[QUOTE=Polycarp]
PRR, if you want to ask me a question about what my views are, I’ll be glad to answer. If it’s unclear to you what I am saying, I’ll be glad to respond to a question about clarification. At the moment, you have some image of what you think I’m saying that you are hurling vituperation at. (The Ray Bolger comment was an attempt to be witty about this: The Scarecrow = “a straw man” – instead of being obnoxious about it.) I honestly do not see where you are getting the conclusions you are drawing about my beliefs or about the Gould essay. It would be uncivil of me to suggest that you are bringing to them your own presuppositions, and misreading them based on them. But it honestly sometimes seems that is what is happening. I have tried to be as clear as possible; if you find it abstruse, it is your move to seek clarification from me. (That’s not intended as a put-off, but as honest bemusement as to what I can do to clarify, and an earnest request to keep the lines of communication open.)
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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.) 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. Where does this differ from your view of The Bible? (If you were just taking a potshot at me, then you needn’t bother answering in detail, of course.) Let’s start there.
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: 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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?