Topic: Lectures On Doubt
Adam Corolla inverviewed Shirley Phelps today on his radio show. She's the daughter, I think, of Fred. What she wanted to tell the world in this instance was, that the recent Amish girls who were murdered were perfectly deserving of the 'crime' and that there is no difference between the Amish and the Taliban. As outrageous as her position sounds, the difference between Shirley and most Christians (and otherwise religious folks) who understand their own theology is mostly a matter of social grace. Virtually every incarnation of God damns the greater portion of humanity with a lot of misery and pain and retribution for, ultimately, incorrectly placed beliefs. If religious belief were like the contents of an irritable bowel, then the governing criteria for social acceptability isn't so much the precise constitution of that content, but whether those contents are released publically or privately.
That I believe, is a very real, serious distinction that needs to go into the evaluation of religious rationality. Civilized professionals with a degree of self-reflection typically try to nuance the manifistation of God's hand in the real world and blurr the lines on who might be taking it hard in the end. Even if they have secret hopes or beliefs, or are constrained when pressed to logically commit to a God who's damnation is way overdone and mostly arbitrary, our evaluation of that theology should ultimately take such public resistance into consideration.
I remember pushing a wealthy and very nice Calvinist once on my mission into admitting that God is going to damn babies, and that the attitude one takes toward that situation is simply, "Well, that's tough for them, isn't it?" If reduced to it's ultimate logical implications alone, this man's doctrine was most likely as despicable as Shirley's. But, "this man's doctrine" was clearly superior in its community expression. When that's taken into account, the victory I felt during the encounter in retrospect should have been deflated a great deal. On the one hand, it might be said that I provoked his thought, yet on the other, perhaps all I did was akin to badgering a well-adjusted non-theist into admitting he has (inappropriate) sexual fantasies.
