Religion and politics: where lies triumph over facts

Brian Hines July 2, 2012No Comments

Fascinating. Reading Leonards Pitts' column in today's Oregonian opinion page, it almost seemed as if he was talking about religion in "When lies triumph over facts, we're done."

All I had to do was mentally substitute a few words in key passages. Which I've done non-mentally below.

Not long ago, if you told a whopper like Palin’s a holy book's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers it's was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them.

Indeed, falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber media preachers, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth.

…It seems that not only are facts no longer important, but they are not even the point.

Rather, the point is the construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to enhance and exploit the receiver’s fears, his or her sense of prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from outside forces.

…This is the state of American political religious discourse, particularly on the political fundamentalist right, where a sense of dislocation, disaffection and general been-done-wrongness has become sine qua non, coin of the realm, lingua franca of the true believers — and of their true belief in the desperate need to turn back the unrighteous Other and his unwelcome change.

…The result of which is that Americans increasingly occupy two realities, one based on the conviction that facts matter, the other on the notion that facts are only what you need them to be in a given moment. That ought to give all of us pause because it leads somewhere we should not want to go. When two realities divide one people, the outcome seems obvious.

They cannot remain one people.

There are some politics vs. religion discordancies in my edited version. Pitts is correct that lies in politics used to be much less acceptable than they are now. In the old days, if a politician was caught in a lie, this was a big deal.

It just elicits a shrug now. People don't expect policians to tell the truth, I guess.

In contrast, religions always have gotten away with falsehoods, in large part because there's no way to definitively say whether a claim like "God loves us" is true. All us skeptics can say is "evidence is lacking."

Still, Pitts has a good point when he writes "a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth." With religions, instead of "lie" it probably is better to use a word like "unfounded belief" (though sometimes lie is exactly what's being promulgated).

As I often say in my blog posts, I'm not bothered by people believing whatever they want to — so long as they don't expect other people to accept those beliefs if they lack demonstrable evidence of their truthfulness.

Unfortunately, the same phenomenon Pitts notes among unfactual politicians is apparent among unfactual religious believers: they feel offended and disrespected when reasonable questions are raised by people unwilling to accept their bullshit.

"How do you know God exists?" "Even if God exists, how do you know God loves us?" "Isn't it more likely that God hates us, given how much pain, misery, and suffering exists in the world?"

Pitts seems to have a dream of people united by a shared vision of reality. Sounds great. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, especially in the realm of religion. It's tough enough to get people on the same truthful wavelength when it comes to scientifically demonstrable realities like human-caused global warming and evolution via natural selection.

Much more difficult is getting people to realize that cherished religious beliefs are just that: beliefs, with no factual substance behind them. Some day, perhaps. Someday. Religious people have their dreams, and so do I.

Such as, a world where humans know the difference between truths and falsehoods, reality and unreality, objective and subjective viewpoints.