It’s the Thought that Counts

While I was out running errands this morning I stumbled again upon the Christian radio station I’ve mentioned a couple times here before. There are a couple in my area, but the others tend to be more Reverend Lovejoy-esque scripture readings and monotonous sermons. This one has the peppy kids’ shows — which is how I recognized it.

“Stay tuned for today’s episode of Adventures in Odyssey,” the voice on the radio said. I thought: Sweet! This will be hilariously entertaining, and maybe I’ll get some good blog fodder out of it too. But the episode today didn’t have any of that delightful arguing-for-the-opposition that the others did. It discussed the biography of hymn writer Horatio Spafford, who suffered through a lot of tragedy but still had buckets of faith. One of the discussion questions on the episode website sounds like the atheist response: “How could Horatio Spafford write ‘it is well with my soul’ even though he lost all of his children and his business?” In other words, it seems a bit strange to say that God is “good” when crediting him with making your life totally miserable, unless you have truly bizarre definitions for “good” and “bad”, or are clinically insane. Christians (and folks of many other religions) say, we can’t understand the complexity of God’s will. Things may seem bad to us but if it’s what God has planned, it must be just and beautiful. And to an extent, they’re right — when you’re talking about a definitionally good supernatural being with powers incomprehensible to the human mind, who knows? The real question is, why are we talking about a definitionally good supernatural and all-powerful being in the first place?

That argument has been hashed out a million times, particularly on the intertubes, so I’m not going to spend any more time on it here. Of much more interest to me was an advertisement I heard just before the Adventures in Odyssey show got started. It was the voice of a girl talking about how she hated her life and wanted to be “anywhere but here” — but there was someone (unnamed…) who helped her realize that everything was great. To find out more, I was supposed to visit NotReligion.com.

Right. Get saved by Jesus, but don’t worry, it’s not religion or anything. The goal of the site is to help people form a “relationship with God,” particularly people who are “skeptical of or turned off by religion.” Newsflash: if you thought you were “skeptical” but you’re duped by this site, you have a lot to learn about critical thinking.

First, let’s take a look at some definitions. Thanks to Merriam-Webster’s for “religion”:

1 a: the state of a religious <a nun in her 20th year of religion> b (1): the service and worship of God or the supernatural (2): commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2: a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness
4: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

And just in case there is any ambiguity, “religious”:

1: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity <a religious person> <religious attitudes>
2: of, relating to, or devoted to religious beliefs or observances <joined a religious order>
3 a: scrupulously and conscientiously faithful b: fervent, zealous

NotReligion.com says that “every question has an answer and that the answers are found in a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ.” On the topic of this Jesus fellow, they say that he’s “the Son of God. It’s important that you know Him. Your whole eternity depends on it.” Hmm… faithful devotion to a deity and its accompanying system of beliefs? Sounds like a religion, guys!

Of course, what they mean is organized religion. They don’t think it’s necessary to have a papal decree or even a session of elders to declare the details of your beliefs — instead, religion is a personal thing. I agree with this attitude insofar as I don’t think anyone should force religious beliefs on anyone else. But I don’t think that NotReligion.com really counts as religion that’s not organized. They clearly state what it is about God, Jesus, and the afterlife that they want you to believe. If you find spiritual or emotional peace with some other understanding of the world, they think you’re wrong. So it’s not really a personal relationship at all — it’s just an attempt to make Christianity seem more hip. Very sad.

Tags: christian radio, religion

Lest you think I was making up that radio show I mentioned the other day, I happened to catch another one, and at the right point in the broadcast to hear its name. (Yep, I’m just that lucky… or radio is just that bad.) It’s called Adventures in Odyssey. From their Parents Page:

It began as an experiment. In 1986 Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family wanted to produce a drama series for the radio that would appeal to 8-12 year olds – in the hope of countering some of the questionable programming many kids were getting from Saturday morning cartoons. The program would take place in a small town where characters could explore the events, concerns and issues facing today’s families.

Seriously — this is James Dobson’s show. This is Focus on the Family, not some guy in his basement recording some independent program for local distribution. So you’d think they’d be better at making their religious messages actually, you know, religious… but just like the episode I heard before, this one seemed to make a stronger case against Christianity than for it.

You can find a summary of this episode (and others) on their website. Basically, it’s about a boy named Isaac who has a problem with procrastination. Isaac has a history project due today, but it’s not done. There’s a geometry assignment due in a week that he’s supposed to be working on with his friend Lucy, but he hasn’t done his share of the work yet. He also promised to have made some illustrations for the local newspaper’s kids section, and he hasn’t even started. When Isaac later complains of getting a C on his history report for turning it in late, Mr. Whitaker, the sagely ice cream store owner and the star of the show, offers to help him out. He diagnoses Isaac with “chronic procrastinitus” (which Isaac, predictably, is unable to pronounce). While there is no cure, there is a treatment: a special elixir which Mr. Whitaker just happens to have in his office, since he has chronic procrastinitus too. Isaac drinks some, and it gives him the boost he needs to get motivated to do those illustrations he promised! But it was just Mr. Whitaker’s special lemonade recipe, not a magical elixir — and the power to do all that hard work came from within Isaac himself! (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) With newfound energy, Isaac rushes off to work on his geometry assignment.

But wait! Where’s the Christianity? It comes from a narrator right after the story finishes. She quotes Proverbs 10:4 and explains that God wants you to work hard and not be lazy. If you’re having trouble with laziness, just read Proverbs for a little motivation.

If you’re wondering why I listened to the show, other than the fact that there was no good music on any other station, it’s because of this: I was amazed, entranced, almost hypnotized by the possibility that they could really be making the point I thought they were making. And they were. Your hard work and good deeds don’t come from some magical, cure-all (omnipotent?) solution. They come from your decisions and your effort.

It’s not that it’s a bad message — it’s a great one. I just don’t think it jives with what they’re advocating the rest of the time. Focus on the Family says that if your friend is struggling with their marriage, you should talk to them and listen to their problems. But that’s tip #2 — tip #1 is to pray, so that God can give you the wisdom to talk to them and listen to their problems. No, it couldn’t be that you had sympathy or interpersonal skills on your own. It must have been that God gave those abilities to you. There are tons of examples of this sort of message. I guess if you’ve trained your followers not to use critical thinking, it’s not too hard for them to hear this broadcast and still say, “Thanks, God, for helping me understand the message and learn not to be lazy.”

I can’t believe these people don’t deconvert all their listeners by accident. Now, maybe James Dobson plans to do the Mr. Whitaker thing himself and make an announcement in a couple weeks. “Hey, everyone, remember that ‘God’ we told you was helping you through all your hard times and giving you strength and wisdom? Well, that was all a lie, and all that strength and wisdom was within you all along.” Somehow, though, I don’t think we should hold our breath.

Tags: atheism, christian radio, religion

Yesterday I was skipping around on the radio when I came to a Christian station broadcasting a story. Read slowly, deliberately, and with almost comical voices for the different characters, it was the tale of a young girl who had seen a TV preacher explaining why next Saturday was the day of Christ’s Second Coming. He had an equation (?) and a book all about it, and that convinced her, so much so that she began putting up posters all around her town. Her parents, good Christians of course, saw this as crazy behavior, but they weren’t sure how to talk to her about it. After all, if they told her that Jesus wouldn’t be returning on Saturday, she’d start to question whether he’d ever return at all! They didn’t know how to get her to stop acting crazy without shaking her faith.

The real issue seemed so blatant I couldn’t believe they were just sweeping it under the rug. What are the actual reasons for believing in the deity of Jesus, and for believing in the apocalypse accompanied by his return? Why is a televangelist’s take on this not seen as credible, but a local church minister’s is? How can you challenge one irrational belief without applying the same sort of scrutiny to your other beliefs? That’s exactly what the parents were worried about — that the “good” skepticism they wanted to teach her would turn into “bad” skepticism (i.e., distrusting things she was supposed to believe blind).

It got me thinking about… well, not exactly hypocrisy, because I feel like that word should be reserved for intentional cases. I suppose I should say contradictions. We all (perhaps to differing extents) compartmentalize various controversies and rationalize beliefs we’re predisposed to, rather than making judgments from first principles. It’s very easy for this to lead to a situation in which you hold very different opinions simultaneously. The more rational you are, the more likely you are to catch these instances when they do occur, and the quicker you resolve the inconsistency. However, understanding the importance of rational thinking doesn’t mean that you never hold contradictory beliefs.

This is more than just the doctor who smokes, or the obese gym teacher. There’s the “creation scientist” who, after being presented with carefully constructed scientific theories that have withstood rigorous testing, demands proof beyond any shadow of a doubt (clearly misunderstanding the concept of science), but who would never think of turning such a critical lens on the religious beliefs that form their large set of assumptions. There’s the pro-life advocate who wants abortion to be illegal because it is murder, but who would never consider assigning sentences of the same magnitude as what murderers get. There are liberals who think of the Constitution as a set of fundamental principles, which justifies giving absolute protection to expression and religion even if that’s not how the Founding Fathers would have interpreted it — but prefer to look to 18th-century laws to justify gun control in the face of the 2nd Amendment. Alternatively, you have conservatives who would oppose the “fundamental principles” interpretation in general, deferring to the attitudes of the Founders to define Constitutional protections — except in cases about gun control where they’re happy to embrace it.

I’m not saying you can’t believe in making abortion illegal while also supporting low sentences for it. What I’m saying is that, if that’s your position, you have to have reasonably subtle logic to back it up. A good way to examine whether your opinion on a topic is rational is to look at the underlying principles and assumptions, and see if you agree with the implications of those assumptions — in all cases, not just in the limited context of the original situation.

I also think this is good to keep in mind during discussions with others. Say you present some scientific evidence to a creationist, and they respond with criticism of the study methods. It’s not worth your time to defend the study; take their point about scientific rigor and run with it. If they really believe in the scientific method, they can’t make a reasonable claim that creationism is science. Rather than just trying to refute every statement they make as though the conversation were some horrible game of Whack-a-Mole, it can be helpful to agree with them while they’re making the portion of their arguments that are better suited to your side.

This way of thinking — about basic principles that reach beyond isolated opinions — seems especially helpful in political debates. Among most intelligent people, the controversy over, say, school vouchers isn’t really about school vouchers. It’s about underlying ways of thinking about political issues, with opposing views on vouchers being obvious conclusions based on different philosophical starting points. Testing and debating those underlying beliefs is more productive (and much more interesting) than trying to deal with the specific policy issue in question.

Update: I found the radio show I mentioned at the start of this post. It’s called Adventures in Odyssey, and you can read a plot summary of the episode here.

Tags: christian radio, debate, politics, psychology, religion, science