American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed.
I consider myself a rationalist, a philosophical materialist, and a strong proponent of the Scientific Method.
Two of the tenets of supernaturalist religion I find most baffling are textual literalism and belief in the efficacy of prayer.
Again, everybody believes that some holy books are true and other holy books are false (Even unto some parts of some holy books). But how are we to decide between one and another??
It pretty much boils down to "guessing" (or accepting the guess of someone else at face value), and then defending our guess in the face of contrary evidence!!
If we have some reason other than guessing to decide if a text is true or false, then we're using some evidence external to the text to decide -- the text itself is superfluous!!
It seems to me what's happening is that literalists, like the rest of us, crave meaning and certainty in their lives. Rather than live in a world where the certainty of a given proposition is always less than 100% (and where some of the issues that humans find the most important are the least certain), literalists prefer to choose, accept unconditionally, and defend passionately, a given text or set of texts (with accompanying interpretation).
"God's basic requirement is for us to love him and one another. That is simple enough, but we have complicated it into a tedious system of religion."
"But by what authority do you call the Bible the Word of God? for this is the first point to be settled.
It is not your calling it so that makes it so, any more than the Mahometans calling the Koran the Word of God makes the Koran to be so. ...
You may have an opinion that a man is inspired, but you cannot prove it, nor can you have any proof of it yourself, because you cannot see into his mind in order to know how he comes by his thoughts; and the same is the case with the word revelation. ...
For my own part, I believe that all are impostors who pretend to hold verbal communication with the Deity. It is the way by which the world has been imposed upon; but if you think otherwise you have the same right to your opinion that I have to mine, and must answer for it in the same manner.
... the works of God in the creation preach to us another doctrine. In that vast volume we see nothing to give us the idea of a changeable, passionate, vindictive God; everything we there behold impresses us with a contrary idea - that of unchangeableness and of eternal order, harmony, and goodness. The sun and the seasons return at their appointed time, and everything in the creation claims that God is unchangeable. Now, which am I to believe, a book that any impostor might make and call the Word of God, or the creation itself which none but an Almighty Power could make? For the Bible says one thing, and the creation says the contrary. ...
As I have now given you my reasons for believing that the Bible is not the Word of God, that it is a falsehood, I have a right to ask you your reasons for believing the contrary; but I know you can give me none, except that you were educated to believe the Bible; and as the Turks give the same reason for believing the Koran, it is evident that education makes all the difference, and that reason and truth have nothing to do in the case."
"God's Word was, is, and always shall be with God. God created all things through his Word. His Word was spoken to the patriarchs. Moses said that the Word of God was in the hearts and mouths of the people of Israel; this same Word came to the prophets. God sent his Word to earth in the human form of his Son, Jesus Christ, who preached that Word and personified it, who lived in the flesh and died on the cross and was raised to life. That same Word of God now sits on the right hand of God and speaks in the hearts of Christ's followers and will judge all things. There is no scriptural basis for the claim that the Bible is the Word of God, for the scriptures do not exalt themselves, but they testify to Christ. From time immemorial people have tried to fit God into forms that they could touch, hold, study, classify, and finally control. People are still trying to do this by clinging to the unscriptural view that the Word of God is a book."
"All of the efforts I have seen to maintain the naïve inerrantist position in the face of what is actually written have struck me as completely ludicrous. In order to maintain that position, one must be prepared to ignore the obvious in many, many places. Words must be twisted so that they have virtually no resemblance to their normal meanings and whole passages must be ignored or distorted beyond recognition. Indeed, so much violence must be done to the text to maintain the naïve inerrantist position that I see no way to claim that the Bible means anything.... I'm certainly not presenting these contradictions to tear the Bible apart."
"Just last week I learned that the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), the diagnostic tool used by psychologists, can spot two personality traits without fail. The MMPI is so respected that it is now used by many police forces around the country to screen out candidates who shouldn't be allowed loose with a gun. The two behavior patterns the MMPI reveals are rule-breaking in a way that can and often does lead to criminal behavior and ... fundamentalism. Maybe the shrinks should consider declaring it a personality disorder.
One of the problems we have as a society in dealing with fundamentalists is that the larger society values tolerance but fundamentalists don't. We're prepared to tolerate them and their behavior, and they're not prepared to return the favor."
-- n.b. that an association of criminality with fundamentalism
is not established here.
Ellipsis in original.
"For me the Vedas are divine and unwritten. 'The letter killeth.' It is the spirit that giveth the light. And the spirit of the Vedas is purity, truth, innocence, chastity, humility, simplicity, forgiveness, godliness, and all that makes a man or woman noble and brave."
The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi
Prabhu and Rao, editors
4:13
-- a page on this site on
/ Gandhi /
"Fundamentalism is, by definition, anti-rational and illogical. Typically, fundamentalists lack all intellectual imagination and can't get their minds around ideas like 'symbol' and 'myth'."
"Jenny (Richardson) suffers from celiac disease, which causes her to get sick from eating gluten, a protein in wheat and other grains. She can safely eat rice. The Archdiocese of Boston has told the family that the church cannot substitute a rice communion wafer for the traditional wheat one, citing 2,000 years of tradition and faith.
The Richardson family now worships at a Methodist church, where the rules on communion are more flexible ... 'It was hard. It's hard to make a decision to change', says the girl's mother, Janice Richardson. ... 'I believe Jesus would have made an exception.'
The following item was relayed to the II News Wire by a reader. We have not confirmed the news source, so take it with a grain of salt, but we are passing it on as a service to our readers. This is a very short article found in the Faith section of the KC Star:
Faith Facts
"The percentage of Americans who hold to biblical literalism, the belief that the Bible represents the actual word of God in all instances, has declined to the lowest point ever recorded --- 27 percent. This compares with 65 percent in 1963. /Gallup Poll/"
"Steven Spielberg takes the grim reality of the Holocaust and portrays it as ghastly and realistic as anyone could expect. There are savage scenes of random, cruel slaughter that would make the young very squeamish. ...
What really disturbs me about this movie is the unnecessary and flagrant nude scenes..."
"I’m always skeptical of any movie that leaves the viewer with more questions than answers."
"There is, throughout the literature, a sense of the magical power of the word, but it is not the word vying in the market place of ideas, rather, it is the recurrent implication that just saying the right thing, believing the right thing, is the substance of victory and remedy. Desire -- at any given moment -- becomes the chief and only important engine of history.
The Politics of Unreason : Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790 1977
by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab
Pages 10
Values Fall Prey to Hypocrisy
by Robert Scheer
26 MAR 2001 LA Times
"What apparently defines us 'nonbelievers' in the minds of right-wing talk show hosts, the Christian right, pompous czars of virtue such as Bill Bennett and the arts censors of the Catholic Church is that we have abandoned religious certainty -- the rights and wrongs that ensure passage to heaven or hell -- for a grayer area of moral relativism in which we have to decide for ourselves what is proper behavior. ...
Let me confess that I do not conduct my life with a constant eye on the literal truths of Scripture because they seem often contradictory and at times downright immoral. For example, the proper procedure for branding one's slaves discussed in the Old Testament and the equally forceful condemnation of eating crustaceans and lying with the same sex all seem provincial when not primitively cruel."
"... evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty." The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withold provisional assent." I suppose the apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possiblity does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."
"Evolution as Fact and Theory" by Stephen J. Gould
Originally in Discover Magazine, May 1981
and included in
Hen's Teeth and Horses Toes, page 254
"A majority of Americans believe the Holy Bible is literally true and not just a book of stories that are meant to be interpreted as symbolic lessons, reports The Washington Times of a recent ABC News poll of 1,011 adults. (I.e., small sample size)"
"61 percent believe the story of the creation of the Earth in seven days as told in the book of Genesis is literally true.
60 percent believe in the story of Noah's ark, the global flood, and God's covenant to never destroy the Earth again.
64 percent believe that Moses really did part the Red Sea so the Jews could escape their Egyptian captors.
'These are surprising and reassuring (sic) figures, a positive sign in a postmodern world that seemed bent on erasing faith from the public square in recent years', the Rev. Charles Nalls, a priest with the Catholic-Anglican church, told The Times. ...
Among those who said they had "no religion," 25 percent still believe in the creation story, almost a third believe in Moses and the Red Sea, and 29 percent believe in Noah and the Ark. ...
Among Christians in the United States:
93 percent believe in miracles.
95 percent believe in heaven.
93 percent in the Virgin Birth of Christ.
96 percent in Christ's Resurrection.
42 percent believe God is a male.
1 percent believe God is female.
38 percent believe God has no gender.
11 percent believe God is both genders."
I have been making what I sincerely feel to be good-faith efforts to find some "opposing viewpoint" pro-literalism pages I can link here.
I regret to say that so far, the ones I'm finding should be considered an embarassment to their authors, and for that reason I have not included them.
Update 09 MAY 00:
I'd say the following is worth a look --