The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society

[applegrove]

by Molly Worthen at the NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/opinion/sunday/the-evangelical-roots-of-our-post-truth-society.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=1

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THE arrival of the “post-truth” political climate came as a shock to many Americans. But to the Christian writer Rachel Held Evans, charges of “fake news” are nothing new. “The deep distrust of the media, of scientific consensus — those were prevalent narratives growing up,” she told me.

Although Ms. Evans, 35, no longer calls herself an evangelical, she attended Bryan College, an evangelical school in Dayton, Tenn. She was taught to distrust information coming from the scientific or media elite because these sources did not hold a “biblical worldview.”

“It was presented as a cohesive worldview that you could maintain if you studied the Bible,” she told me. “Part of that was that climate change isn’t real, that evolution is a myth made up by scientists who hate God, and capitalism is God’s ideal for society.”

Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones who think that an authority trusted by the other side is probably lying. But they believe that their own authority — the inerrant Bible — is both supernatural and scientifically sound, and this conviction gives that natural human aversion to unwelcome facts a special power on the right. This religious tradition of fact denial long predates the rise of the culture wars, social media or President Trump, but it has provoked deep conflict among evangelicals themselves.

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[world wide wally]

1. Supernatural ain't natural

[Warpy]

2. Believing a load of bullshit makes you a sucker for more bullshit

is what this article talks around.

Basically, right wing Christians can tell you all about the myth and a lot of intolerant stuff in the OT, but you'll find not many of them have sat down and read the book they all consider scientifically and historically inerrant. They certainly can't quote you any of the Beatitudes and they'll quote the Golden Rule only when bullied into it. They honestly think belief in the myth while discarding all the teaching will get their tickets punched for heaven no matter what they do on earth. Clearly, this is bullshit, and the first person to tell them that would have been the Jesus represented in that book they flog but will not read.

I'm afraid there is nothing you can do about such people except make sex, religion and politics taboo subjects. They will continue to cling to most of the bullshit no matter what you do unless you've got unlimited patience and spend years pussyfooting around the ugly truth while interjecting a few honest questions here and there, gently enough they don't realize what's happening. I don't have that kind of patience, few do. So we're stuck with light switch, paranoid thinkers who think everybody's out to get them because only they have the One Whole Truth and the devil they invented has gotten the rest of us.

And once they believe this shit, you can use it to manipulate them into thinking a lot of other destructive bullshit and you can even get a few of them to act violently on it. There's a reason so many Republican ranters sound just like tent meeting preachers.

Can we take these people away from them? No, nor should we. They're their own worst advertisers and I'm sorry to say a lot of kids out there who are believers won't volunteer that they are Christians because of them. Right wing churches are starting to lose membership as younger people reject them. Eventually, they will rip that party apart as the rigidity of men like McConnell is seen for what it is.

[applegrove]

3. My grandmothers were christian churchgoers. But the old kind. Where it was based on

love of mankind and good works. I have had friends who are christians. There is something great about the walk the walkers. But yeah - when religion is used by powerful men to garner themselves more money and power, as the GOP does, and less about a Jesus like world...I hate it. Known Buddishts, evangelicals, cathorlics, presbyterians, Hindus, muslims, all great eggs. All walking the walk of the Golden Rule. Great family people. I would not want religion taken away from them. Like anything human, it depends how you roll.

[meow2u3]

4. Translation: "conservative 'Christians'" are lying sacks of shit

who are collectively out of touch with objective reality, especially when inconvenient facts contradict their rigid beliefs.