On Science and Blasphemy …

Posted: August 31, 2011 in Culture, Featured

When I talk about religion on the O’Reilly Factor I get more mail than when I talk about anything else. And most of it is depressing.

Best I can figure I’ve talked about religion with Bill only three times on his program, and all three times he brought the subject up. Once, during a discussion about President Obama wanting to raises taxes on the “rich” Bill said: But the Bible says it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. What about that, Bernie?

“I don’t care what the Bible says,” I told him – clearly meaning I don’t care what the Bible says about the tax debate. I got a ton of angry email, all of it from self-professed Christians, much of it warning me: “You better care what the Bible says!”

In that same segment I casually added: “Besides, if Jesus were around today, he’d be a liberal Democrat.” Boy, did that touch off the evangelicals. Some said, “What do you mean if Jesus WERE around today. Jesus IS around today!” Okay. But what they saw as downright blasphemy was the reference to a liberal Jesus Christ. Until then I never really understood just how much these people hate liberals – and yes, hate is the word I want to use.

Now I gladly grant you that reasonable people may disagree on this thing about Jesus being a liberal. But the people who wrote to me had no doubt whatsoever. No way their Lord and Savior would be a lefty. NO WAY! They would have been less angry if I said Jesus was a bank robber.

I wrote back to some and said, “Imagine if a modern day politician took the floor of Congress and said, ‘It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven’ – who do you think would be more likely to say such a thing: a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican?”

I rest my case, your honor.

The second time religion came up was not long ago when Michelle Bachmann told supporters in church that her husband wanted her to become a tax lawyer, something she says she had no interest in. But she did it anyway, because the Bible says the wife should be submissive to her husband, she said.

When journalists asked her about that Ms. Bachmann said “submissive” means “mutual respect.” “No it doesn’t,” I said on the air. She was backtracking, I said, the way gutless politicians often do — because she understood that she could say something to supporters in church and get away with it, but saying a wife should be submissive to her husband would hurt her, I said, “even in Republican primaries and certainly in a general election.”

What followed that was another ton of emails with my name on them. This time the writers told me I shouldn’t talk about something I know nothing about; that Ms. Bachmann was right and I was wrong; that “submissive” may not be synonymous with “respect” in Webster’s dictionary, but the two words mean the same thing in the Bible.

The last time religion came up was just the other day when Bill asked if it is legitimate for journalists to ask politicians about their religious beliefs. Yes, it’s perfectly legitimate, I said, if religion is an important part of the candidate’s life. Then, as an example, I added this: Let’s say a candidate thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old [it’s 4.5 billion years old] and dinosaurs roamed the planet at the same time as people, “that kind of ignorance matters,” I said. It may not affect his foreign policy or her economic policy, I went on, but it will affect something – and so we need to know about such things.

That one didn’t go over too well, either, with those who take the words of the Bible literally. “The Earth is 6,000 years old,” they told me. “And dinosaurs did roam the Earth at the same time as people.” And again, they advised me to keep my yap closed if I didn’t know what I was talking about. A few also said that God created the world in six 24 hour days and that he created Adam and Eve pretty much by snapping his fingers.

A brief aside: If God created Adam and Eve, and they had two sons, Cain and Abel, where did the fifth person come from? So far we have three males and one female, right? So how did the next person get to the Garden of Eden? You see where I’m going with this? I’m sure the literalists will have an answer to this one too – an answer that probably will come straight from the Bible and will also strike me as dopey.

Let me be clear: I don’t care if someone believes in God or doesn’t. I don’t care if someone believes Jesus is the Son of God or doesn’t. I think religion has inspired many noble and selfless deeds throughout history. I think it also has spawned a great deal of stupidity. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion but not to his or her facts. The Earth is not 6,000 years old no matter how many true-believers think it is. It’s not 6,000 years old even if the Bible says it is.

The anti-science nature of these people brings me down – that is when I’m not falling down laughing at how silly they are. Why can’t they believe that a God that can create heaven and Earth and all the planets and stars can also create … evolution!

I’ll bet that something close to 100 percent of these people who write to me are conservative Republicans. Liberal Democrats may be nuts, but they’re not nuts about this kind of thing. A conservative running for the GOP nomination for president may do quite well in Iowa believing in religious fairy tales – but it’s not going to play well in other parts of the country, especially with independents who tend to be more moderate. And even Republicans running for president who don’t believe in this kind of thing, I suspect, will be afraid to say so – not wanting to alienate the Christian Right.

I have said that I’d vote for Scooby Doo before I’d vote for Barack Obama. Anyone who feels the same way should pray that no journalist asks any of the Republicans running for president: Do you think that dinosaurs walked the Earth side by side with humans?

The wrong answer could result in four more years for President Obama.

Infrequent visitor

I just have a question for all those people who say every word in the Bible should be taken literally. Why do you insist that there are no symbolic meanings to any of the words, then get to Revelations and tell me that horses symbolize jeeps, or tanks, and angels mean jets, and AntiChrist means Obama (or any other leaders, over the years of my life there have been many) and so on and so forth (see Left Behind series, et al)?
Either the Book is full of metaphors and parables (as Jesus himself says) or it’s not, but you can’t have it both ways.
BTW I consider myself a Christian, although biblical literalists will probably say I am not.
I can’t take someone seriously when they can’t even be consistent within their own mind.
el cajon dui attorney

Thanks for the auspicious writeup. It if truth be told was a amusement account it. Look complicated to far introduced agreeable from you! By the way, how can we keep up a correspondence?
Proe Graphique

Salvatore,

When you are a professor of microbiology at a major University like Behe, who wrote Darwin’s Black Box, then you can swagger around citing “sketchy sources” and administer praise and condescension as you see fit. Right? Right.

Bob Hadley

When you’re a professor of economics at a major university like Princeton and get a nobel prize then you can swagger around with bravado, with your carping and condescending criticism.

Is that what you say to Prof Paul Krugman’s agonistes?

I guess you’re not one of those who rails against elitists.

salvatore

Proe Graphique was doing pretty well up until “Darwin’s Black Box” (aside from the evolution-makes-no-sense-argument, because the only way you need it to “make sense” in your way of thinking is if the universe was Created by a similarly-minded being). Misguided armchair pseudoscientists always give themselves up by their sketchy sources. I once had a long, unproductive conversation about Milton Friedman with a guy who finally tried to prove his bona fides by linking me to World Net Daily, the website that thinks soy makes you gay.
salvatore

1) How can you be surprised by this reaction when you’re a frequent Fox News guest?
2) You have watched Fox News, yes?
3) So are you saying you’ll vote for Bachmann or Perry over Obama?
Bob Hadley

“But what they saw as downright blasphemy was the reference to a liberal Jesus Christ. Until then I never really understood just how much these people hate liberals – and yes, hate is the word I want to use.”

DUH! For someone who can be so keen, you can also be so clueless.

Have you not listened to right wing rhetoric over the last 20 years or so? Maybe you’ve been so busy monitoring the Left that you don’t know what many on the Right are espousing.

But you need go no further than the Commentary section of this website to see hatred spewed at liberals (as much as or more than at the word than at the reality). Maybe you don’t consider your posters to be comprised of what you term “these people.”

Occasionally you have spewed venom at liberals that, if your counterparts on the Left had spewed at conservatives, you’d label as hateful.
Proe Graphique

I missed this initially, Bernie, and let into your pal Burt who it now seems was only following your lead.

It appears to me that your terror about journalists asking these questions of Republican candidates is born of the same thing that appears to keep you silent of the fact that expert analysis by guys like Newcomer who got Dan Rather fired from CBS news say Obama’s birth certificate is fake: with respect, you lack the backbone to stand up and call a truth a truth, an opinion legit when it is, and live under the knee-shaking fear that media backlash will give us four more years of Obama. I have news for you: it is exactly that thinking that got us four years of Obama in the first place.

I gave this information to Burt. I’ll give it to you, involving creationists and what they believe. It’s lengthy. It’s lengthy because their point of view and what informs it is almost entirely unknown to the mainstream mediettes, so one almost needs to start from scratch. Anyway, here are a few examples for your enlightened age memory banks:

(Burt had misstated radio carbon dating as being an aspect of old-earth measurement and I corrected him, but this is woven into the fabric of what you need to know, so I’m leaving it in)The way you write this shows you know little if anything more than you were taught in grade school, since you mention “radio carbon dating” in relation to the age of the earth, since as every science junior knows, radio carbon dating tops out at 50,000 years (c-14 has a half life of 5,000 years, so in 50,000 years there is not enough c-14 left in the sample to measure for an accurate dating assessment). Duh. Check it out on any secular university site, as that aspect was predicted correctly by the very inventor of the process, Dr. William Libby. So you are mocking young earthers but mention radio carbon dating in the process.

Let me clue you in and yes, I’m also a birther guy, so here is your chance to lump birthers in with young-earthers in one, smooth, intellectually dishonest swoop.

First, my own armchair opinion, to clarify my opinion which is clearly more educated on the subject than your own: We do not know the earth is billions of years old. We do not know that the earth is thousands of years old. Keeping it real when you look at the larger facts, IMO we know nothing. The questions are so vast that we probably never will know anything substantial on this matter for sure – and secular scientists who say they do are either looking for money or on ego trips or both – before God destroys the earth by fire or we blow ourselves up because as people like you are proving, people, in the aggregate, tend to talk – and believe – way past where their knowledge tops out.

Here are a couple of scintillating facts put forth by young earth/universe creations that, IMO, does not prove their point, but disproves old earth-favoring science, hence my opinion that we know nothing:

1. A comet is made of ice, and we see the tail as the ice ball swings around in a usually elliptical orbit (in the case of Halley’s, 76 years) and as it gets closer to the sun, and as the heat and solar winds burn off a significant portion of its icy bulk, that burning off vapor is what we see as the tail. So who is making the ice balls that burn off and show as comet tails, because if the universe is billions of years old, those ice-ball comets should have been spent to nothing long, long ago – in only several thousand years. Even a small overall proportion of loss should drive it off its orbit as its mass shrinks and gravity affects it differently, anyway. So who has been making those ice balls for billions of years? There is nothing whatsoever to suggest they they are just drifting into the solar system willy-nilly. Secular since has some fanciful suggestions, but itself admits it has not a clue based on fact.

2. When the first astronauts landed on the moon they expected to find a few feet of dust on the surface. This is because the earth and moon, as they orbit the sun, every year go through dust clouds in space. On earth those clouds are responsible for the several meteor showers we see every year (we go through them, they do not come to us), as the larger particles hit the atmosphere at an angle at incredible speed and show as bright streaks in the sky. What doesn’t burn up is otherwise absorbed into the soil, etc. However, there is no atmosphere with which to burn the particles and and no rain to muddy the dust on the moon. Gently, imperceptibly falling year after year on the airless moon, that dust remains as dust, hence their expectation at the time of a few feet of dust based on their understanding of how much we catch in each orbit around the sun each year and an assumption of an earth and moon a couple of billion years old . When they got there the moon had only a couple of INCHES of dust, dramatically suggesting a much, much younger moon at least. Why was more not found? They have some interesting math which is clearly based on wishful thinking, but unfortunately, as they themselves often acknowledge, after over 40 years they don’t have a clue. Nobody knows.

3. The orbital imbalances of the planets, including earth, should have long since played out by now, unless such imbalances were so large billions of years ago that our solar system could not possibly look the way it does now. The imbalances are still there and so are we. Explanation? Nobody knows.

4. One of the great cases for an old universe is that the speed of light is a constant – if not acted upon by gravity, and therefore we see from measurements that the light from stars and galaxies, pulsars, etc, is coming from many light-years distant, supposedly proving the universe is billions of years old.

Einstein mathematically predicted that time and matter/gravity were indivisible and scientists have proved it in actuality with a tool Einstein did not have: atomic clocks. Two such clocks are synchronized and one is left on the surface and one goes up in a plane. The difference in that little amount of gravity changes the rate in which actually time operated and the clocks fell out of sync – by only the smallest of atomic-clock measurements, but out of sync nevertheless; the one higher up was running slower while in the air, proving Einstein’s theory in practice. Afterwards, atomic clocks were eventually found to run at a different rates of speed only between the height of a table. In lab tests light has been slowed down to a slow pulse. Einstein was right. It’s been proven practically that time and space are indivisible.

However, the idea that light traveling through such enormous distances would be unaffected by the passage past black holes and a billion island galaxies, the gravitational influence even mathematical astrophysicists can only barely shrug at – and this does not count the biggie: the utterly unknown geometry of the boundaries of the universe – is a preposterous and simple-minded secular daydream. OF COURSE distant starlight is affected by gravity as it passes through such dense gravitational forces multiplied by the billions that are certain to bend time. However, without a second and ideally third point of reference for triangulation – since our only current vantage point is earth – we have no idea how those gravitational forces effect the light that is traveling toward us. It is certainly effected – it is mathematically impossible for that light/time to NOT be effected as Einstein predicted. How much? Once again, nobody knows, and scientists I have spoken to about it don’t like to talk about it. My guess from the emotions involved is that it frightens them to think they don’t know the basics, and that fear angers them. But their hostility to the questions they can not answer does not change the fact that they can not answer them. We – don’t – know.

We know nothing. Go to the 4th day alliance for some balance in your education and if you meet the two points of view halfway, secular and creationist, as the facts demand, you’ll realize we know nothing. So the mockers are getting a bit too big for their britches.

In terms of evolution, that silly supposition – not “theory” as a theory demands a predicted outcome under controlled conditions – is falling apart by the day, and secular evolutionists struggle with evermore absurdest ideas. For example, did you know that according to them, turkeys were cold-blooded – then warm blooded, and then became cold blooded again – back and forth? Oh yes, they believe that without a shred of actual evidence to support it: the Discovery Channel devoted a whole hour to it a few years ago, complete with lots of animated dinosaurs.

I could go on for hours, but this should be enough to suggest you get your act together before shooting your mouth off. Secular science knows as little about these larger issues in actual fact than they did in the middle ages, because despite all the instruments and communication of this “enlightened age” – as they used to say in the Victorian times – secular science continually skips over the tough questions and chooses to ignore them, undermining our general understanding completely. Most of what you are being told is a supposition fantasy.

On the issue of evolution, for one of many examples, I assume also you never heard of Professor Michael Behe’s famous and revolutionary book, Darwin’s Black Box; Behe is professor of microbiology at Lehigh University, no small accomplishment. Read it, and learn how evolution is – literally, it seems – impossible on a microbiological level, as the very things necessary for evolution as a mechanism could not have evolved without them: the ultimate catch 22/ chicken or the egg scenario, and makes absolute mincemeat of little naturalist Darwin’s absurdly simplistic notions based on superficial observation that he mostly ripped off from Greek and Roman scholars two thousand years before his time, anyway.

Bernie, you aren’t doing the world much of a service by only knowing the upper two percent of the stories and information on which you are writing “facts” and opinion. Instead of mocking even more people whose mainstream media backlash may cost votes, why don’t you smooth out the highway for a GOP win that includes all conservatives when you’re on TV and say things like, “They may sound like nutters on the surface, and while I don’t subscribe to their beliefs, they do have some interesting scientific facts on which to hang their belief structure.” If you missed the memo, a very large portion of the south is baptist and a large percentage of those people believe the very thing you’re mocking, and they vote, too.

If we have to do what your example suggests: cow-tow to the liberals every time they say boo for fear of losing an election, we might as well let them win, anyway, because they’ll just keep moving the goal post regardless and living too many intellectually dishonest points of view is simply bad for the heart.