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[JesseEwiak]

For those unaware, Rod Dreher is an author and blogger for The American Conservative, a conservative in the old school isolationist/socially conservative/anti-big business wing of the Republican Party. He's not a dumb guy. He's not a redneck you'd see on TV talking about the gays. But, even he has bought into the idea that real Christianity is doomed in the US.

http://www.theamericanconservative....future-christian-religious-liberty-gay-rights

I spent a long time on the phone last night with a law professor at one of the country’s elite law schools. This professor is a practicing Christian, deeply closeted in the workplace; he is convinced that if his colleagues in academia knew of his faith, they would make it very hard for him. We made contact initially by e-mail — he is a reader of this blog — and last night, by phone. He agreed to speak with me about the Indiana situation on condition that I not identify him by name or by institution. I do know his identity, and when he tells me that he is “well-informed about the academy and the Supreme Court,” I assure you that from where he sits, and teaches, and from his CV, he is telling the truth.

I will call him Prof. Kingsfield, after the law professor in The Paper Chase.

What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the workd she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

On the conservative side, said Kingsfield, Republican politicians are abysmal at making a public case for why religious liberty is fundamental to American life.

“The fact that Mike Pence can’t articulate it, and Asa Hutchinson doesn’t care and can’t articulate it, is shocking,” Kingsfield said. “Huckabee gets it and Santorum gets it, but they’re marginal figures. Why can’t Republicans articulate this? We don’t have anybody who gets it and who can unite us. Barring that, the craven business community will drag the Republican Party along wherever the culture is leading, and lawyers, academics, and media will cheer because they can’t imagine that they might be wrong about any of it.”

Kingsfield said that the core of the controversy, both legally and culturally, is the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), specifically the (in)famous line, authored by Justice Kennedy, that at the core of liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As many have pointed out — and as Macintyre well understood — this “sweet mystery of life” principle (as Justice Scalia scornfully characterized it) kicks the supporting struts out from under the rule of law, and makes it impossible to resolve rival moral visions except by imposition of power.

“Autonomous self-definition is at the root of all this,” Prof. Kingsfield said. We are now at the point, he said, at which it is legitimate to ask if sexual autonomy is more important than the First Amendment.

....

“I read that list and I think it’s very useful,” Kingsfield said. “I think the bulwarks in terms of a parent’s right to raise a child, and to educate a child, are more durable than others.”

....

“I think in terms of hiring people [within the academy], that’s quite acceptable in people’s minds,” said Kingsfield. (And, I would add, not just within the academy.)

Kingsfield says that religious schools will have a substantial degree of protection in the law, at least for a while, to the extent that the school can be described as a part of a particular church, with clear doctrines that it expects its members to live by and uphold.

“There’s going to be some question as to whether this applies to parachurch charities, schools, shelters, things like that,” he says. “If you’re a church you’re pretty much protected in who you hire, pay, and so forth. If you are a school and are careful only to hire people of your denomination, you’re probably okay, though there are questions about the person who says ‘I’m a good Catholic, though I’m gay.’

“It could be that if bishop certifies that you are a Catholic in good standing, you’re okay,” he continued. “Catholics have a clear line of what constitutes the visible church, and what it means to be Catholic. So do the Orthodox. But if you are an Evangelical church that has a more general statement of faith, and depends on a shared assumption that its non-married members will live a chaste life, I’m not so sure that’s going to hold.”

For hierarchical, doctrinally well-defined churches, much depends legally on what the bishops do. “To the extent that some of the Catholic bishops want to punt, like the New Jersey bishop [Bootkoski of Metuchen] did with that schoolteacher [Patricia Jannuzzi], I’m not sure at all what happens to them.”

(Bootkoski arranged for Jannuzzi to be fired from her position teaching at a Catholic school in his diocese after a Facebook post in which she stated Catholic teaching on homosexuality and the family, but did so intemperately. “The teacher’s comments were disturbing and do not reflect the Church’s teachings of acceptance,” the bishop said in a public statement. From what Kingsfield said, this might well have laid down a marker making it hard for the Diocese to defend itself in court in future challenges over hiring.)

....

This could well push religious schools into making hiring decisions that they’re not comfortable with. Say, for example, that a Catholic school had no trouble hiring a chemistry teacher who openly advocated for same-sex marriage, because that teacher was in the school to teach chemistry. His views on gay marriage are irrelevant, in practice. The school may have a different standard for hiring its religion teachers, or its social studies teachers, requiring them to be more doctrinally in line with the Church. But that is a distinction that may not hold up in court under challenge, Kingsfield said.

.....

Businesses, however, are going to have a very hard time resisting what’s coming. Not that they would try. “The big companies have already gone over,” said Kingsfield.

“Most anti-discrimination laws have a certain cut off – they don’t apply if you have 15 employees or less,” he said. “You could have an independent, loosely affiliated network of artisans, working together. If you can refer people to others within the network, that could work. You won’t be able to scale up, but that’s not such a bad thing.”

...

Kingsfield said we are going to have to watch closely the way the law breaks regarding gender identity and transgenderism. If the courts accept the theory that gender is a social construct — and there is a long line of legal theory and jurisprudence that says that it is — then the field of antidiscrimination law is bound to be expanded to cover, for example, people with penises who consider themselves women. The law, in other words, will compel citizens to live as if this were true — and religious liberty will, in general, be no fallback. This may well happen.

....

The accreditation issue is going to be a much stickier wicket. Accreditation is tied to things like the acceptance of financial aid, and the ability to get into graduate schools.

.....

“Accreditation is critical to being admitted to law schools and medical schools,” Kingsfield said. “College accreditation will matter for some purposes of sports, federal aid, and for the ability to be admitted by top graduate schools. Ghettoization for Christians could be the result.”

....

The emerging climate on campus of microaggressions, trigger warnings, and the construal of discourse as a form of violence is driving Christian professors further into the closet, the professor said.

“If I said something that was construed as attacking a gay student, I could have my life made miserable with a year or two of litigation — and if I didn’t have tenure, there could be a chance that my career would be ruined,” he said. “Even if you have tenure, a few people who make allegations of someone being hateful can make a tenured professor’s life miserable.”

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

I pointed out that the mob hysteria that descended on Memories Pizza, the mom & pop pizza shop in small-town Indiana that had to close its doors (temporarily, one hopes) after its owners answered a reporter’s question truthfully, is highly instructive to the rest of us.

“You’re right,” he said. “Memories Pizza teaches us all a lesson. What is the line between prudently closing our mouths and closeting ourselves, and compromising our faith? Christians have to start thinking about that seriously.”

“We have to fall back to defensive lines and figure out where those lines are. It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia,” he added. “But what’s coming is going cause a lot of people to fall away from the faith, and we are going to have to be careful about how we define and clarify what Christianity is.”

“If I were a priest or pastor, I don’t know what I would advise people about what to say and what not to say in public about their faith,” Kingsfield said.

There is a bitter irony in the fact that gays coming out of the closet coincides with traditional religious people going back into the closet.

“Gays have legitimately said that it’s a big deal to have laws and a culture in which they have been forced to lie about who they are, which is what you do when you put them in the position of not being able to be open about their sexuality,” Kingsfield said.

“‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ forced them to segment off a part of their lives in a way that was wrong. What they don’t realize today is that the very same criticism they had about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ can be applied to what is happening now to Christians: you can do what you like in private, but don’t bring who you are into the public square, or you can be punished for it.”

On the political side, Kingsfield said it’s important to “surrender political hope” — that is, that things can be solved through political power. Republicans can be counted on to block the worst of what the Democrats attempt – which is a pretty weak thing to rely on, but it’s not nothing. “But a lot of things can be done by administrative order,” he said. “I’m really worried about that.”

And on the cultural front? Cultural pressure is going to radically reduce orthodox Christian numbers in the years go come. The meaning of what it means to be a faithful Christian is going to come under intense fire, Kingsfield said, not only from outside the churches, but from within. There will be serious stigma attached to standing up for orthodox teaching on homosexuality.

“And if the bishops are like these Indiana bishops, where does that leave us?” he said. “We have a problem in the current generation, but what I really worry about is what it means to transmit the faith to the next generation.”

“A lot of us will be able to ‘pass’ if we keep our mouths shut, but it’s going to be hard to tell who believes what,” Kingsfield said. “In [my area], there’s a kind of secret handshake that traditional Christians use to identify ourselves to each other when we meet. Forming those subterranean, catacomb church networks is not easy, but it’s terribly vital right now.”

...

“We need to study more the experience of Orthodox Jews and Amish,” he said. “None of us are going to be living within an eruv or practicing shunning. What we should focus on is endogamy.”

Endogamy means marriage only within a certain clan or in-group.

“Intermarriage is death,” Kingsfield said. “Not something like Catholic-Orthodox, but Christian-Jew, or high church-low church. I just don’t think Christians are focused on that, but the Orthodox Jews get it. They know how much this matters in creating a culture in which transmitting the faith happens. For us Christians, this is going to mean matchmaking and youth camps and other things like that. It probably means embracing a higher fertility rate, and celebrating bigger families.”

...


“There are a lot of conservatives who are very chest-thumping pro-America, but there’s an argument that the seeds of this are built into American individualism,” Kingsfield said. “We Christians have to understand where our allegiances really must to lie. The public schools were meant to make good citizens of us and now are being used to make good Moralistic Therapeutic Deists of us.”

Christians should put their families on a “media fast,” he says. “Throw out the TV. Limit Netflix. You cannot let in contemporary stuff. It’s garbage. It’s a sewage pipe into your home. So many parents think they’re holding the line, but they let their kids have unfettered access to TV, the Internet, and smartphones. You can’t do that.

“And if you can’t trust that the families of the kids that your kids play with are on the same team with all this, then find another peer group among families that are,” he said. “It really is that important.”

And for secondary education? Kingsfield teaches at one of the top universities in the country, a gateway to elite advancement, but says he’s not sure he would want his kids attending there. It depends on God’s calling. He remains there because for now, he sees that he has a mission to mentor undergraduates who need a professor like him to help them deal with the things coming at them. The fact that he has his kids in a good school and a good parish makes this possible. But he recognizes that by the time his children become college age, the landscape may have shifted such that the elite universities are too hostile.

“I could still imagine having a kid who was really strong in his faith, and believing that God was calling him to going to a prestige college. I’m not ready to say ‘never’ for that, but I do think there are a lot of kids that we need to steer away from such hostile places, and into smaller, reliably Christian schools where they can be built up in their faith, and not have to deal with such hostility before they’re strong enough to combat it.”

It’s hard to say what kind of landscape Christians will be looking at twenty, thirty years from now. Kingsfield says he has gay colleagues in the university, people who are in their sixties and seventies now, who came of age in a time where a strong sense of individual liberty protected them. They still retain a devotion to liberty, seeing how much it matters to despised minorities.

“That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”

Bottom line: the Benedict Option is our the only path forward for us. Indiana shows that. “Write that book,” he said.

OK, I will.

 

[BronsonLee]

Goddamnit Jesse

You stole that man's article!

 

[ivysaur12]

I'll have a longer response to this later, but I think it's pretty ridiculous to assume that a majority of Americans have somehow "been in the closet" at the will of, his words, "sexual autonomy". That's a fundamental misunderstanding of sexual orientation, where it seems to equal sexual orientation with behavior rather than being, which is what the crux of his belief system seems to rest on.

 

[Tesseract]

tolerance of intolerance is cowardice, so they'd do well to keep their traps shut in public

persecution complexionz

 

[NobleXenon]

Oh, I thought this article was going to be about how business and governments dealing with the aftermath of an awful law (that was recently amended to be less awful). Not a sob story.

Also I hate the word Social Justice Warriors; Social Justice Clerics sounds fancier.

EDIT: It just came to me how interesting it is how gay people had to be in the closet for their well-being up until a certain point where the other side now feels they need to put their religious affiliation in the closet.

 

[Kemal86]

Honestly thought that was satire until about half way through.

 

[A_Gorilla]

It's so cute when white Christians try to play the victim...

 

[The Technomancer]

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything

...and he lost me

 

[Jacob]

I mean ... I think the witch-hunting that the Internet has made so easy can be a bad thing, whether it's getting someone fired for taking a disrespectful picture at Arlington or causing them to lose their business because of their anti-gay opinions. And it should go without saying that death threats are wrong. But I'm not going to shed any tears for the end of the era in which being openly anti-gay does not merit a response. We've been through the same process with misogyny and racism (in stages against various groups; obviously both are still works in progress). Society will continue to evolve and Christianity will evolve with it, except for hardcore isolationist groups like the Amish or some of the Mormon splinter groups. But for the most part, even fundamentalist Christians will change with the times. It's worth noting that "Christian fundamentalism" as we know it is a very recent development anyway. Changing social attitudes about morality won't spell the end of religion.

 

[GaimeGuy]

Freedom of religion has never been about letting religiously-motivated actions towards other individuals be unregulated - it's about individuals being able to pursue their own spiritual enlightenment, fulfilment, and growth, without society dictating to them which faith they can or can not follow, or society itself adopting a particular faith.

 

[Tesseract]

...and he lost me

we got ourselves a demon, here!

 

[KingGondo]

"The fact that Mike Pence can’t articulate it, and Asa Hutchinson doesn’t care and can’t articulate it, is shocking,” Kingsfield said. “Huckabee gets it and Santorum gets it, but they’re marginal figures."

... Yeah. Huckabee and Santorum don't really get much of anything, especially when it comes to how much of a role religious belief should play in the crafting of public policy.

 

[BocoDragon]

How remarkably self aware. The anti-gay ideology of Fundamentalist Christianity is becoming increasingly unacceptable to a wider society that demands tolerance. It will be hard to indoctrinate Children into that brand of thinking... So you'd better close them off from the outside world.

Christianity ceased to become a cult when it subsumed greater society under Constantine. Maybe it will revert back into being that cloistered little cult in the future?

 

[The Technomancer]

“Autonomous self-definition is at the root of all this,” Prof. Kingsfield said. We are now at the point, he said, at which it is legitimate to ask if sexual autonomy is more important than the First Amendment.

Okay, this part is actually interesting to me. Because I almost sort of agree with the vibe that he's getting at here, insomuch as I also perceive a problem wherin people fail to recognize that genuinely autonomous self-definition isn't even possible, let alone desirable. But the context around all of what he perceives as this "dangerous trend" is that it exists in backlash to a cultural monolith of imposed self definition, and I think that's the part that he's never ever going to be able to understand, because he can't conceptualize of his particular cultural mode of thought as an imposition.

 

[HylianTom]

 

[collige]

I thought this was gonna be just typical Christian persecution bullshit, but the latter half of that is some legit crazy talk.

“When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

What's the context of this? What did Lacycock actually say?

 

[Siegcram]

Why are gay rights continuously compared to nukes? This is like the third article this week I've read that's using that image.

 

[SteveWinwood]

there was a piece on npr that expressed a similar stance (from my quick glance)

I can't find it now but it was just how this whole mess was such a misstep politically and caught most of the Republicans completely off guard and that it would significantly hurt them for a while

edit at another glance this is mostly trash and its nothing like I just said

 

[TumblingHippo]

So one of the solutions is to only marry into, or close enough to, your religion, and pop out as many kids as you can, trying to choose who they marry and hope none of them are gay, or fall in love with a person outside of the faith.

This plan is flawless.

 

[charlequin]

Well, that's a lot of nonsense in one place.

I think my favorite part is this:

“What happened to Brendan Eich” — the tech giant who was driven out of Mozilla for having made a small donation years earlier to the Prop 8 campaign — “is going to start happening to a lot of people, and Christians had better be ready for it. The question I keep thinking about is, why would we want to do that to people? But that’s where we are now.”

"We want the right to unilaterally fire entry level employees for their gender or sexuality, but it is abhorrent for a CEO to be forced to step down for his!"

 

[NYCmetsfan]

“We need to study more the experience of Orthodox Jews and Amish,” he said. “None of us are going to be living within an eruv or practicing shunning. What we should focus on is endogamy.”

Endogamy means marriage only within a certain clan or in-group.

“Intermarriage is death,” Kingsfield said. “Not something like Catholic-Orthodox, but Christian-Jew, or high church-low church. I just don’t think Christians are focused on that, but the Orthodox Jews get it. They know how much this matters in creating a culture in which transmitting the faith happens. For us Christians, this is going to mean matchmaking and youth camps and other things like that. It probably means embracing a higher fertility rate, and celebrating bigger families.”

Wut.

This is the same type of thinking that gets us "antiracism is anti white"

 

[JustenP88]

What a couple of turkeys. Boohoo for the persecuted mass-majority.

 

[piratepwnsninja]

Well, that's a lot of nonsense in one place.

I think my favorite part is this:



"We want the right to unilaterally fire entry level employees for their gender or sexuality, but it is abhorrent for a CEO to be forced to step down for his!"

Yeah, that's what struck me about the article, that it completely misses the point of equality.

 

[NYCmetsfan]

This makes me wish the internet was around in the 50s ans 60s so peoples racism could have been immortalized

 

[Angelus Errare]

Freedom of religion has never been about letting religiously-motivated actions towards other individuals be unregulated - it's about individuals being able to pursue their own spiritual enlightenment, fulfilment, and growth, without society dictating to them which faith they can or can not follow, or society itself adopting a particular faith.

Shush with the logic you heathen!

 

[CrimzonSamurai]

That's a load of rambling nonsense. The sort of insular Christian communities he says they'll need to survive already exist anyway, and have since the nation's inception.

But if these sorts of religious fundies want to interbreed until they have massive congenital disorder rates like every other group that does that, fine by me.

As if one can't be Christian and accepting. It's just so asinine that protestants are the main source of this view, as if their existence isn't owed to someone throwing out old church dogma.

 

[Guileless]

They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.

Believe.

 

[The Lamonster]

Believe.

Talk about projection. God damn.

 

[Siegcram]

This makes me wish the internet was around in the 50s ans 60s so peoples racism could have been immortalized

I mean ... it still is. The "arguments" of racists haven't exactly evolved.

 

[NYCmetsfan]

Kingsfield said we are going to have to watch closely the way the law breaks regarding gender identity and transgenderism. If the courts accept the theory that gender is a social construct — and there is a long line of legal theory and jurisprudence that says that it is — then the field of antidiscrimination law is bound to be expanded to cover, for example, people with penises who consider themselves women. The law, in other words, will compel citizens to live as if this were true — and religious liberty will, in general, be no fallback. This may well happen.

"As of this were true"

Lol what difference does it make for them. How does it affect them in the slightest besides their desire to dictate to others how to live?

 

[watershed]

Who is this closeted professor and what hyper-liberal university does he work for where he lives in fear of being attacked if his religious beliefs were known? It sounds like he has a serious persecution complex. I attended 3 highly liberal west coast colleges and had plenty of religious professors who had no problem being openly so. This professor sounds more like a closet bigot than a closet Christian.

 

[KHarvey16]

Who is this closeted professor and what hyper-liberal university does he work for where he lives in fear of being attacked if his religious beliefs were known? It sounds like he has a serious persecution complex. I attended 3 highly liberal west coast colleges and had plenty of religious professors who had no problem being openly so. This professor sounds more like a closet bigot than a closet Christian.

He clearly has trouble accurately perceiving reality. The crazy all falls into place as soon as you understand that what's actually happening is not important to or sometimes even considered in their point of view.

 

[whatsinaname]

All the time I was reading that, I could hear that guy from Monty python going "Help! Help! I am being repressed."

 

[Opiate]

Freedom of religion has never been about letting religiously-motivated actions towards other individuals be unregulated - it's about individuals being able to pursue their own spiritual enlightenment, fulfilment, and growth, without society dictating to them which faith they can or can not follow, or society itself adopting a particular faith.

I'm not quite sure I agree. We sort of agree, but I'd say that we would like to protect all religious freedom of all kinds -- it just sometimes runs in to other values and clashes with them such that we have to make a choice.

I would love to allow everyone complete religious freedom, but sometimes that value clashes with something else I hold dear, such as the ability of every person in our society to live a life free of discrimination and prejudice.

Another example: I'd love to allow everyone complete freedom of speech, but sometimes people say things like "kill that person, over there, kill him," and my desire to allow complete freedom of speech conflicts with my desire to avoid murder. This is a really common problem in social governance, to me; two good things clash with each other, and we need to make nuanced choices.

 

[watershed]

He clearly has trouble accurately perceiving reality. The crazy all falls into place as soon as you understand that what's actually happening is not important to or sometimes even considered in their point of view.

I think I read the article looking for more intelligence because of the OP. I mean both the mysterious professor and the writer may be intelligent in terms of knowledge and facts, but their ability to reason and understand has clearly been hindered by their prejudice. There's nothing intelligent about this rambling article.

 

[The Llama]

There are a few interesting points in there, but most of it is just crazy tbh.

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

Setting aside the crazy, he seems to think that more dogmatic versions of Christianity will be forced to create something of a mini-society within society if their beliefs are to survive the age of multiculturalism and nigh-mandatory liberality of perspective re: difference.

Kind of an interesting thought, will be interested to see if it comes to pass. It already has, to an extent (see: homeschooling, religious camps, and creationist museums), but will they eventually become as immediately identifiable as, say, a Mennonite? How many of them will there be? Will they eventually seek governmental recognition of their right to interact with others of their subculture on their own terms, in the same way Muslims in Europe seek to be able to try other Muslims under a more Sharia-type code of conduct?

 

[FStop7]

The incoherent ramblings of a madman.

 

[Guileless]

There's nothing intelligent about this rambling article.

Starting from the beginning, what's the first thing you find "unintelligent" and why?

 

[Deified Data]

Freedom of religion has never been about letting religiously-motivated actions towards other individuals be unregulated - it's about individuals being able to pursue their own spiritual enlightenment, fulfilment, and growth, without society dictating to them which faith they can or can not follow, or society itself adopting a particular faith.

When I've finally collected enough stillborn infants and manage to beckon the moon people will wish they had regulated my ability to sincerely practice my faith. The sky and the cosmos are one.

 

[johnsmith]

But, even he has bought into the idea that real Christianity is doomed in the US.

So Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians aren't real Christians? Nobody has a monopoly on "real" Christianity, but everybody likes to think they do.

 

[verdures]

Who is this closeted professor and what hyper-liberal university does he work for where he lives in fear of being attacked if his religious beliefs were known? It sounds like he has a serious persecution complex. I attended 3 highly liberal west coast colleges and had plenty of religious professors who had no problem being openly so. This professor sounds more like a closet bigot than a closet Christian.

Exactly. What large and prestigious college doesn't have a bunch of Christian student groups? When I was an undergrad half the signs on campus were religious student groups advertising functions and doing outreach.

 

[Christine]

Rod's been beating this drum for quite some time now. I always kinda wondered when the sound of its echoes would make it into our little chamber.

For further reading, I recommend his "Law of Merited Impossibility", an epistemological construct he's created and subsequently locked jaws on in an unassailable death-bite.

 

[Guileless]

There are a few interesting points in there, but most of it is just crazy tbh.

Starting from the beginning, what is the first point you think is "crazy?"

 

[Deified Data]

Who is this closeted professor and what hyper-liberal university does he work for where he lives in fear of being attacked if his religious beliefs were known? It sounds like he has a serious persecution complex. I attended 3 highly liberal west coast colleges and had plenty of religious professors who had no problem being openly so. This professor sounds more like a closet bigot than a closet Christian.

Didn't you see God's Not Deee-heeaad?

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

This is your brain on religious far-right shit.

Not even once.

 

[KHarvey16]

I think I read the article looking for more intelligence because of the OP. I mean both the mysterious professor and the writer may be intelligent in terms of knowledge and facts, but their ability to reason and understand has clearly been hindered by their prejudice. There's nothing intelligent about this rambling article.

I went in looking too. I didn't suspect it off the bat, but it didn't take long!

Starting from the beginning, what's the first thing you find "unintelligent" and why?

I won't speak for him but we seem to be on the same page, so I'll offer this is a quick example:

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold."

This is a naive and ignorant view of both the past and the present.

 

[trips]

“That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”

yassss, fear me.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Religion has the unfortunate problem that since it depends on faith and the authority of patriarch type figures it can be easily manipulated to stand for any position just as can be done without it. You just have to look at what is going on in Syria. Removing access to outside media can only make that worse.

 

[KHarvey16]

Rod's been beating this drum for quite some time now. I always kinda wondered when the sound of its echoes would make it into our little chamber.

For further reading, I recommend his "Law of Merited Impossibility", an epistemological construct he's created and subsequently locked jaws on in an unassailable death-bite.

You seem to be familiar with the author so maybe you could answer: is he above inventing a college professor at a cartoon perfect evil liberal university?