It breaks my heart to hear you talkin’ this way

It breaks my heart to hear you talkin’ this way August 3, 2015

• Here’s an example of what I was trying to say in my recent post rambling about the language of souls. For all the Platonic, Augustinian, revivalist baggage of body-soul dualism and all the many ways that misleads and confuses us, soul-talk is still important, I think, because we need to be able to talk about that thing that Dr. William J. Lewinski sold and now lacks.

Danny Coleman: “By far the most pernicious piece of baggage collected from my decades as a religious fundamentalist was a form of cynicism that saw everything in exclusionary terms. Anything new or unfamiliar was to be distrusted.”

It’s the word “cynicism” that leaps out at me there. I hadn’t applied that term to the fundie “worldview” before, but Coleman’s right — that’s exactly what it is. And now I need to think on that a bit.

• Here’s an example of fundamentalist cynicism in action: “Evangelical college cancels student health insurance plan over birth control misinformation.”

Wheaton College used to provide health insurance that included contraception coverage. Then the Affordable Care Act set standards for minimal coverage that included contraception as a requirement, at which point Wheaton decided that continuing to do so was morally unacceptable because baby-killing sluts can never be trusted. (Call this Exhibit D.)

So now Wheaton is screwing over its students to grandstand over an explicitly dishonest anti-contraception, anti-healthcare political lie. Yeah, that’s pretty cynical. And deeply, perversely immoral.

At issue, mainly, is coverage of IUDs and morning-after pills, which some religious groups view as a form of abortion — and which, by the way, are not. Two years ago, George Washington University health policy professor Susan Wood made it clear when speaking to NPR, “It is not only factually incorrect, it is downright misleading. These products are not abortifacients. And their only connection to abortion is that they can prevent the need for one.”

For just $32,950 a year, you can study biology at Wheaton College. That’s a lot of money to study biology at a school that trumpets its rejection of the science of biology.

Studying biology at Wheaton makes about as much sense as studying medicine with the Catholic bishops of Kenya.

Samantha Field has a spiffy new website, which everyone should be bookmarking or subscribing to or doing whatever it is that people do nowadays with the blogs they follow.

We are not alone. UFO enthusiasts and Peretti-literalist “spiritual warfare” Christians agree on that much. But the latter group thinks this photo shows demon toys from Hell.

Roswell

That’s a Roswell, New Mexico, gift shop. The photo by Jordan Teicher is from Arielle Milkman’s terrific TPM piece, “Jesus vs. Aliens: The Culture War Raging in the UFO Capital of the World.” Milkman discusses:

… the identity crisis besieging Roswell almost seven decades after its famous UFO sighting. It’s a microcosmic culture war in which competing believers — of extraterrestrial identity, of Christian theology, of the holy church of the American dollar — proselytize their own mutually exclusive notions of reality.

Roswell is a place where a city council member says grace even to open the annual UFO festival,” she writes, introducing us to a host of fascinating characters — true believers of every sort, including Guy Malone, a kind of born-again Max Fenig.

Malone might find a kindred spirit in Timothy Dailey, author of The Paranormal Conspiracy: The Truth About Ghosts, Aliens and Mysterious Beings. Spoiler alert: It’s all Satan, Dailey says.

James McGrath reviews Dailey’s book and is unpersuaded:

… the existence of demons and their involvement in these phenomena is not something that Dailey demonstrates, but merely something that he assumes. And there is no need to read an approximately 200-page book in order to learn that someone asserts that these things have a demonic origin.

It takes a very particular kind of faith to be able to write a book about ghosts, aliens and mysterious beings that turns out to be boring.

• “He played a bad guy, but he was a good guy.” RIP Rowdy Roddy Piper, legendary pro-wrestling heel and star of They Live. If you haven’t seen They Live, go watch it. You’ll thank me later.


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