As predicted, in an attempt to gain attention, Michele Bachmann has ramped up the crazy, going after Rick Perry by suggesting, without any evidence whatsoever, that the anti-HPV vaccine Gardasil could cause mental retardation.
Who knows where she will end up.
One reason that religious rhetoric in politics is on the rise these days is because of the uncertain economic outlook. When people are fearful of their future, they tend to lash out and seek others to blame and it is easy for politicians to direct their attention to scapegoats. Blaming economic and social problems as being due to god’s dissatisfaction with our behavior has always been popular trope for a certain segment of the public, going back to biblical times. It is easy for politicians to take advantage of the vanity of people thinking that they have a good idea of what their god wants, which always conveniently happens to coincide with what they themselves want. But working against them is the general decline of religion itself. As I explained in my series Why atheism in winning, the signs of decline of religion are unmistakable and I strongly suspect that religious leaders know this and are desperately seeking ways to at least slow down the process.
The most telling sign is that surveys show that people are leaving religion in significant numbers, with the greatest drop being among young people. This is why the stakes have been raised, in a desperate attempt by religious leaders to regain ground by making hysterical claims that the lack of religion is causing America’s problems. While they point to general moral decay that is supposedly bringing about god’s wrath, one of their key signs is the increasing acceptance of gay people as deserving of the same rights enjoyed by others, including marriage.
The irony is that the more religious leaders decry the increasing acceptance of homosexuals, the more they alienate young people, the very group that they need to secure their future. As Adam Lee points out:
Over the last few decades, society in general, and young people in particular, have become increasingly tolerant of gays and other minorities. For the most part, this is a predictable result of familiarity: people who’ve grown up in an increasingly multicultural society see less problem with interracial relationships (89% of Generation Nexters approve of interracial marriage, compared to 70% of older age groups) and same-sex marriage (47% in favor among Nexters, compared to 30% in older groups). When it comes to issues like whether gays and lesbians should be protected from job discrimination or allowed to adopt, the age gap in support is even more dramatic (71% vs. 59% and 61% vs. 44%, respectively).
But while American society is moving forward on all these fronts, many churches not only refuse to go along, they’re actively moving backward. Most large Christian sects, both Catholic and Protestant, have made fighting against gay rights and women’s rights their all-consuming crusade. And young people have gotten this message loud and clear: polls find that the most common impressions of Christianity are that it’s hostile, judgmental and hypocritical. In particular, an incredible 91% of young non-Christians say that Christianity is “anti-homosexual”, and significant majorities say that Christianity treats being gay as a bigger sin than anything else.
This rise is similar to the way that acceptance of interracial dating and marriage among the young increased with time as more and more young people did not see any problems with it. Currently 86% of people approve of interracial marriages, up from just 4% in 1958. Again, young people are more accepting than old people, with senior citizens with 66% approval being the lowest group.
Many religious people and groups are locked into an anti-gay stance that they cannot free themselves from. While some are trying to soften their message with variations of the ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ circumlocution of the Catholic church, this is widely seen as a sham. Most religious institutions simply cannot escape being seen as intolerant and hateful.
So instead of religion defeating homosexuality, the increasing acceptance of equal rights for gays will accelerate the decline of religion.
In reading about the things that the audience at the Republican debates booed and applauded most enthusiastically, I was reminded of this scene from the classic Mel Brooks’ comedy Blazing Saddles (1974).
In his weekly radio address just prior to the orgy of memorializing on September 11, 2011, president Obama boasted that “They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.”
How long are we going to deceive ourselves that that is true? You may have read about the panic aboard an airplane on September 11 when some passengers were reported by their fellow passengers to have acted suspiciously. Now read the account of one of those people who was deemed to have been acting strangely.
Home of the brave, indeed.
After the previous Republican debate last week, Jon Stewart nailed the development in the Republican party that I wrote about in this post.
One cannot help but observe a sharp rise in religious belief and anti-science feeling in American politics. Almost all the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination either wear their religion on their sleeves and proudly proclaim their religious fervor at every opportunity (Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain) or support at least some policies that are counter to science and seem to be religion-based (Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich). Only Jon Huntsman seems to be exempt from this particular feature although his policies in general are extremely pro-oligarchy. The fact that he’s getting nowhere, at least in 2012, shows how strong this religious feeling is.
[Read more…]
The Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry is having its 2011 Humanism Award banquet on Friday, September 30th 2011 at 7:00 pm at the Crowne Plaza Independence, 5300 Rockside Road, Independence, OH 44131.
The award is being given to Page Stephens, PhD, “who, as cofounder and seventeen year president of the now-disbanded South Shore Skeptics, was instrumental in cultivating a burgeoning skeptics community on the southern banks of Lake Erie and proved himself a staunch defender of science over pseudoscience.”
The featured speaker is the well-known biologist blogger P. Z. Myers.
Via Progressive Review, I learn that the chance of:
Being killed by a terrorist is 1 in 20 million
Being struck by lightning is 1 in 6 million
Being executed in Texas is 1 in 1 million
Dying in a bathtub is 1 in 800,000
Dying in a building fire is 1 in 99,000
Dying in a car accident is 1 in 19,000
Until the terrorism threat approaches that of a car accident, I don’t see any point in worrying. So let’s shut down the national security state and bring back civil liberties and the rule of law.
Reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write sent me this link to a Australian TV show that seems to have as its premise asking advertising agencies to come up with campaigns for extreme ideas. They usually get a good response but when they asked for campaigns to ban all religions, for the first time ad agencies declined to take part, even though earlier suggestions such as ‘Invade New Zealand’ or ‘Bring back child labor’ or ‘Euthanize everyone over eighty’ had not dissuaded them.
(For other posts in this series, see here.)
Reader Jeff asked three good questions about some of the issues I discussed in my series on the logic of science that I would like to address here. What follows are his questions and my responses.
“First, in Part II you discuss the concepts of Know-How and Know-Why. I am curious as to what extent these concepts might be applied to understanding the differences between the Hard Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, &c.) and the Soft Sciences (Psychology, Sociology, &c.) Are what we call Soft Sciences sciences at all?”
Science has considerable prestige as providing reliable knowledge and as a result many fields of study aspire to that label. But the issue of what distinguishes science from non-science is as yet unresolved. The know-how/know why distinction of Aristotle ceased to be considered viable as a means of distinguishing science from non-science when Newton came along. His laws of motion and gravity were spectacularly successful in explaining the motion of objects, especially the solar system. He thus provided the ‘know-why’ that had been previously missing from the purely empirical field of astronomy, lifting it into the realm of science. [Read more…]