I was having this conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago, about the “ambulance chasers for Jesus” thing, and we got off onto a tangent about my opinions of clergy, selling fake hope to people in crisis. He said I was being too hard on them, because many of them genuinely believe what they’re telling people, so I can only condemn them if I am correct about religion being a crock. “That’s only valid if we assume you’re right.” “Well, of course,” I told him. “Duh!” We had a good chuckle over it. But then I went into more detail about why I still think it’s a fair criticism.
If a merchant sells you a box purporting to contain something useful, and it turns out to be an empty box, do you blame the manufacturer completely and let the merchant off the hook? Or does the merchant have an obligation to know what’s in the box before he sells it? I maintain that the merchant has that responsibility, and if he doesn’t honor it, then he shares the blame for defrauding his customers. And I think that’s the situation with a lot of purveyors of religion. They don’t analyze the arguments against religion, at least not honestly; to the extent that they think about those things at all, they only do it looking for ways to deny them. This is not intellectual honesty; it’s rationalization in favor of a preconceived notion. It’s deliberately not looking in the box.
This is not surprising, considering how people get “called” to the clergy. They come into it already believing it, and follow courses of study that deliberately avoid challenging it. They don’t look in the box; in fact, the religions explicitly discourage them from looking in the box. It’s a virtue to avoid looking in the box. That’s “faith.”
So if one of the tenets of the religion is to find “merchants” who will sell the “product” without examining it, and those merchants believe this makes them moral – or “holy” – then this is obvious unscrupulous behavior and deserves criticism and scorn. And the scale of this con job does not excuse it.
But the box isn’t empty, it contains toxic waste……. =8-O
Clergy, or as many of us think of them, professional superstitionists, are like chiropractors, homeopaths, astrologers, technical stock analysts, Keynesian economists, and others on the fringe of reality that pander to the hopes of the uneducated, gullible, and willing who will trade their souls (forgive me) for the promise of a miracle based on smoke and mirrors.
These people fall into one of three categories: They are either evil, deranged, or stupid. After years of education, one has to assume they are no longer stupid. That leaves evil or deranged. Next, ask whether they are psychotic or schizophrenic, for example. If the answer comes out, no (more often than not), then that leaves evil, in some form. They know very well what they do. I agree with you, Dwasifar. They are unscrupulous, and deserve criticism and scorn.
Mr Fnortner, do you know a SF/F author named Spider Robinson? One of his stories has a grifter protagonist, and he takes it as read that a lot of learned and respectable professions are in the same business. Shall we add management consultants and psychotherapists?
Oh, yes indeed, psychotherapists. Most management consultants I have worked with were just plain stupid.
The clergy and religious well-wishers who really crack me up are the ones who caution that it’s safer to believe – just in case. What if you died, and found out you were wrong? Gimme a break!
That’s “Pascal’s wager,” a well-known simpleminded argument, easily disproved. Here’s the quickest way. Muslims claim christians will go to hell, and christian fundamentalists claim muslims will go to hell. You can’t believe both, and each is the “unsafe” choice from the other’s point of view.
I wonder what Jerry Falwell thought when he met Thor.