellectual dishonesty of your opponent to the audiences they are playing to; 3) it raises your awareness of the many ways you can be rhetorically sandbagged; and 4) explaining how logocide and dog whistle politics work, tends to immunize people from the thought-stopping effects of these kinds of propaganda.
Object on moral grounds. Born Again Christians have an Achilles heel. They believe that because they are religious and "god-centered," they are automatically morally superior to the rest of us. Indeed, there appears to be an uncontested assumption in our culture that prayerful pious people are more moral than the rest of us. However, when it comes to Born Again Believers, this emphatically not true. They live in such a state of unreality that they become blind to normal human concerns about the welfare of others. They become willing to kill their own children if they believe God orders them to. In putting Scripture above reality, they become willing to subvert the Constitution in an attempt to get religion taught in the public schools. In placing Absolute Faith above reason, they arrive at strange arbitrary positions and become unaccountable to their fellow man. They place principle above people, as in the case of using the power of the state to force women to have the children of the men who rape them. They also tend to see things in terms of black and white. They tend to divide the world into "us" and "them," identifying themselves as "good" and "pro-God," demonizing everyone else as "against God." And, they tend to single out scapegoats instead of looking for systemic solutions to systemic problems.
Therefore, some of the very best arguments against Born Again religion involve opposing it on moral grounds. Hypocrisy, however, is always a cheap shot. So, go for the deeper and more troubling issues, such as the inherent dishonesty of shabby thinking necessitated by living in a fantasy world; the lapses of conscience; and the arrogant disregard for others implicit in trying to force their particular interpretation of "biblical" principles on other people. Rather than dispute the existence of God, I argue that very idea of a supernatural god is inherently immoral. God can not be "all-Good" unless He equally good to everyone. Playing favorites is inherently morally offensive. It insults every sentient being who is not specially "chosen"--and it is a disservice to the "chosen" as well, since favor implies superiority, and superiority implies permission to ride roughshod over everyone else. Rather than dispute the power of prayer, the existence of miracles or other forms of divine intervention, I argue that any display of explicitly supernatural powers is inherently unethical, since can only induces terror and override free will. Morality depends on people making ethical choices because they believe them to be right, not because they have been bribed or coerced with eternal consequences.
Morality is the one of the more real parts of the True Believer's reality, and it is one of the things that everyone understands--or thinks they understand. It is one of the few critiques that a non-Believer can make that will have any effect on a Believer. And you don't have to be an atheist to do it.
