revere at Effect Measure uses a recent Gallop Poll to point out what we atheists have long know: This is a society full of religious bigots. Only 45% of the population would vote for an otherwise qualified nominee of their own party if (s)he was an atheist! The comparable figures for mormons and Jews are 72% and 92%.
Add comment February 19th, 2007
Add comment January 16th, 2007
A new poll brings the startling news that an overwhelming majority, over 80%, of Americans believe in angels:
A bluebird in the garden, a spirit in a house, a kind man on the side of the road. Americans are big believers in angels, although not necessarily the ones with halos and wings.
An overwhelming majority, almost regardless of backgrounds and religious convictions, think angels are real, according to an AP-AOL News poll exploring attitudes about Santa Claus, angels and more.
Belief in angels, however people define them, is highest — almost universal — among white evangelical Christians, 97 percent of whom trust in their existence, the poll indicates. But even among people with no religious affiliation, well more than half said angels are for real.
Among the findings about angels and Santa:
- Protestants, women, Southerners, Midwesterners and Republicans were the most likely to believe in angels, although strong majorities in other groups also shared that faith. Belief in angels declined slightly with advanced education, from 87 percent of those with high school education or less to 73 percent of those with college degrees. Overall, 81 percent believed in angels.
- 86 percent believed in Santa as a child. And despite the multiethnic nature of the country, more than 60 percent of those with children at home consider Santa important in their holiday celebrations now.
- Nearly half, 47 percent, said Santa detracts from the religious significance of Christmas; over one-third, 36 percent, said he enhances the religious nature of the holiday.
- 91 percent of whites believed in Santa as a child; 72 percent of minorities did. One quarter of those now living in households with incomes under $25,000 did not believe in Santa.
The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted by telephone Dec. 12 to 14 by Ipsos, an international public opinion research company. The margin of sampling error for all adults was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
If it’s one thing to believe in angels, it’s something else to explain exactly what an angel is.
“A presence that you feel around you, is my opinion,” said Elizabeth Daves, 63, of Flemington, N.J. “I accept them — to come whenever they want to.” And she said they came, and have comforted her, since her mother-in-law died in their house.
Edward Pelz, 80, of Grabill, Ind., said he believes that angels are guiding him, even though it’s impossible to explain to anyone else.
“Have I ever seen one? Nope. We depict an angel as a person that’s white, has a robe on, has wings on back. I’m not sure that’s the way they look. So for me, I think sometimes there’s angels that aren’t that way.”
Pelz recounted a story about a man who showed up to change his tire when he had a flat in Ohio five years ago.
“I look at life — I say, well maybe I had an angel with me here today. It could have been just another man doing a good deed.”
Although Santa took knocks in the poll for diminishing the religious nature of the holiday, some grown-ups who considered him a benefit to the season cited the spirit of selfless giving that he represents.
“Now, if you are using Santa Claus to push a $100 robotic dinosaur, then that’s a problem,” said Ron Montgomery of Louisville, Ky. But the 64-year-old grandfather counts himself as a Santa believer to this day.
“It’s the whole atmosphere,” he said. “Santa Claus is the spirit. The trees, the church, the whole works. You actually see more of your neighbors.
“It’s a feeling. It’s not like a ghost. It’s an attitude.”
Pelz felt another spirit when he walked into his backyard on a winter’s day — that of the wife he lost over two years ago. He called her Mom.
“She loved bluebirds,” he said. “In the wintertime, we don’t have bluebirds. I was out in the back, thinking, ‘Mom I’d like to see you,’ and this little bluebird comes by.
“I don’t know, maybe that’s an angel. It was just something I wanted to see. Maybe I imagined it. Next thing you know, it flew off. What is an angel? Is an angel something that has a heartbeat like us? Or is it …?”
The thought trailed off.
The sense given here is that “angels” are a remedy for a profound loneliness, a sense of a benevolent presence that enhances life’s meaning and protects us. After all, we live in a society that, compared to most other industrialized countries, does not, either in ideology or practice, protect its citizens. The vaunted American individualism means that each of us faces our fate alone, with only potential support from our families. If we fall, there is little or no safety net to keep us from falling to the bottom.
Of course, this applies only to the majority of us. The wealthy have elaborate safety nets. CEOs are guaranteed tens of millions of dollars in “severance packages” if and when they fail. Their pay goes up regardless of performance. And the George W. Bush’s have wealthy families and their pals to bail them out when they fail. Perhaps they believe in angels because they’ve experienced undeserved beneficence.
As for the rest of us, Santa or angels are the only creatures potentially available to save us when disaster strikes: job loss, death of spouse, or loss of a loved one in Iraq (a fate virtually never experienced by the wealthy and powerful). We know that society will leave us to our fate. It’s either Santa or angels or disaster.
1 comment December 27th, 2006
Phil Ochs sings The Cannons of Christianity on a 1968 TV show, “The Sound is Now”:
Add comment December 24th, 2006
What is hypocrisy? Is it simply the ego’s defenses at work? Or is there another element? Is the rash of homosexual radical Christian pastors just an accident, a sign that radical Christianity is fundamentally hypocritical, or yet another confirmation that defenses rule?
This question combines definitional, theoretical, and empirical elements. When is deception hypocrisy? The question is posed by yet another megachurch leader quitting over his homosexuality:
In a tearful videotaped message Sunday to his congregation, the senior pastor of a thriving evangelical megachurch in south metro Denver confessed to sexual relations with other men and announced he had voluntarily resigned his pulpit.
A month ago, the Rev. Paul Barnes of Grace Chapel in Doug las County preached to his 2,100-member congregation about integrity and grace in the aftermath of the Ted Haggard drugs-and-gay-sex scandal.
Now, the 54-year-old Barnes joins Haggard as a fallen evangelical minister who preached that homosexuality was a sin but grappled with a hidden life.
“I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy,” Barnes said in the 32- minute video, which church leaders permitted The Denver Post to view. “… I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away….”
Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.
In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a “fag” approached him.
Barnes thought, “‘Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed.”
When Barnes experienced a Christian conversion at 17, it gave him a glimmer of hope. But his homosexual feelings never went away, he said. He said he cannot accept that a person is “born that way,” so he looks to childhood influences.
Barnes said he asked God many times why he was called to ministry, to start Grace Chapel, carrying a “horrible burden.”…
Barnes described struggling with what he believes is the biblical teaching that homosexuality is an abomination. Over the years, he grew to accept that “this is my thorn in the flesh.”
Barnes expressed hope for a future where one can “be who you are” and be accepted and loved in the Christian community and also spoke about “separating some of the teachings from Scripture” from Jesus Christ.
Palmer said he wasn’t sure what Barnes meant, but Barnes told him that he believes God views homosexuality as a sin.
Barnes said he has been in counseling three times and never found anyone he could talk to.
His wife said on the video that she didn’t know about her husband’s struggles until he confided in her last week. The couple has two daughters in their 20s.
Char Barnes said she feels “like I’m living someone else’s life” but was grateful her husband revealed himself. The couple said they hope to stay in Denver. Near the tape’s end, Paul Barnes says, “This is what it is, it’s right, and it’s time.”
Church elder Russ Pilcher said the reaction at services Sunday was largely concern for the couple. “I thought, ‘Where did I fall short in making myself so unapproachable that he couldn’t come to me?”‘ Pilcher said.
Paul and Char Barnes will get counseling, but unlike Haggard, they will not go into seclusion or report to a board of reconcilers, Palmer said. He said it will be more personal and that church members will play a role….
Given the Haggard story, Pal mer was asked whether Barnes’ fall from grace would expose the evangelical community to further charges of hypocrisy.
“The criticism is valid if you look at perfection being the mark, because the next person who stands at our pulpit is going to be guilty of not being perfect as well,” he said. “Does that mean we have to change what we say about the word of God? We can’t do that.”
2 comments December 12th, 2006
I don’t spend a lot of time attacking other bloggers. And, given the modest readership of this blog, I don’t really expect to have others spend much time attacking me. So imagine my surprise when I accidentally discovered that Gagdad Bob, on his One Cosmos blog, found me worthy of a detailed critique. At least that’s what I think it was. Read Putting the “Psycho” in Psychoblogging and decide for yourself.
To whet your appetite, here are a few choice excerpts:
This morning I found a leftist psychoblog linked to dailykos, Psyche, Science, and Society, run by psychoanalyst Steven Soldz. It is a goldmine of leftist foolishness, cant, and cliché, and you understand in a second why this man would be linked to the breathtakingly infantile dailykos. This blogger vividly demonstrates the axiom that education has nothing to do with wisdom. More often than not, the two are inversely related….
[O]ne wonders why Dr. Soldz focuses only on our so-called projection of evil into the terrorists, but not on their projection of evil into us. After all, they started it. I promise to stop thinking they’re evil if they promise to stop trying to kill me. (By the way, you’d think Soldz might take a bit more offense at the idea that the terrorists also want to kill him merely for believing in “Jewish psychoanalysis.” After all, they’re not going to give him a pass just because he appeases evil. In fact, they probably won’t even extend the professional courtesy of killing him last.)…
Naturally, like all lying, agenda-driven leftists, Dr. Soldz willfully and misleadingly conflates torture with any number of techniques that do not deserve the term. But even then, what moral person would not waterboard a known terrorist to try to stop a massive terror plot?…
Imagine the mentality of someone who “cannot see” the 200 million souls murdered in the 20th century as a direct result of atheistic ideologies. They are “invisible” because they do not fit into the twisted template of his ignorance and bigotry. What an imbecile.
But on the positive side, I now have a ready source of inspiration when there’s nothing else to write about.
So I guess there’ll be a lot more coming. I’m glad to provide entertainment for, Gagdad Bob until he gets a life worth writing about. In the meantime, at least he spelled my name right. Oops, I take that back! He didn’t spell my name right. Oh well….
12 comments November 29th, 2006
Today’s ZNet Commentary by Vijay Prashad is very interesting, drawing links between racism, binge drinking, and boredom:
Beirut
A series of flaps on campus. Racist incidents abound: the most public is at Texas A & M, home to the new Defense Secretary. Students donned “blackface” and played plantation life. They might be influenced by the sunny depictions of the slave economy from such notables as Eugene Genovese. He has, after all, converted from writing Marxist analyses of enslavement to a celebration of Southern hospitality and tradition. How the mighty fall!
In the midst of the revelations, and some of on my own campus, I, being “out of it,” heard of that my students enjoy a game called “Beirut.” It’s a “drinking game,” one of the legion that allow students to egg each other to get drunk faster and faster. These are the kinds of institutions that lead to the small-scale epidemic of death by binge drinking. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report (September 2006) found that over seventy percent of under-age binge drinking occurs in Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota. The government analysis is that these areas suffer the most because the youth are bored.
Our college students seem bored too. The NIH’s College Drinking Task Force reports that each year drinking by 18-24 year old college students contributes to an annual estimated 1,700 deaths, 599,000 injuries and 97,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape. Based on this data, and on extensive survey work, the NIH concludes, “Students form their expectations about alcohol from their environment and from each other. As they face the insecurity and stresses of establishing themselves in a new social setting, environmental and peer influences combine to create a culture of drinking. This culture actively or at least passively promotes drinking through tolerance, or even unspoken approval, of college drinking as a rite of passage.” The “when we were young, we got hammered” maxim perpetuates binge drinking, and with alumni pressure, suppresses the ability of college administrations to do what they should do about social life on campuses (including reigning in fraternities and other organizations of mayhem).
Our bored students dress up the weekend (and many week-nights) with games to hasten their entry into oblivion. One such is Beirut. It is an elaboration of “beer pong,” a ping-pong game that requires the players who miss to chug a glass of beer. Beirut is played without paddles. It was created in the early 1980s, during the U. S. fiasco in Lebanon. The students who throw the ping-pong ball imagine that they are bombing Arabs, and the losers have to bomb themselves by drinking the beer. This game was developed either at Bucknell or Lehigh.
Poor Beirut. In modern times, it has suffered gravely: a brutal civil war (1975-1977) attempted to settle unfinished social contradictions that resulted from the Ottoman withdrawal, and with the demise of any truly secular movement (such as the forces that led the 1958 uprising, of whom was the multi-ethnic Lebanese Communist Party); interventions by the great powers, be they the French or the U. S., often on the side of reaction against that of hope; and at least two invasions by the Israelis, once in 1982 and again this summer. So much death, so much mayhem. To play “Beirut” is to mock this history of suffering and hope.
The Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi offered the following paradox: everyone agrees that racism exists, but no-one admits to be a racist. Those who play games like “Beirut” would hasten to say that for them this is a game, and that it has nothing to do with Arabs, that they are not racists. That’s like George “Macaca” Allen saying that the noose in his office has nothing to do with Jim Crow and lynching. The coalition of the swilling is alive and well on college campuses, reproducing anti-Arab racism as beer-drinking patriotism.
Blackface, red-face, Beirut, the criminal use of Rohypnol (”roofies”), and what not: college campuses have become a hive of anti-social, dangerous behavior. On every college that I visit, the antidote to this behavior is either from the religious students or the radical students. These students, whether invested in God or Revolution, have something that defines their lives. They are not bored. The complaint about boredom is now over thirty years old. In an early issue of “New Left Notes,” Steve Golin (who went on to a distinguished teaching career at Bloomfield College in New Jersey) wrote, “By the time we graduate, we have been painstakingly trained in separating facts from their meaning. We wonder that our classes, with few exceptions, seem irrelevant to our lives. No wonder they’re so boring. Boredom is the necessary condition of any education which teaches us to manipulate the facts and suppress the meaning.” Our radical and religious students understand the importance of meaning in the world. The mainstream should learn from them.
Add comment November 26th, 2006
In a recent email distributing my article Death in life in Iraq that, if I was religious, I would say “pray for the Iraqis.” In response to my comment, Rick Stecker, a student at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis Institute for the Study of Violence, a retired minister, sent the following comment:
Stephen,
Prayer doesn’t work on God; it works on you. And so, to pray for the people of Iraq means to hold their suffering and exploitation within you so that compassion (”with suffering”) and action (your article) may improve their lot as well as enabling others to be sensitive to such things in the future. In such matters you are “religious” because the root word for religion comes from the word ligament which means being “bound together.”
Rick
Add comment November 8th, 2006
Ted Haggard helps us understand the “Christian” Right’s obsession with homosexuality: They’re fighting themselves. We psychoanalysts are, of course, hardly surprised. It is both very frightening and very sad:
Disgraced Haggard: I am a “deceiver and a liar”
In a letter of apology read to the congregation of New Life Church Sunday morning, Ted Haggard confessed to sexual immorality and described himself as “a deceiver and a liar.”
“There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life,” Haggard wrote.
Describing a lifelong battle against temptations that were contrary to his teachings, Haggard said he had sought assistance “in a variety of ways,” and while he had stretches of “freedom,” nothing proved effective.
Haggard was fired as senior pastor of the church on Saturday by an oversight board of pastors that concluded Haggard committed “sexually immoral conduct.” The board had investigated claims by a male prostitute who said publicly this week that Haggard paid him for sex and took methamphetamine over a three-year period.
“The accusations that have been leveled against me are not all true, but enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from ministry,” Haggard wrote.
Haggard asked the congregation of the church he founded 26 years ago to forgive him. He also told church members not to be angry at his accuser, instead urging them to thank God for him.
“He didn’t violate you; I did,” Haggard said.
While the letter was read, more than 7,000 people in attendance sat in silence, some of them weeping. The letter was read by Larry Stockstill, who leads a church outside Baton Rouge, La., that is considered the “mother church of New Life.”
After the letter was read, there was brief applause with a smattering of people standing.
In deciding to dismiss Haggard, the oversight board consulted with several evangelical leaders, including James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Jack Hayford, a prominent preacher from southern California, Stockstill said.
Stockstill tried to reassure church members their institution was safe and secure, despite Haggard’s removal as leader. The decision to dismiss Haggard, rather than discipline him, actually came as a relief to “Pastor Ted” and his wife, Stockstill said.
“That is not a harsh thing, that’s a wonderful thing for him,” Stockstill said.
In his letter, Haggard said he added to the confusion this week when speaking to reporters about the allegations against him. He acknowledged “inconsistent statements” for which he was solely responsible.
“The fact is, I am guilty of sexual immorality, and I take responsibility for the entire problem,” he wrote.
Haggard said he and his wife, Gayle, “need to be gone for a while,” and will never return to a leadership role at New Life Church.
Gayle Haggard also released a letter to the congregation. In it, she professed her commitment to her marriage and her belief in the teachings of the church.
“I would not change one iota of what I have been teaching the women of our church,” Gayle Haggard wrote. “For those of you who have been concerned that my marriage was so perfect I could not possibly relate to the women who are facing great difficulties, know that this will never again be the case.
“My test has begun; watch me. I will try to prove myself faithful.”
You can hear part of his statement here, thanks to Crooks and Liars.
Add comment November 5th, 2006
As Haggard falls, it pays to look backat what happened when Richard Dawkins visited Rev. Ted Haggard
[Thanks to Crooks and Liars for this, though I actually posted a different video.]
Add comment November 3rd, 2006
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