Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Evangelism kills Bible study
As I was thumbing through the latest U.S.News magazine I noticed an article pertaining to why America has become less knowledgeable on religion in recent years. The article, found here, has a few insights into this phenomenon which is all too often blamed on Atheists and people supporting Church-state separation (you know, immoral people who don't have any interest in the good of the people).
More below the fold...
The opening to this article is what you'd suspect from someone who studies religion, disappointment that America has become one of the most religiously illiterate countries in the world. There is also the comment that although 90% of people claim to be religious only about half can name off the top of their heads one of the New Testament gospels. Now I know how I got a 31% on that "how religious are you?" test PZ referenced, it wasn't that I absorbed a lot of info from society or that I'm just a better than average guesser, it's that some people know less about religion than someone whose never read a Bible or been to church in her life. That's sad. The test in question had 4 choices in each multiple guess question, so I should have gotten around 25% (31%'s probably reasonably within the margin for error considering I knew some stuff, like Philadelphia is not a city mentioned in the Bible and The Lord of the Rings is not one of the books of the New Testament).
The big links were churches, schools, households, Sunday schools, colleges, and Bible and tract societies. In schools, the chain of memory got broken not in the '60s by secularists, as many conservative Christians claim, or by Supreme Court rulings that outlawed devotional Bible reading and prayers in public schools. Bible courses and the teaching of religion started to go away in the mid-19th century as a result of the debate over which Bible to read—and that was instigated by religious people, not secularists.
Probably most of you knew this already. Although I hadn't learned anything about this it was common sense to me that a decline in religious learning would have more to do with the religious than the atheists, because people can always teach the Bible at home any lack of knowledge on the part of the child is the parents' fault. For those that don't you now have the ability to back up the claim that Christianity is the root of religious decline in America. Or more specifically Evangelism.
Puritans understood God through a combination of the head and the heart. They were keen on religious learning and reason. [But] evangelicals were suspicious of the mind. Focusing on experience and emotion, they slowly turned Americans away from religious learning.
Easily the best quote of the article. Looking at it, as much as I am generally annoyed by the Puritanical values of the Puritans at least they respected good old fashioned book learning. The idea that the Evangelicals are suspicious of knowledge and rely almost solely on their emotion and gut to tell them of the world is not new. The fact that they would gut their own religion, that's very interesting.
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Philly
Uh, actually, Philadelphia IS mentioned in the bible. I was once one of the crazies, and I loved to read the book of Revelation, thinking (probably with no small influence of the fact that I was an impressionable teenager, and it was the very beginning of the Left Behind craze) I had a way to know what was going to be happening in the future. Philadelphia is one of the cities John on Patmos is commanded to send a letter to, along with 6 other cities which had the churches in Asia.
For what it's worth, I'm glad I read the thing, there's a lot better crazy stuff in there than anything on TV half the time, and I have a distinct leg up on lots of people I end up arguing with.
suspicion of "knowledge" IS biblical
Ironically, Evangelical suspicion of "worldly knowledge" DOES have biblical sanction. The itself bible is very down on rationality and learning, and prizes unwaivering faith above all else.
The OT can be summarized in one word: OBEY
The NT in another word: BELIEVE
All else is commentary.
Religion seems to go through cycles...the more "scholarly", "rigorous" and "rational" a certain congregation begins to approach the holy texts, the more Liberal they become until they piss off the unlearned masses, who break off from the learned sect and create their own "Fundamentalist" (i.e. literalist) branch ever seeking to return to the "original" meaning (whatever that means)...the Puritans were breaking from what they saw as the corruption in the Church of England, and its more "liberal" theology. Harvard in the US was established as a fundamentalist, conservative institution...but over the course of time, of course, the Harvard Divinity School has become itself more rigorous, scholarly, rational, and, as a result, Liberal, causing further rupture and the rise of new fundamentalisms in the form of Liberty University, Oral Roberts University, what have you...they seem stuck in these endless feedback loops. It happens in part because the biblical texts are complicated, contradictory, and ultimately incoherent. Trying to reconcile the texts is ultimately a waste of time and energy. The sooner a person figures that out in life, the better off they are.
A study of the History of Religion, seeing patterns like this recur throughout history, helped me opt for atheism pretty early on in life...that and having a Natural Sciences teacher for a dad.