Why Are So Many Christians So Un-Christian?<\/a> by Amanda Marcotte in Alternet.<\/p>\nThe Text:<\/strong> In an age where your average Republican politician is thumping the Bible with one hand and trying to strip food from the mouths of the poor with the other, it\u2019s become a sad clich\u00e9 to point out how little the most outspoken Christians have in common with their charity-preaching, forgiveness-loving messiah. It\u2019s only gotten worse in recent years, with the followers of the man who cured lepers threatening to shut down the government if Obama insists on giving more people access to healthcare.<\/p>\nBut while a nudge and a laugh at the silly Christian hypocrites is a good time, it\u2019s worth looking deeper at what\u2019s really going on with the parsimonious haters of the poor who claim to speak for Jesus. The fact of the matter is that right-wing Christians refuse to see their differences with Jesus as hypocrisy. To really understand how religion works in the world of politics, it helps to understand that it\u2019s usually more about rationalizing what you already want to believe than it is about actually studying your religious texts and drawing intelligent conclusions from it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s going on when Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State and current conservative activist says things like there is \u201cnothing more Christian\u201d than cutting needy people off food stamps? It may seem like the rational thing for Blackwell to have done was simply admit that there\u2019s nothing in the Bible that even comes close to suggesting that it\u2019s good for people to be forced into starvation simply because they had the misfortune of living in a time of high unemployment. After all, Jesus just simply gave people the loaves and the fishes. He didn\u2019t withhold the food, and like Blackwell did, say that being able to eat food would \u201cbreed dependency\u201d and that starving the poor was a good way of \u201cempowering others and creating self-sufficiency.”<\/p>\n
Blackwell is stretching; it\u2019s obvious he\u2019s stretching. So why go there at all? Well, as stupid as he sounds, it\u2019s the rational choice. Being considered a Christian means you get a lot of unearned esteem from the public, and you\u2019re given a lot more benefit of the doubt than if you claimed to be, say, an atheist. Indeed, for many audiences, it\u2019s better to sound like an idiot while claiming to be Christian than to sound intelligent without mentioning religion at all. It makes sense that a politician or activist would want to be perceived as a Christian even if they have to bend themselves into pretzels to explain away the obnoxious clash between what they believe and what even the most strained but intellectually honest interpretation of their Bible would have you believe.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s more than that. There\u2019s no reason to think Blackwell believes himself to be lying when it comes to his religious beliefs. As much as liberals would often wish it otherwise\u2014and no matter how much conservative Christians may claim their beliefs all come from the Bible\u2014the truth of the matter is there\u2019s no real relationship between what a person believes and what their religion ostensibly teaches them to believe. In practical terms, the word \u201cChristian\u201d is an empty term that can basically mean whatever the believer wants it to mean. Christians decide what they want to believe first and then, after they\u2019ve chosen their beliefs, search for any excuse, no matter how thin, to claim that their belief is consistent with their chosen religion.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a process called rationalization or motivated reasoning, and to be perfectly fair, it\u2019s how most people think about most things most of the time: They choose what to believe and then look for reasons to explain why they believe it. Huge reams of psychological research show this is just how the human brain works. Almost never do we look over a bunch of arguments and choose what to believe based on reasoning our position out. As Chris Mooney at Mother Jones explains, \u201cWe push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close.\u201d Our faculties are usually put to the task of trying to defend what we already believe, not towards developing a better understanding of the world.<\/p>\n
While most people engage in motivated reasoning most of the time, injecting religion into a situation only makes this process worse. That\u2019s because, unlike most other belief systems, religion is impervious to empiricism. Most claims people make are subject to real-world tests. Are you in denial that your spouse is cheating on you? If you\u2019re given photographic evidence that it\u2019s true, that\u2019s probably enough to shake you from your convictions. Want to believe the Earth is flat and not round? Shoot you into space and see how long that belief lasts. Sure, there are always fools who won\u2019t believe the evidence, no matter how overwhelming, but for most of us, most of the time, we have a limit.<\/p>\n
With religion, however, there\u2019s no limits about what you can claim to believe. Jesus is a mythological character: he believes whatever the person speaking for him says he believes. For one person, Jesus believes we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked. For another, Jesus didn\u2019t really mean it when he said that stuff; he was just handing out goodies in order to recruit new believers. We weren\u2019t there (and it probably didn\u2019t even happen), so the sky\u2019s the limit when making up reasons why what you believe counts as \u201cChristian.\u201d If you want to believe Jesus was actually a space alien brought here by Martians to teach us how to fly, you have as much right as anyone else to believe what you want. It all has equal amounts of evidence to back it up.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one reason politicians love to talk about religion, because they don\u2019t have to prove anything. But that\u2019s the major reason religion really has no place in politics. It\u2019s hard enough for voters and policy makers to hash through the real-world claims that fly around in politics. Trying to figure out what some silent, mythical god wants us to do is a fool\u2019s errand. That god is always and forever going to want what the person speaking for him wants him to want, and nothing else. If Ken Blackwell was only allowed to speak for Ken Blackwell and not claim authority from on high, the true cruelty of his words would be all the easier to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: Why Are So Many Christians So Un-Christian? by Amanda Marcotte in Alternet. The Text: In an age where your average Republican politician is thumping the Bible with one hand and trying to strip food from the mouths of the poor with the other, it\u2019s become a sad clich\u00e9 to point out how little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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