The Cure for Religious Diversity

May 17, 2013 By 3 Comments

I’ll admit that I was surprised to see John Loftus’ new book The Outsider Test of Faith. On one hand, the OTF has been Loftus’ signature argument for six or seven years now. On the other hand, it’s fundamentally a simple argument.

The OTF, boiled down, states that you should evaluate your faith from the outside. As Loftus puts it, “The only way to rationally test one’s culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use when examining the other religious faiths they reject.”

So, in short, the OTF is nothing more than the golden rule: You should treat your own religion exactly as you treat other religions, and evaluate your beliefs using the same criteria that you use to evaluate others’ beliefs. It’s a sound and powerful argument. Granted, stepping outside oneself and one’s own upbringing is one of the most difficult things to do. Still, do we really need an entire book to explain it?

Answer: no, but we do need an entire book to defend it. Loftus’ first couple of chapters describe the OTF and the thought process behind it. His last two chapters work through the OTF and explain some of the implications. But half of the book is Loftus responding to critics.

Loftus is a magnet for apologists, so he’s got quite a rogues gallery of people to work through. He does a good job of condensing arguments that likely took up long comment threads on one blog or another, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.

All this does leave me with a problem. The natural audience for this book are people like myself who are stuck in to the world of apologetics and counter-apologetics. This new work gives us a nice handbook where all the likely moves of the debate are spelled out. People who avoid these debates – known in the trade as sane people – might be better off sticking with Loftus’ shorter description of the OTF in the collection The End of Christianity.

Filed Under: Book Reviews 3 Comments

Modern Racecraft

May 16, 2013 By 22 Comments

By now you’ve heard that a right-wing scholar by the name of Jason Richwine has resigned from the Heritage Foundation as a result of his previous work on race and IQ. Richwine produced a paper on the costs of immigration, which brought him into the public eye and led some to check his credentials. This inevitably led to the discovery of his Harvard dissertation on low IQ in latinos.

Some folks on the right, including the inevitable Andrew Sullivan, weigh in. They speak as if this in unplumbed territory that is being carefully guarded by political correctness and leftist thought police. I think the best response comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Dark Art of Racecraft“:

It is almost as though the “dark arts of race and IQ” were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define “race” or “intelligence,” such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it’s important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in.

Coates shows off the advantages of the blog format by blockquoting selections from previous racial scientists like Lothrop Stoddard. Coates points out that their success rate with predictions is on par with Christian apocalyptics:

One might oppose the Stoddard tradition strictly on its tendency to birth suffering, misery, and catastrophe. But one can oppose it for simpler reasons — its practitioners have a nasty habit of being wrong.

Just as an aside, it’s amusing that this should all happen just as The Great Gatsby is coming out it theaters.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?’

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientiic stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——””

“Goddard” is probably a reference to Stoddard, possibly by joining it with Madison Grant, another eugenicist.

Filed Under: History, Science 22 Comments

Recipe Swap

May 15, 2013 By 3 Comments

Hemant posted this “scripture cake” recipe and invited us all to share our most Biblical recipes:

I’m just glad Ezekiel 4:12 didn’t make it in, “And you shall eat it as a barley cake, baking it in their sight on human dung.”

For that matter, Zeke 5:10 would be pretty bad as well, “Therefore fathers shall eat their sons in the midst of you, and sons shall eat their fathers;”

Probably best to just avoid Ezekiel all together.

I’m not really going to enter the contest, but I thought I’d share one of James McGrath’s classic recipes. The recipe for Biblical Literalism:

Take one part overly-familiar Bible verses. Repeat these verses over and over again until a thick, opaque layer is formed. Use this layer to cover the remaining 39 parts consisting of Bible verses that do not talk about the same subject as those more familiar verses, verses which seem to disagree with them, as well as verses you don’t understand, verses you understand but do not put into practice, and any other verses you could happily live without. Bake until the lower verses are obscured from view.

Avoid stirring and serve.

Filed Under: Bible, Christianity 3 Comments

Leaving the Deadlands

May 15, 2013 By 3 Comments

NOTE: This is a pure geek post. It has nothing to do with the topic of the blog. You may skip it, and it will not count against your claim to be a regular UF reader.

Wil Wheaton mentioned the roleplaying setting Deadlands. That reminded me of the system, which sent me scurrying back to the corebook, which reminded me of why I don’t like the setting.

For those who haven’t heard of it, Deadlands is a roleplaying games set in the weird west. That’s a sub-genre that fuses cowboy stories with a bit of the supernatural, some steampunk and maybe a few aliens. Deadlands is broadly alt-history, with the point of divergence happening in 1863 during the Battle of Gettysburg. One of the results is that the Civil War is still going on at the time of the setting, 1876-1879.

You can probably see where this is going. If you set a game in WWII, you’re going to have to deal with the Holocaust. Set a game in the Civil War, and you’re going to have to deal with slavery. But they don’t.

The game designers are honest about it. They explain that slavery is just not fun, so they handwave it away. Slavery has been ended in the south, racism is a thing of the past, whites and blacks joining together to kick the snot out of the other whites and blacks. I guess if you can swallow that you won’t have any problems with demon-possessed zombie cowboys fighting haunted steampunk mad scientists.

Three problems.

First, as Fred Clark likes to point out in his reviews of the Left Behind series, writers can get away with changing physics but they can’t get away with changing people. Narratives are about people, and we have to be able to relate to those people for the story to work.

How do you understand a people who would say that slavery was the cornerstone of their society in 1861, then say “eh, nevermind” a decade later? How do you narrate a society that would give up $4 Billion in revenue producing capital? How does such a society continue? How does such an economy continue? These are problems left for the GM.

Of course, the GM will likely ignore them and focus on killing zombies with six-shooters. Fair enough. But the second problem is that now slavery is the elephant in the room. Say “civil war” and half of America will respond with “slavery.” But slavery doesn’t exist anymore, so don’t think about it. Got that? Don’t think about slavery. Good luck.

Which leads to the third, and largest, problem. Since slavery is not to be mentioned, African-Americans disappear as a cultural force. We don’t bring up ex-slaves, slave culture, slave folk traditions like hoodoo, and so on. While the Sioux Indians, Chinese immigrants and Mexicans all form cultural factions – hell, there are even Vikings in Minnesota – African-Americans dissolve into the Northern and Southern white factions.

So General Grant, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis (sorta) are still around, but Frederick Douglass is nowhere to be seen. You’ve got famous generals like Sherman and Lee, plus a host others who show up, but no one like William Henry Singleton. You’ve got Calamity Jane and “Wild Bill” Hickock, but where’s the Loop Garoo Kid? Sure he’s fictional, but he’s still the only cowboy who could really handle the weird west.

So let the GM add in what he wants. But that brings us back to problem one: how do you fit anti-slavery forces together with a south that will suddenly turn away from slavery and forget about racism? The whole thing feels like a massive missed opportunity.

As an aside, it’s interesting that the game designers are willing to leave in mentions of the Native American genocide, which ought to be at least as “not fun” as slavery. But even one of the main villains is an Indian who is motivated by the death of his family at the hands of white settlers. That’s not a knock on the designers, it’s just interesting what atrocities our culture decides are too hot to handle and which are safe.

Filed Under: Culture, History 3 Comments

Family Radio Shutting Down?

May 14, 2013 By 11 Comments

I’ve always complained that apocalyptics never seem to pay a price for their date setting. Hal Lindsey, Pat Robertson and the others seem to keep on trucking despite having published numerous false predictions about the end of the world. Despite the damage they do to the lives and finances of their followers they never seem to sacrifice much.

However, it looks like Harold Camping may not be so lucky. After the failure he suffered a stroke, so it’s a bit snide to continue heaping abuse on him. But now it looks like his organization, Family Radio, may be in a death spiral. According to the Hudson Valley’s own Daily Freeman, it’s the “End of the line for Christian radio network that predicted 2011 rapture”

The free spending before May 21 combined with the drop in donations thereafter has left a shell of a nonprofit two years later. Earlier this year, Family Radio sold the last of its three powerhouse East Coast FM stations — WFME in Newark-New York City, WFSI in Annapolis, Md.-Washington, D.C., and WKDN in Philadelphia — the nonprofit’s cash cows. The New York station was sold to Cumulus Media in January for $40 million, the Philadelphia station went the previous month for $22.5 million to Merlin Media, and the Annapolis station was sold to CBS in November for $8.5 million.

Family Radio kept most of its significantly smaller radio stations and other assets — even buying some smaller stations — but has trimmed the on-air staff and cut its international schedule by 80 percent, sources said. [...]

Former and current insiders allege the situation may be even worse than it appears, claiming donations have dropped almost 70 percent since the Rapture prediction proved incorrect, leading to numerous layoffs of longtime Family Radio staff members. Those insiders say the nonprofit mishandled the sales of the stations, reaping far less than they were worth, and is on the hook for millions of dollars to devotees who have loaned them money over the years. Since the failed prediction, at least two letters have been sent to the California Attorney General’s Office requesting an investigation into the station sales and Family Radio’s handling of donations. The office does not confirm or deny investigations.

“You eliminate those three (FM stations) and, ultimately, the rest of it dies,” said Tuter, a 55-year-old San Leandro, Calif., resident and longtime right-hand man to Camping, who was fired last year. “I believe they are killing it off.”

Filed Under: Christianity 11 Comments
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