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Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Mocking Christianity

A friend wrote the other day to complain about all the people who ride around with the bumper sticker showing the Christian fish symbol with feet on it. He said, "It's a direct mockery of Christianity, insinuating Christians are too stupid to realize that Darwinism proves Christian beliefs null and void." 

He quoted Pat Buchanan on the subject: “Christians believe Christ could raise people from the dead because he is God. That is faith. Atheists believe life came out of non-life. That, too, is faith. They believe in what their god, science, cannot demonstrate, replicate or prove. They believe in miracles but cannot identify, produce or describe the miracle worker.”

Personally, I believe in evolution. And my religious affiliation is somewhere between atheist and agnostic. But I find those who mock Christianity cowardly and hypocritical: none of them would ever dream of spoofing Judaism or Islam, since there are actually consequences to doing the latter.

And the fact that there are consequences to making fun of some religions but not others is, in brief, what's wrong with our society today.

What I always point out to those on the left who mock conservatives for not believing in evolution is that the real anti-science crowd are the liberals, since they ignore well documented facts about human differences. They not only refuse to acknowledge basic average biological differences between the sexes and the races, they try to make it a thought crime to notice them.

The crucial difference here is that we don't base any national policies on whether or not evolution exists, but we do base policies -- like Title IX, and affirmative action, and No Child Left Behind -- on the assumption that we are all created equal biologically as well as legally.

That is simply not the case. Evolution, if you will, has caused us to evolve differently.

Please explain this to the next liberal you hear berating conservative Christians for not believing in science.

3 comments:

Baloo said...

Extra-great piece. I've reprinted it with my comments added here:
Darwin the Misused

Anonymous said...

We have evolved to be hypocrites. Liberals are just more highly evolved ;)
see
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9271.html
"Robert Kurzban believes that we are all hypocrites. But not to worry, he explains, hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind. In his book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, Kurzban asserts that the human mind consists of many specialized units, which do not always work together seamlessly. When this harmony breaks down, people often develop contradictory beliefs."--Victoria Stern, Scientific American Mind

G

John Craig said...

G--
Not sure I entirely agree with that. There are definitely differences in degree of hypocrisy, otherwise there would be no such thing as sociopaths as distinct entities from the rest of us.

I'd agree that a certain amount of narcissism is evolutionarily adaptive, coincidentally I just wrote the rough draft of a post about that this morning. And if you search hard enough, you can find examples of hypocrisy in everybody. But some are far worse than others.