A really big celestial choir
The New York Times spots ‘tolerance’ where a more jaundiced observer might spot giggling incoherence mixed with wide-eyed gullibility.
[N]early three-quarters of [Americans] say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The report…reveals a broad trend toward tolerance and an ability among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict the doctrines of their professed faiths. For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”
Yee-ha! The report reveals an ability among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict each other; the report reveals an ability among many Americans to believe anything and everything; the report reveals that Americans are adept at believing things and complete crap at thinking about them. Hooray, hooray, hooray! We’re a generous people. We know there are lots of religions around, so we’ll just go ahead and believe all of them. No problem. It’s just as easy to believe all of them as it is to believe one, so why be stingy about it? Hah? What the hell! Many religions can lead to eternal life. Yuh huh. You got your Hinduism, and your Total Immersion, and your Church of the Talking Snake, and your Freshwater Baptist Twice Removed, and every dang one of them can lead to eternal life. You just follow them down Spang Road until you get to the fork, and there’s your eternal life on your left – you can’t miss it.
“It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists or dogmatists.”
No, and we aren’t clear thinkers, either.
My favorite part of that study was the fact that only 15% of ATHEISTS are either absolutely or fairly certain that god exists. Another 12% were uncertain or said they didn’t know.
ATHEISTS said that.
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/table-belief-in-god-or-universal-spirit-by-religious-tradition.pdf
People are stupid.
Love the ridicule.
I think I’ve spotted the problem:
They were talking to someone from the “Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life”…
If they’d got in touch with the “Center on Race, Religion and *Semi-Rural* Life”, well…THEN you’d find more decisiveness. A dang sight more biblical literalism, I grant you, but still… ;-)
It must be all the pollution in yer cities that’s smogging-up people’s brains…
:-))
The world is full of shitheads who’ve never been introduced to critical literature – where are today’s Charles Watts and his Thinker’s Library or today’s Haldeman-Julius and his Little Blue Books? We should all be supporting President Bush in his efforts to teach the controversy – “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”.
What a smashing idea! – let’s start with atheism v theism, followed by Jesus: myth or history.
_
And here is where the limitations of surveys are on most spectacular display. The thing is, people are not just muddle-headed. I’m not denying that they ARE muddle-headed, mind you; I’m saying that they aren’t just muddle-headed. People are also liars.
Or, to be a bit more charitable, they are “polite.” After all, it would be rude and presumptuous to say that one’s own church is the one and only and true way to salvation. Believing it is one thing, saying it in church on Sunday is one thing, but saying it to people outside the fold (such as collectors of survey data) is quite another thing altogether. Except for members of the most extremist fundamentalist sects, few Christian believers think their particular church is the one and only way to get to Heaven. In fact, they’re willing to allow that other Christians – even those who belong to inferior Christian denominations – might find their way to Heaven. After all, God knows if someone’s heart is in the right place – and they can’t help being raised in the wrong church. (As long as they were raised in a church, and not a synagogue, or mosque, or worse.)
If the surveyors had worded the questions more carefully or asked more questions to tease out distinctions about which “faiths beside their own” people think give believers a shot at salvation, they’d probably have gotten fewer polite white lies and more honest answers. (Maybe they did, and just chose not to emphasize those results. The Pew Forum is not known for its total objectivity, despite their pretenses.) And even aside from lying, it’s worth remembering that Methodists, for example, generally don’t *really* think that Presbyterians and Lutherans are going to Hell. Most will even allow that Catholics, for all their peculiar Pope-worshiping silliness, aren’t necessarily doomed. But Muslims and Hindus? Uhm. Ask them directly about that and they’ll probably say something vague and evasive about there being many ways of seeing God – not wanting to appear rude or judgmental – but you’ll be able to read the lie in the way they avoid eye contact.
Generally speaking, in the modern era of making common cause with anyone willing to say “Rah! Rah! Rah!” to the act of clinging to insupportable beliefs in the absence of any evidence whatsoever – in a word, faith – it’s considered quite rude to emphasize those elements of one’s doctrine which suggest that other doctrines are false or even evil. After all, believers have to worry about those nasty unbelievers first before they turn on each other. The fundamentalist Christians will even make common cause with fundamentalist Muslims if it means support for keeping women around the world in their collective place (on bottom).
None of this is a sign of growing ecumenism or tolerance: It’s simply the collective, largely not even conscious tendency to put one’s enemies in priority order. Atheists, humanists, and secularists in general are public enemy number one in the eyes of most believers. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend… for now.
Alternate headline: Americans So Open-Minded Their Brains Fell Out
G,
Your point on the limitations of surveys is spot on, and mirror what I was thinking when I first read about the Pew survey. To flesh it out a bit more:
It’s not just that people don’t want to admit to survey-takers that they have “ugly thoughts (though you’re right that they do feel inhibited about doing that), it’s that they don’t want to admit it to themselves. Surveys on such charged topics as one’s religious or ethical convictions force the participant to confront him or herself in ways that can be awfully uncomfortable, even when you’re doing the survey anonymously at your own desk. There’s a strong temptation to lie to one’s self, and mark down a more tepid, “nice” (and less honest) answer to certain questions if they call into doubt one’s self-image as moral/ethical/conventional/nice person.
To my great irritation, I’ve discovered I’m not immune to this temptation. I’ve taken a number of surveys done by psychological researchers looking to find out about peoples’ moral intuitions on thus-and-such. Many of them are designed to ferret out the inconsistencies between what participants claim to believe or do and what they actually believe, or would actually do (of course, this is just what a good study should do). I try to hold myself to a very high standard; I try to question whether I’m being dishonest with myself in order to salve my insecurities or to preserve an image of myself that’s “prettier” than reality. So, I’ve had to had to give myself a stern talking-to during some of these surveys when I’m tempted to mark down an answer that preserves what I want to believe about myself, but which is, well, a lie. Sometimes I suck it up and tell the truth, other times I’ve decided to quit the survey because I don’t want my own insecurities to spoil a worthwhile research project.
I think most people have these tendencies, but I rather doubt most of them examine their own motives this way. That’s not to put me on a pedestal – I just don’t think most people have the inclination to be candid and honestly reflective about their own motivations. So I’d guess the majority just mark down th answer that best comports with how they’d like to see themselves, which is why the answers in this Pew survey are moronically inconsistent and just flat unbelievable. And worthless.
I think it will take a much more subtly and cleverly designed study to find out what people *really* think. Then again, it’s pretty likely they really don’t know what the hell they think, in which case someone ought to be analyzing the data in that light, rather than simpering over how bloody nice and “tolerant” we muddle-headed Americans are about our “spiritual” (retch) beliefs.
With advance apologies for any muddle-headed sentences. . ..I’ve been on a plane for 9 hours and am trying to drown the memory in a few glasses of red wine. . .
Furthermore – the survey looks to me like a pretty obvious case of looking for the evidence you want to find. This kind of thing is so predictable in the US – nearly everybody ‘believes’ but oh whew most of them are also ‘tolerant’ – it’s all good! Alan Wolfe found out just the same thing in One Nation After All some ten years ago or so. It’s as if there’s this Platonic Idea hanging around in the air, Murkans Are Devout But Also Tolerant, and phalanxes of researchers march out day after day to collect more evidence for this Idea.