I can understand being simultaneously devout and a little hazy on religious history, but I don’t understand how you can be both devout and so hazy about the doctrines of your own church. In the words of Bryan Caplan, who blogged this first:

If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead. Unfortunately for religious believers, this leaves them with two unpalatable options:

Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased)….

Option #2: Most religious believers are so stupid and/or impulsive that they’ll knowingly give up eternal bliss for trivial mortal pleasures. But why then do so many believers show intelligence and self-control in other areas of life?

Now it seems to me that in the cases of the Jews and the Protestants, who were unable to identify Maimonides and Martin Luther, Bryan has overlooked a third option:

Option #3: Religious believers have better things to do than study history.

Unfortunately, this won’t work for the Catholics, for whom the analogous option would be

Option #3′: Religious believers have better things to do than to understand the doctrines of their religion.

This makes no sense, because religious believers should surely think that a) it’s important to have the right beliefs and b) the doctrines of their church contain (perhaps imperfect) information about which beliefs are right. (Otherwise, why subscribe to a religion at all?) So you’d think it would be well worth the while of those believers to acquaint themselves with church doctrine, even if they don’t plan to accept 100% of it uncritically.

Since Bryan has ruled out Option #2 with his “But why then…?”, this, I think, leaves us with Option #1.

(For more on this subject, read Chapter 6 of The Big Questions !)

Note: For all I know, Protestants, Jews and Muslims are as ignorant of their own churches’ doctrines as Catholics are. I can’t tell because the Pew Forum website, with the raw survey data, has been down all night.

Share/Save

If somebody asked me, How do I get to Heaven, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is faith in Christ, because I believe the New Testament. That’s the only map I got. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what? If it works, I’m not going to argue with you.

Well, that makes sense. If somebody asked me, How do I get to Mount Rushmore, I would tell them that the only way I personally am aware of is Route 90, because I believe in Google Maps. Somebody says, Well, I got a different map. O.K.! You know what, if it works, I’m not going to argue with you. Unless, of course, I actually care whether you make it to Mount Rushmore or not, in which case I might take the trouble to defend my map.

Or maybe I don’t argue because I know Google Maps is sometimes wrong. (Ask me sometime about how it directed me across a field of boulders in Vermont last year.) But the analogue in Huckabee’s case would be knowing that the New Testament is sometimes wrong, and I don’t think he wants to go there. That leaves us to infer that he really doesn’t care whether you get to Heaven or not. That’s certainly his privilege, callous as it may be. But then, a little farther down in the same New Yorker piece, we get this (on why we should subsidize education in poor districts):

To be truly pro-life means that we should be just as much concerned about the child who is eight years old and living under a bridge or in the back seat of a car.

So there we have it. The governor, who surely considers himself truly pro-life, cares passionately about how things turn out for you at age eight (and, we may infer, at eighteen and at eighty) but pretty much not at all about how things turn out for you in the infinitely many years thereafter.

This sounds so implausible that I am forced to conclude he can’t mean a word of what he’s saying. (And as readers of The Big Questions are aware, similar implausiblities convince me that the same is true of very many ostentatiously religious people.)

Is there any way to spin this that makes any sense at all? Let’s do this as a flow chart (click to enlarge):

All paths, it seems to me, end in questions to which the only possible answer is “He doesn’t really mean it.” Is there a path I’m not seeing?

Share/Save

There are roughly 30 million self-professed fundamentalist Christians in the United States. How many of them really believe what they say they do? New evidence suggests that the number is somewhere around 100. Either that or fundamentalism breeds exceptional callousness toward ones’ pets:

Many people in the U.S.—perhaps 20 million to 40 million—believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture. In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World,” the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. “If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this,” he says.

Here is the full article by Mike Di Paola, writing in Business Week.

Edited to add: I shouldn’t have said 30 million fundamentalist Christians; I should have said (at least according to the Business Week article) 30 million who expect the Second Coming and the Rapture in their lifetimes.

Share/Save

When my sister asked me this question over Thanksgiving dinner, I answered, with the utmost confidence, that it causes (quite instantaneously) an enormous flood. (Note the exact wording. This will be important later.) My sister nodded sagely and said “That’s what I thought, too.” My sister and I had the same mother, you see.

And then she asked, quite innocently, “So. How exactly does that work?”. And I was stunned—absolutely stunned—to realize not only that I had no answer to this question, but that there could not plausibly be an answer. Which somehow had never occurred to me in the half century or so that I’d been harboring this ridiculous notion.

My sister had seen the light just a few weeks earlier when her husband was filling the bathtub. The water level had gotten perilously close to the metal plate, and my sister had frantically cried out that he was about to cause an “enormous flood”. (My mother’s contention that she never taught us any such thing is severely undermined by the fact that my sister and I shared not only the same bizarre misconception, but the same phrase to describe it). Her husband, puzzled, had responded appropriately with something like: “Huh?”. And she’d realized she had no answer.

Readers of The Big Questions will be aware that in my opinion, much religious belief is very like my belief in the mystical power of bathtub hardware. That is, it survives only because it is unexamined. It does not, in other words, run deep. And as a consequence, it doesn’t affect the way most people live their lives—because as soon as it starts interfering with your life (or with your husband’s bath) you set it aside.

Such “beliefs”, it seems to me, do not deserve to be called beliefs at all. In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “You do not believe; you only believe that you believe”.

I was recently pointed to a wonderful column by the philosopher Jamie Whyte, making the same point so vividly that I rushed to order two of his books from Amazon. As it turns out, they’re both the same book. Crimes Against Logic is the Americanized version of the original and very British Bad Thoughts. I randomly chose to read the British version, and it’s a blast. Whyte lists a dozen logical fallacies so blatant you’d think nobody could ever fall for them, and then gives you multiple examples of people who have fallen for them. Much snarky commentary ensues.

As Whyte documents, people speak a lot of nonsense. (I am one of those people. So are you.) You might be tempted to conclude that people are dumb, but I’m more inclined to conclude that people are busy. We’re all working so hard to be good carpenters, or good taxi drivers, or good teachers, or good parents, that we don’t have the time and energy to think hard about bathtub hardware or God or the consequences of a protective tariff. And most of the time, we don’t suffer for getting this stuff wrong. But every now and then it pays off—in some combination of enlightenment and entertainment—to pull out one of your cherished “beliefs” and ask: “So. How exactly does that work?”

Share/Save