# Are Xians stupid? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 15, 2007, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-xians-stupid/388057 "2007-01-15T13:01:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 12
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-xians-stupid/388057/221 "2007-01-22T01:17:33Z")
[QUOTE=pseudotriton ruber ruber] Sure (and thanks for your willlingness to engage. As a brief hijack, this is what I like about GD–that we can see the world entirely differently and still treat each other with a modicum of civility.) [/quote] My pleasure, and I’m more than willing to maintain that modicum of civility _at least_ if it is returned. I’m called on by my own ethics to do so even when it’s not, but I fully admit to being less than perfect at doing so. > [@](#): > > I’m really confused by your analogy between your view of the Bible and mine of THE WASTE LAND. I hope you’re not just taking random potshot at the English prof here (that’s getting kind of tired, no?)–as it happens I believe all sorts of things about TWL that I doubt you hold about the Bible–that it was written by a mentally disturbed person, that it’s more than a little bit intended to mystify rather than enlighten, that it’s sad in trying to call back a dead world of religion, etc. I have a certain amount of healthy contempt for Eliot (and a certain amount of healthy admiration) but I certainly don’t regard anything he says as doctrine I need to pay the slightest attention to. I chose “The Waste Land” because it was (a) a work of literature which (b) contains abstruse allusions which are not evident to the average uninformed reader but (c) which are accessible with a bit of research and scholarship, and because (d) it was from a period when Eliot had cast off his youthful Christianity and was expressing his contempt for a humdrum Establishment world and exploring Eastern philosophy as a possible alternate source for meaning to his world. I fully understand that you do not invest “The Waste Land” with doctrinal significance – and that was precisely my point. With an eventual caveat, neither do I invest the Bible with a dignity of doctrinal source. (“The Hollow Men,” “Gerontion,” and “The Waste Land,” as I recall, are from an earlier period than “East Coker” and “Murder in the Cathedral” when Eliot had returned to Christianity.) In short, my point was an attempt, by comparison, to show that the Bible is for me a collection of literary works, by a variety of authors, which together comprise a history of ways in which the Jewish people and the early Christians explicated their understanding of their God and the ways in which He purportedly interacted with them. Now, that caveat. Having myself been convinced, by means I outlined earlier, that there was in fact a personal God out there who wished to interact with me, I found it a means of learning more about him == \*\*provided that one brings to it the ability to do intelligent scholarship and not take as dogma that because Zephaniah or James Justus said something, it is therefore _ipso facto_ the [sonorous James Earl Jones voice on] Word of God [sonorous James Earl Jones voice off]. In short, I bring to Bible study the same tools that one of your colleagues might bring to the Pearl Poet or Dryden, or even better to Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth (the Arthuriana analogy is one I keep reverting to, because it is on point: there is a historical truth overlain by a mass of legend, special pleading with reference to particular cultural norms, and you name it). > [@](#): > > In a broader sense (and getting closer to to the OP), it seems to me that many of these attempts by professing Xians to rationalize what I’m terming “criminal” lies (of the Bible, of the Catholic Church, of Bishop Ussher, etc.) all share a common theme: Stop right there. Have you never in your career encountered anyone reporting information or facts as known or understood to be true by them, **but were mistaken**? I’ve seen it happen all the time, right here on SDMB among other places. I will grant that some power-hungry religion leaders – what **Liberal** scathingly refers to a “religion politicians” – have used doctrine and dogma to control human thought. But this is very far from the norm, as reading into the history of thought will tell you. Only briefly, at the time of the Reformation and again in France and Italy during the Enlightenment and its sequels, was it a conscious policy of the leadership. > [@](#): > > Some religious authority has seriously attempted to pass off as fact an event that we (contemporary scientific thinkers) now accept as impossible. The Sun stopping dead in the sky, a 6,000 year old earth, Jesus walking on water, etc. For the skatey-eighth time, that has nothing to do with religion per se. The Joshua story is legend, intended to show the power of God; the Fatima story is not dogma for **any** church (unless some part of the Blue Army has schismed from Catholicism and I don’t know about it); the 6,000-year-old Earth is a theory younger than I am except as an intellectual exercise by Ussher and his contemporaries (about which more later); and Jesus walking on water is again a figure intended to show the power of the Son of God over Creation. The fisherman-disciples are in a boat at the mercy of a storm; Jesus not only defies the storm but walks across the water to save them. (And shows Peter something about faith in the process.) > [@](#): > > It seems to me quite obvious WHY these events were incorporated into religion: 1) if true, they would be very impressive signs of a power well beyond human capacity and 2) no one, at the time, anticipated the state of modern understanding that would render these events capable of being refuted. With all due respect, are you crazy? I suspect that the average Joe of 1000 BC, 1 AD, 1000 AD, or 1500 AD knew as well as you and me that the Sun does not stop dead in the sky and that rabbis are not accustomed to walking on water. It’s **legend** , fable, fictive story about a character told to convey a point. Parson Weems and the cherry tree come to mind as a modern example. > [@](#): > > Now, as long as people remained reasonably ignorant of scientific or historical understanding, there seemed little risk in reinforcing belief in such gross improbabilities by invoking the power of Churches and bishops and priests over mainly ignorant people, so they doubled down their bet and accepted–indeed, revelled in–their role as authorities of fact. If humanity didn’t make the advances in knowledge we’ve made over the past hundred or two hundred years, I have no doubt that many, many people would be citing these learned authorities as “proof” of miraculous events (or at least as absence of evidence that frees them to decide for themselves, helped along by the authority of the Church and Bible, of course). But they were wrong–as it turns out, factually wrong, but more to my point, morally wrong to have actively and eagerly sought out the role of authorities when they were in fact pretty clueless as to what had occurred and why it had occurred. This is NOT trivial to me, **Polycarp**. It is a grave crime against humanity. Then you have a definitely false impression of the history of thought. Of which one post from me will not disabuse you. Nor am I prepared to recommend good reading matter to correct this, but perhaps our historically-minded fellow Dopers may have some material they’d recommend. > [@](#): > > What is going on here are attempts to mitigate that grave crime by time-honored (if risible) methods: **Tom** ’s silly and pompous attempts to make the good Bishop seem less egregiously criminal by pointing out (and citing the great Gould as his authority) that Ussher’s boneheadedness has been overstated or incompletely understood in context: So fucking what? He said a colossally dumb thing, he put his authority behind it and he stands for the ages as a citable example of churchly authority telling lies about stuff they had no clue about, thus intimidating good Christians into believing that the Bible had answers to everything on earth if only we were trained to look at it correctly and thoughtfully, as the Bishop was. And I respectfully submit that you have no clue what you are talking about here. The **point** behind Gould’s essay was to examine one of the classic “science vs. religion” stories – Archbishop Ussher’s chronology – and show exactly what was going on. Ussher did not, as you seem to be suggesting, use the Bible as if it were absolute fact. What he did was to identify the Biblical date of Creation (presuming the _toledoth_ stories to be factual, something we have since disproven) as the starting point for a history of the world, and to bring the best historiological methods of his time to find out precisely what, on the Common Era/Anno Domini system, that date was. It is only modern Biblical literalists who insist on it as being something other than a starting date for history, and had Ussher known that Jericho and Damascus predated it, he would certainly have modified his approch substantially. He was not a benighted and bigoted religion-pusher; he was a scholarly man who took seriously the care of the Anglican minority in Ireland but had a great deal of spare time to do scholarly research. The reason that both Tom and I sent you to the Gould article was to attempt to disabuse you of the religion-vs.-science conflict dichotomy, which is a manufactured journalistic piece of BS. > [@](#): > > What **Tom** and **Quiddity Glomfuster** and others in this thread are seeking to do (again, kind of laughably) is to keep calling “cite!” and then to nitpick the provenance of facts that, in the end, even they do not deny. It’s kind of a tough roe to how, as the Bible and the Church spent a couple of millennia laying out the laws of the universe as we are intended to understand them, so there’s a huge paper trail. But, since they’re asking atheists for evidence about shit that they’ve been rolling their eyes over for decades, in my case, they’re bound to come up with examples that the atheists don’t know or don’t remember or don’t care much about. I thought Gould’s point was fairly stupid when I first read it in the late 1980s, and hadn’t thought about it much when\*\* Tom\*\* first invoked him as the great authority. Or, in other words, you fully admit that you are criminally wasting your time posting about atheism on an Internet message board instead of out curing cancers by the means that will not be discovered yet for another 100 years? Because that’s what you’re indicting Ussher for. All the research that gives us a 4.6-billion-year Earth and a human history extending back into the Paleolithic lies between his time and ours. He worked honestly with the best knowledge of his day – all of it, not just the Bible – as anyone who had read the Gould article with an open mind could tell you. > [@](#): > > Now, if you agree that the Bible, and various Xian authorities have been deliberately perpetuating a fraud on humanity mainly because it served their purposes to impress the unwashed masses with miraculous events that never happened, And I don’t. > [@](#): > > you and I can go the same path, for a while. I suspect, if you accept my characterization, that you’re not simply (as I am) rejecting these sources as proven liars, but try to find ways to mitigate their falsehoods. Discussing our differences on this would be, I think, interesting. I certainly have mitigated some literal crimes over the years out of a sympathy (sometimes misguided) for the criminals, as you have no doubt wished a harsher punishment for certain crimes than I would, so we could discuss what you and I think is so terrible (or not) about what harm these authorities have done. That would be perhaps useful, and would speak to the question of the (im)morality of Xianity, which could be one of the dichotomies I set out on page 1 of this thread. But for now, why don’t you try clarifying my small question about THE WASTE LAND and the Bible? Weak analogy or something you care to defend and, if so, how far? And I’m maintaining that, despite some egregious and offensive acts over the years and a lot of ignorance on the part of a lot of people, the record of Christianity has **usually** been for the good of people, and not an attempt to keep the Unwashed Masses ignorant. And we both know dozens of examples to the contrary, so let’s not bandy examples. People are fond of bringing up Santa Claus as an example of false belief. So how about the historical St. Nicholas? Francis of Assisi? Father Damien? the Cure d’Ars? Albert Schweitzer (who was a great musician and theologian as well as missionary)? My own namesake? Sure you can dig up Savonarola, William Jennings Bryan, Galileo’s adversaries, et al. Now: I believe in God. Not the Bible, not Satan, not the Second Coming, not the doctrine of this that or the other thing. I’ve defined what I mean by “faith” and “believe in” already. I respect the Bible as a resource to learn more about how God has historically been known. And I recognize that critical study of it, with acceptance of the variying genres of work within it, is necessary to sort fact from fable. What I am left with is material with varying degrees of level of confidence, that I find to be compatible with my worldview and the teachings of my church. And if you consider that **cherry-picking** , I expect you to be spending next semester doing a learned analysis of Harlequin romances, because otherwise you’re cherry-picking literature. They’re (a) books, (b) published in English – so obviously they’re on a par with Shakespeare, Austen, etc. Unless you want to cherry pick. And if you have criteria for judging some material as worthwhile works of literture and others not, then don’t ride me for bringing the same sort of criteria to the collection of books that you accuse me of cherry-picking from. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-xians-stupid/388057/222 "2007-01-22T04:25:28Z")
> [@](#): > > **PRR** : Now, if you agree that the Bible, and various Xian authorities have been deliberately perpetuating a fraud on humanity mainly because it served their purposes to impress the unwashed masses with miraculous events that never happened, you and I can go the same path, for a while. Why do you ascribe such base motives to them? How would you know what their motives were? Are you saying that you think they should have known more than the scientists of their time? > [@](#): > > **PRR** : But you see, cosmosdan, that your “simple truths of love, compassion, forgiveness, and honesty” are not foreign to atheists, either. Insisting that there’s some of --or any–special claim that Xians have to any of these characteristics, especially given in your de-emphasis on doctrine and dogma, just amounts to a kind of smugness and arrogance that elevates Xians above other people, which we generally don’t appreciate. You want to treat people better? Then do it, and dont bother explaining why it is that you’re so motivated. **PRR** to **Cosmosdan** : > [@](#): > > No, sorry, I’m not talking to you, though your post did set me off on other Xians, and I wrote my post to make it seem I was addressing you. Why would you make your post _seem_ to be addressing **Cosmosdan** unless you really _were_ addressing **Cosmosdan**? > [@](#): > > **PRR** : (You let Polycarp get away with insults that you busted badchad’s chops over incessantly, and finallly got him suspended over.) I’m not providing you with cites–anyone with eyes can read those threads and draw their own judgments, and this is mine–and no one can prove that your interpretation is right nor that mine is. Actually, I suspect that most of us reading this thread, have had our proof for a long time. We’ve been witness to all of these nonsensical and citeless threads. As you said, “anyone with eyes can read those threads and draw their(sic) own judgments…” Your posts haven’t been making much sense and the clarification that I asked for wasn’t forthcoming. On a lighter note, Jesus can cure those without cite. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-xians-stupid/388057/223 "2007-01-22T05:04:31Z")
[QUOTE=Zoe] Why do you ascribe such base motives to them? How would you know what their motives were? Are you saying that you think they should have known more than the scientists of their time? [/QUOTE] Thats the part I don’t get either. Why ascribe such motives when it doesn’t to make any sense to do so. > [@](#): > > Why would you make your post _seem_ to be addressing **Cosmosdan** unless you really _were_ addressing **Cosmosdan**? Actually he explained this in the post you quoted. It was a knee jerk response about certain types of Christians which he mistakenly addressed directly to me. I suspected as much because I’ve seen it before. Even at that it’s not accurate to imply all Christians behave in that way. Some do, Some don’t. ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-xians-stupid/388057/224 "2007-01-22T12:18:08Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] My pleasure, and I’m more than willing to maintain that modicum of civility _at least_ if it is returned. I’m called on by my own ethics to do so even when it’s not, but I fully admit to being less than perfect at doing so. I chose “The Waste Land” because it was (a) a work of literature which (b) contains abstruse allusions which are not evident to the average uninformed reader but (c) which are accessible with a bit of research and scholarship, and because (d) it was from a period when Eliot had cast off his youthful Christianity and was expressing his contempt for a humdrum Establishment world and exploring Eastern philosophy as a possible alternate source for meaning to his world. I fully understand that you do not invest “The Waste Land” with doctrinal significance – and that was precisely my point. With an eventual caveat, neither do I invest the Bible with a dignity of doctrinal source. (“The Hollow Men,” “Gerontion,” and “The Waste Land,” as I recall, are from an earlier period than “East Coker” and “Murder in the Cathedral” when Eliot had returned to Christianity.) In short, my point was an attempt, by comparison, to show that the Bible is for me a collection of literary works, by a variety of authors, which together comprise a history of ways in which the Jewish people and the early Christians explicated their understanding of their God and the ways in which He purportedly interacted with them. Now, that caveat. Having myself been convinced, by means I outlined earlier, that there was in fact a personal God out there who wished to interact with me, I found it a means of learning more about him == \*\*provided that one brings to it the ability to do intelligent scholarship and not take as dogma that because Zephaniah or James Justus said something, it is therefore _ipso facto_ the [sonorous James Earl Jones voice on] Word of God [sonorous James Earl Jones voice off]. In short, I bring to Bible study the same tools that one of your colleagues might bring to the Pearl Poet or Dryden, or even better to Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth (the Arthuriana analogy is one I keep reverting to, because it is on point: there is a historical truth overlain by a mass of legend, special pleading with reference to particular cultural norms, and you name it). Stop right there. Have you never in your career encountered anyone reporting information or facts as known or understood to be true by them, **but were mistaken**? I’ve seen it happen all the time, right here on SDMB among other places. I will grant that some power-hungry religion leaders – what **Liberal** scathingly refers to a “religion politicians” – have used doctrine and dogma to control human thought. But this is very far from the norm, as reading into the history of thought will tell you. Only briefly, at the time of the Reformation and again in France and Italy during the Enlightenment and its sequels, was it a conscious policy of the leadership. For the skatey-eighth time, that has nothing to do with religion per se. The Joshua story is legend, intended to show the power of God; the Fatima story is not dogma for **any** church (unless some part of the Blue Army has schismed from Catholicism and I don’t know about it); the 6,000-year-old Earth is a theory younger than I am except as an intellectual exercise by Ussher and his contemporaries (about which more later); and Jesus walking on water is again a figure intended to show the power of the Son of God over Creation. The fisherman-disciples are in a boat at the mercy of a storm; Jesus not only defies the storm but walks across the water to save them. (And shows Peter something about faith in the process.) With all due respect, are you crazy? I suspect that the average Joe of 1000 BC, 1 AD, 1000 AD, or 1500 AD knew as well as you and me that the Sun does not stop dead in the sky and that rabbis are not accustomed to walking on water. It’s **legend** , fable, fictive story about a character told to convey a point. Parson Weems and the cherry tree come to mind as a modern example. Then you have a definitely false impression of the history of thought. Of which one post from me will not disabuse you. Nor am I prepared to recommend good reading matter to correct this, but perhaps our historically-minded fellow Dopers may have some material they’d recommend. And I respectfully submit that you have no clue what you are talking about here. The **point** behind Gould’s essay was to examine one of the classic “science vs. religion” stories – Archbishop Ussher’s chronology – and show exactly what was going on. Ussher did not, as you seem to be suggesting, use the Bible as if it were absolute fact. What he did was to identify the Biblical date of Creation (presuming the _toledoth_ stories to be factual, something we have since disproven) as the starting point for a history of the world, and to bring the best historiological methods of his time to find out precisely what, on the Common Era/Anno Domini system, that date was. It is only modern Biblical literalists who insist on it as being something other than a starting date for history, and had Ussher known that Jericho and Damascus predated it, he would certainly have modified his approch substantially. He was not a benighted and bigoted religion-pusher; he was a scholarly man who took seriously the care of the Anglican minority in Ireland but had a great deal of spare time to do scholarly research. The reason that both Tom and I sent you to the Gould article was to attempt to disabuse you of the religion-vs.-science conflict dichotomy, which is a manufactured journalistic piece of BS. Or, in other words, you fully admit that you are criminally wasting your time posting about atheism on an Internet message board instead of out curing cancers by the means that will not be discovered yet for another 100 years? Because that’s what you’re indicting Ussher for. All the research that gives us a 4.6-billion-year Earth and a human history extending back into the Paleolithic lies between his time and ours. He worked honestly with the best knowledge of his day – all of it, not just the Bible – as anyone who had read the Gould article with an open mind could tell you. And I don’t. And I’m maintaining that, despite some egregious and offensive acts over the years and a lot of ignorance on the part of a lot of people, the record of Christianity has **usually** been for the good of people, and not an attempt to keep the Unwashed Masses ignorant. And we both know dozens of examples to the contrary, so let’s not bandy examples. People are fond of bringing up Santa Claus as an example of false belief. So how about the historical St. Nicholas? Francis of Assisi? Father Damien? the Cure d’Ars? Albert Schweitzer (who was a great musician and theologian as well as missionary)? My own namesake? Sure you can dig up Savonarola, William Jennings Bryan, Galileo’s adversaries, et al. Now: I believe in God. Not the Bible, not Satan, not the Second Coming, not the doctrine of this that or the other thing. I’ve defined what I mean by “faith” and “believe in” already. I respect the Bible as a resource to learn more about how God has historically been known. And I recognize that critical study of it, with acceptance of the variying genres of work within it, is necessary to sort fact from fable. What I am left with is material with varying degrees of level of confidence, that I find to be compatible with my worldview and the teachings of my church. And if you consider that **cherry-picking** , I expect you to be spending next semester doing a learned analysis of Harlequin romances, because otherwise you’re cherry-picking literature. They’re (a) books, (b) published in English – so obviously they’re on a par with Shakespeare, Austen, etc. Unless you want to cherry pick. And if you have criteria for judging some material as worthwhile works of literture and others not, then don’t ride me for bringing the same sort of criteria to the collection of books that you accuse me of cherry-picking from. [/QUOTE] Just wanted to thank you for your lengthy post, to which I will respond. But since my semester begins today, and I’ve just picked up a class over the weekend that I don’t have a clue about, I suspect Iwon’t be able to respond immediately. But quickly, I disagree on Ussher’s using “the best historiological methods of his time to find out precisely what, on the Common Era/Anno Domini system, that date was.” If it’s not a harebrained assumption that patriarchial lifespans make a shred of common (or other) sense, then “harebrained” doesn’t mean what I think it does. He was using that (and as Gould notes) many other bits of evidence that are ludicrously derived, which had the clear effect (and I think deliberately) if not the intent of bolstering literal belief in the Bible. And its silly and disingenuous to pretend otherwise. He wrote what he wrote, if it were true you’d be jumping up and down proclaiming the genius of his scrupulous methodology, and you can’t have it both ways, sorry (that would be further cherry-picking–‘When our sources are right, then they’re literal, and when they’re wrong, they’re figurative. And we get to define “figurative” and “literal” as we please.’ Nope. Sorry.) Likewise, I think (since I’ve heard modern preachers claim as much) that people did believe that God stopped the sun in the sky. Again, sorry, but if ancient people were too savvy to buy into this arrant bulllshit, please account for the millions of literalists today. Or are you claiming that literalist belief in the Bible is a very recent phenomenon? I’d be interested in seeing your case that literalism is a post-Darwinian phenomenon. And I appreciate (sincerely) your concession that “some egregious and offensive acts over the years and a lot of ignorance on the part of a lot of people” might account for my skepticism about the goodness of Xianity. Of course I don’t require your interpretation to agree wth mine as to the pervasive awfulness and malicious motivations I see clearly in these acts and in these people," You’re not content to simply hurl epithets in my direction with condescending disdain, and that’s appreciated. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-xians-stupid/388057/225 "2007-01-22T12:45:20Z")
[QUOTE=Zoe] On a lighter note, Jesus can cure those without cite. [/QUOTE] WWJD? Spit in his eye? 😛 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-xians-stupid/388057.md?page=11)