Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema wrote:
>
> Also, if you notice, I didn't say it was "a crock" in my original post, which
> responded, just to recapitulate, to Kevin Dean's posting data on gross
> brutality in a Christian school in Missouri. Nor did I "trash" Christianity
> as Chip accused me of doing. I pointed out that the brutality in the school
> was only one aspect of Christianity, and referred to others, which we on the
> left tend to see as positive. Barely even a criticism in any of this.
Class society entails extreme brutality -- and various ideologies will emerge to justify that brutality. Platonists of various sorts will then turn this upside down and explain the behavior in terms of the ideology, with the implication that another ideology would not lead to the same behavior. This is incoherent.
>
> Perhaps Christianity is even deeper difficulty than we realized if Chip feels
> compelled to defend it even against analytic description.
One version or another of Christianity has at one time or another been invoked to explain, justify, or attack almost every form of human behavior. That is, substitute almost anything for X int he following sentence, and you will be paraphrasing the actual thought of some group in the last 2000 years: "Christianity causes X." Since Christianity (in the abstract) explains everything it explains nothing. For explanatory force we would have to show why a given selection of doctrines in one instance, or among one group, leads to one set of behaviors, and in another instance or among another group leads to another set of behaviors. And since these differences do in fact occur, the common element (the given set of doctrines) has no explanatory force.
And hence Chip is at least partly right in seeing this as an attack on _people_, not merely an analytic description. To be blunt about it, the whole thing strikes me as what could be crudely called a put-down. "What can you expect of people who believe X" -- they don't have any objective reason for believing it, so it must be their internal make-up." Like all forms of baiting, there is no way to respond to this. That's the point of a put-down -- to make it impossible for the other party to respond, for whatever they say has been disqualified in advance.
Saying that Christianity is a crock is perhaps not the best argumentative decorum, but Doug is right it is not bigotry. Saying that all Christian thought necessarily exemplifies such and such a motive _is_ reprehensible -- whether bigotry is the correct label I don't know, but a nasty label is called for.
Carrol
>
> Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Michael Pollak wrote:
> >
> > >Nope, it's a creed, as in "no discrimination on the basis of race, color
> > >or creed." You've never heard of anti-religious bigotry?
> >
> > Not hiring someone because s/he's a Christian would be
> > discrimination; saying that Christianity is a crock isn't bigotry.
> >
> > Doug