Romney and the Role of Religion
Nick Gillespie | December 11, 2007, 10:55am
Columnist Ron Hart on Romney's recent rap about religion:
A Pew Research Center poll in September found that 25 percent of GOP voters, including 36 percent of white Protestants evangelicals, said that they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon. Rudy Giuliani with his three wives does better than Mitt Romney with his stable solid marriage of 30 years and his great kids. Folks, that is small-minded and wrong.
The Democrats are smarter on this. Their leading candidate Barrack Obama has admitted to drug use and no one cared. Meanwhile, the GOP base slices and dices its candidates; forcing them into in a ludicrous competition over issues of religion and morality that should have no bearing on their ability to govern.
More here.
Jay J | December 11, 2007, 4:53pm | #
Lou said,
"Come on, it's wrong to not want a guy in office who believes in the silly Mormon stuff? I don't care how many wives the president has had, that's still not as bad a quality as believing Native Americans were Israelis and Joseph Smith wasn't a fraud."
Why? Why is believing in something which seems unbelievable a bad quality?
If you're a moral realist, then you might understand Romney a little better, and perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt, I mean hell he was raised in that religion, all his family, friends, etc are in it. BTW, I don't care for Romeny. I'm not a republican, and even if I was, I wouldn't vote for Romney.
But if we're just going on evidence, it's certainly not apparent that religion in general is bad for those who participate, whether or not some think the world would be better without it. And Mormons in particular are some of the highest educated and highest income earners around, on the average. That doesn't make any of them qualified to be president, but it certainly shows that this 'lack of genral judgment' meme doesn't seem to fit.
If you're a moral non-realist, on the other hand, well then nothing is really bad. And if you can go ahead and admit that, then we can wave bye-bye to all the rhetorical force of your argument.
If you're not sure what you are, and just are committed to the idea that believing weird things is a bad quality, then perhaps your view is itself pretty weird. After all, there's nothing substantial behind it, other than a taste like a preference for cake over ice cream, nevertheless it is asserted as if it packs an objective punch.
So belief in Isrealite Native Americans on the one hand, and belief in the "goodness" of epistemological rigor on the other, are in the same boat, which means without rational (or better yet, emperical) justification.
So it seems to me that if someone maintains that weird beliefs are a "bad" thing, then they either a) don't really mean it deep down, or b)lack a rigorous justification for what they're maintaining, in which case, what they're maintaining seems pretty...weird.
UM | December 11, 2007, 5:52pm | #
Rattlesnake Jake,
This is going to be a bit long, but I've got to cover some pretty basic historical method stuff here for you. Sorry about that, but your comments indicate that you really aren't aware of how historians work with events prior to good record keeping.
First off, I'm not talking about Mormon beliefs or what believers say about Jesus, but rather about if you pose the historical question: was there a fellow named Jeshua (Gr. Jesus) who was regarded by some as a messiah and who was executed by the Romans?
That is a very distinct question from was Jesus the son of God or whether Jesus did much other than that get exectuted. Now if you go into any department of Religious Studies (which tend to be populated by non-believers who are very distrustful of actual believers, by the way) and asked the scholars that question, you would get positives with a bunch of provisos about that not meaning that Jesus did anything in particular.
You are correct, we have no contemporary mentions of Jesus. But then again, if that is your only basis for determining if people existed, you'd have to rule out of a lot of people that we are reasonably confident did in fact exist. In fact, given Roman history practices, it would be somewhat surprising if we did have contemporary records of Jesus rather than later encapsulations of the stories circulating among early Christians.
But, to play it your way a little bit, we do have records of other wild-n-crazy hicks from the sticks who led messianic movements at the same time as Jesus, and we even have a few brief mentions of them being killed by the Roman authorities. From those we know that the Romans didn't take these guys seriously—they treated them as a minor nuisance—until they started fighting against the Roman authorities or leading the Sanhedrin to make noise. If you read a decent translation of the accounts of Jesus' trial (i.e., not the KJV, which is wonderfully indecipherable), it's pretty apparent that Pilate wants nothing more than to get these stupid provincials out of his hair when they show up during the Passover, the period when violence was most likely to erupt. Letting them kill Jesus was intended to pacify them and make his life easier. So we have that part of the New Testament pretty consistent with what we know actual Roman officials tended to do with actual messiah figures of the time.
So you would propose that, even though there were a number of Jesus-like guys running around causing problems for the Romans in exactly the way Jesus seemed to do from the Roman perspective, that we should assume that everything was made up from whole cloth? That takes more faith that just accepting that there was a Jesus guy who got executed.
To go a bit further, there are ways of working with texts to determine probabilistic authenticity. These ways rule out
a lot of the New Testament (which is why fundies don't like them and argue that they're Satan's tools). When you start seeing the same stories showing up in texts from obviously different oral traditions, who start assigning a high probability to those events being rooted in some historical event. You can count out the resurrection if you want (even the New Testament argues that this is something you wouldn't normally believe), but other bits are reasonable under this criteria. The Bethlehem birth isn't among them at al, but the idea that Jesus was from the sticks in Nazareth is pretty certain, as is that he taught that he was the messiah and that he got himself executed as a public nuisance.
When you start talking to historians of religion—as opposed to armchair polemicists who tend to be arrogant enough to think they've discovered something nobody realized before in pointing out the lack of a smoking gun—very few scholars question that there was some guy in Roman Palestine who was the germ for Jesus. Whether that fellow did much of what is recorded in the New Testament is another question, but you'll get that much agreement.
Of course, you're sold on your position, so this is probably so much wasted effort…
Of course, I have to ask why it would threaten you if there really was a Jesus, even if it turns out that he was a yokel rabble-rouser killed to appease a more powerful rabble.
Someone Who Doesn't Want to Lose His Job | December 11, 2007, 9:41pm | #
UM said:
Remember that history isn't science and historical truth is probabilistic in nature.
I'd guess that this is only under a pretty loose definition of the term
probabilistic.
I suspect that there's very little, and very hard to quantify, data to even
make a valid statistical inference in the cases of which you speak. That's not to say that the existence of a man called Jesus whose life
roughly corresponds with
part of the Biblical account mightn't the
best guess - though still far from a certainty - given what records we have. However, if the data can't be quantified in some manner (which I doubt even the full historical records can), and doesn't have a large enough sample size (likewise I assume the historical record on Jesus would have to be said to have a very small sample size if its "sample size" could even be measured in a meaningful way), citing probability or statistical methods to determine the
likelihood of a certain historical event's truth is problematic at best. I doubt we can state the end result with any sort of worthwhile confidence. This is especially true as we are unable to clearly describe the space of possibly true historical events.
This is not to say that statistics aren't often misinterpreted even when they are applicable or that there might be
non-statistical methods of determining the likelihood of a historical account's truth. Keep in mind that statistics certainly isn't my field. However, I am pretty comfortable saying that statistical methods will be of very little use in determining the accuracy of historical accounts, especially very old ones. If there's a valid and useful way of quantifying these accounts of which I am not aware, history's on more certain ground (statistically speaking) than I had thought.
Having said all this, you are certainly correct that history is not a science. Also, if you are using the term probabilistic in more of a common usage sense than in reference to the study of probability and statistics, I suppose I should withdraw my post as being pointlessly technical. (Which seems likely, now that I think of it.) Sorry! Have a nice day!
UM | December 12, 2007, 6:59am | #
If you want a good summary of how the evidence for a historical Jesus is built and weighed, the
Wikipedia article on the historicity of Jesus is actually pretty good. Notice that none of the evidence discussed is archaeological, but then again, unless you found the True Cross™ or something like that, I have no idea what you'd expect. There are lots of people who left no archaeological record.
The article explains why scholars posit earlier records than we now have (you can't explain the earliest writings we do have if there weren't earlier ones) and how they build the case. It does acknowledge a controversy over whether there was a real Jesus person, but as it (correctly) puts it, the position that there was not one is a "very small minority" position. As the article puts it, “Non-historicity is regarded as effectively refuted by almost all Biblical scholars and historians.”
Part of the reason that it's a minority position is that its proponents have to engage in quite a bit of mental gymnastics to explain away the evidence we do have and it's a much more straight-forward proposition, both intellectually and historically, to accept that there was a Jesus person whose life was embellished in early Christian writings, a statement rather neutral in its theological impact (unless you're a fundie).
And no, I'm not relying on Wikipedia in making this case: it just happens in this case to be a pretty good summary of a lot of historical work. There are any number of reputable, non-polemic books that outline the arguments about sources for the New Testament. For good, mainstream scholarly accounts by a (presumedly) non-believer (he doesn't discuss his faith except to say he's a former fundy, but it's clear he's not proselytizing), see the various works by Bart Ehrman. When you read them, consider how much more complicated the picture becomes if you posit that there is absolutely no historical grain at the center of what he's discussing. So much of what we do have becomes unexplainable in that case, but poses no problem if there was a Jesus guy.
So, Rattlesnake Jack and Isaac Bertram, before you argue that there is no evidence, you should be aware of what counts as evidence and not insist that only certain kinds of evidence that are lacking for many historical figures be applied. Be aware as well that the burden of proof is on you in face of consensus among scholars that the evidence for the existence of a Jesus person is compelling.
But then again, you probably know that most scholars don't agree with you and get pretty pissed that not everyone acknowledges the truth of the books you've read that say there was no Jesus person at all.
Wait, somewhere in the back of my mind that reminds me of the attitude some other class of people have towards another book. Can't think who it might be, but I'll let you know if I think of them...
