Thread by @jeffblack945

Thread # 120
“What the Hell?”
Part 4 of 5
Determined Ignorance

1/ I’ve been ruminating--painfully--about what prepared White Evangelicals to respond so gleefully to someone as misogynist, as greedy--and frankly, as stupid--as President Trump.

2/ Today my distraught musings are about how someone as willfully ignorant as the Orange Goofball could have attracted 80% of White Evangelicals.

3/ Donald decides what facts he will take in and what facts he won’t. He’s confused thinking with shopping. Some facts look nice and he buys them; other facts make him feel bad, so they are not for him. This is a fundamental grandiosity, a stance of superiority over reality.

4/ And it’s a kind of cowardice, a fear of knowledge itself, for knowledge may force me to question my beliefs, my attitudes, my purposes. Learning takes a combination of courage and humility.

5/ Why would White Evangelicals embrace a fast talking grifter who disbelieves settled facts and believes whatever he wants?

6/ For 30 years, for instance,Trump’s had the theory that we’re losing money on trade & would be better off with tariffs. To him, It’s right because it’s what he likes to believe. I studied macro economics 52 years ago--that social science even then had disproved this stupidity.

7/ That same confusion between thinking and shopping is on full view in many White Evangelical Churches. You can hear breathtaking nonsense solemnly repeated about dinosaurs and Adam and Eve and evolution & the necessity of a literal reading of Genesis 3 in order to go to heaven.

8/ If you grow up and dwell in a church where the Bible is held to be uniform in its kind of truthfulness, where virtue is equated with rejection of scientifically established facts,..

9/.. and where you’re told that the people who do not share your beliefs are doomed, you’re well prepared to become a Trumpster.

10/ You know this fake news business Trump uses to bind his people to him? Folks inside really conservative White Evangelical churches are trained not to accept as fact what intelligent people in the community around them believe....

11/..All it takes to dissent from the commonly held wisdom of the larger community is a persuasive father figure & a crowd of people you like who agree with him. So if you believe that settled science is fake, it’s not a big step to believe that widely broadcast news is fake too.

12/ It was Jesus Himself, as recorded in John, who said, “The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” (14:25-26)

13/ If the Holy Spirit is going to lead us into truth, that means we haven’t yet got the whole deal. Hmmmm.

14/ Back in the 80’s I lived in Kansas City, Missouri, a great town. Turns out, near our home was a library that held a copy of every American PhD doctoral thesis in the physical sciences, going back, I think to 1900. I’m pretty dumb about science, but it was nearby so...

15/.. one day I went in to see what it was like. I started with the old card catalogue, just to read the titles. I did not understand a single word. Nada. Zippo. Talk about humbling! (I was an English major. What can I say?)

16/ I’ve since found science writers who have helped me a lot and I am filled with awe about the revelations of the little I do understand. Did you know that right now there are places in the heavens called star nurseries, where objects the size of the sun are coming into being?

17/ I’ve also gotten a smattering of philosophy and a bit more theology, and so I understand that God has an epistemological dilemma with humans and the Bible. Epistemology is the study of how we learn.

18/ When it comes to understanding how creation works, our learning is mostly sequential. That is, I have to learn something basic before I can learn the more subtle things within that subject. Giving a first grader a test on differential equations, for example, is hopeless.

19/ Consider God’s dilemma: God has infinite wisdom, way more than humans do. God wants to make revelations about divinity, about humanity, about creation. God also cherishes our freedom, for only free people can choose to return God’s love.

20/ When, how, and how much God reveals about God’s own identity, and the complexities of God’s creation, is partly determined by God’s commitment to foster human freedom and to encourage human discovery.

21/ In order to get great big truth into our brains, God had to give us what we could handle at the time God revealed it. It was necessarily simpler at first. Genesis 1 is not science, but the pattern it taught us helped science begin and develop.

22/ One of the basic tenets of Christian, Jewish & Islamic culture is that God communicates through Holy Scripture, and through Creation. I don’t worry about conflicts between scientifically validated understandings like evolution or general relativity, and Biblical revelation...

23/.. If stuff is true then it’s true.

24/ How will science be reconciled with Biblical authority? There are three things to understand. Two have to do with understanding the Bible, and one has to do with valuing science.

25/ (1) The Bible is not a prairie. It’s a mountain range. 66 books written over 1200 years including books of poetry, tall tales, history, essays …

26/.. If you read all the Bible as equally, objectively, humorlessly accurate about the physical world, you will just shut your mind down to most of the Bible’s revelations. After 50 years of carefully considering this material, I can tell you that most of it is infinitely rich.

27/ (2) The Bible has several themes that develop over all those writings. Here are two that have been most helpful for me: How close can we draw to God? How, in the varied complexities of all 66 books, is God leading us away from violence and towards a cherishing of creation?

28/ (3) Science itself has a certain holiness. Scientists cannot proceed without a profound humility. Their question is: What do reason and verifiable experiments reveal?...

29/... Their question is not: In our desire to be comfortably in control of what all good people agree to, what do we already believe? Again, what does the actual evidence reveal?

30/ My advice is to trust God to speak both through creation and scripture, and to learn to be ok with not controlling how God is permitted to speak.

31/ Here’s something else that I learned over the decades: most good church-going evangelicals do not, in fact, read the Bible. I wish they would.

32/ You cannot carefully consider the ethical teaching and the character of Moses, the Prophets, or Christ, and continue to support this disastrous administration.

33/ We’ve seen how White Evangelicals were prepared to follow this misogynist, greedy, dishonest, racist President--absolutism about abortion, the Prosperity Gospel’s encouragement of greed, and the rejection of science, all block perception of the hideous reality of Trumpism.

34/ As St. Paul saw, those whose stance is self-righteousness ruin the present and threaten the future. We need a reformation, and to that we turn in the last thread of this series.