Having just returned to London from San Francisco, I am reminded of the three things whose remarkable popularity in America continue to convince me that I can never truly fit in over there:
That last link greeted me on my return courtesy of this posting to Dave Farber's IP list. The article starts off as follows:
Today marks the Roman Catholics' Feast of the Assumption, honoring the moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).
It goes on to describe how Americans are becoming more religious and fundamentalist in their views even while most of the rest of the world is, if anything, becoming more secular and rational.
I recently finished reading A Devils Chaplain by Richard Dawkins. Predictably enough, he takes a lot of swipes at religion. Also predictably enough, I quite enjoyed them. His discussion of transubstantiation (the Roman Catholic belief that the wine of the Sacrament actually becomes the blood of Christ) was particularly entertaining. Religion, Dawkins explains, requires mystery, and transubstantiation handily conjours up two whole mysteries — (i) that wine has become blood and (ii) that it nevertheless continues to look and taste just like wine — out of thin air where there was previously only one completely mundane fact — it's just wine.
Should we be worried that a large proportion of the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, including many of their leaders, are willing — nay, eager — to believe in this sort of thing? Is it a cause for concern when 83% of them accept that Mary was a virgin despite the fact that the oldest known written accounts make no mention of this fact and the story probably arose from a mistranslation of a word meaning "young woman"? Don't these people shown themselves to be even more credulous when they accept Mary's own Immaculate Conception, which was only added to the official story in 1854? Is it potentially dangerous when people irrational enough to believe all of the above, but at the same time dismiss evolution, hold sway over the world?
I think the answers to all these questions are yes. But I don't know what to do about it — I can always turn down the sourdough or turn off Fox TV, but those gullible carriers of the Hebrew Myths meme are just about everywhere.
Posted by timo at August 15, 2003 09:23 PM | TrackBack