[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

[Carrol Cox]

If fundamentalism or evangelicalism is to be made a cause of political
views it has to be shown to cause the same political views in _all_
periods. And it can't, because the relations of religion to politics are
constantly changing , which would be evidence of both being grounded in
other causes rather than being causes of each other. This single-minded
effort to link religion with conservative politics is pervasively
idealist. And even at the present time the identity is not perfect;
there is  only an overlap. So you have to show why _sometimes_ religion
leads to conservative politics and sometimes it leads to radical or
liberal or even communist politics.

Carrol

Dennis Claxton wrote:
> 
> At 12:11 PM 3/25/2010, SA wrote:
> 
> >>>So what exactly is the political effect of believing in the
> >>>inerrancy of the bible?
> >>
> >>It makes white people more conservative than they should be.
> >
> >What's the evidence of that?
> 
> Here's something:
> 
> http://www.anth.uconn.edu/degree_programs/ecolevo/godscategories.pdf
> 
> God's categories: The effect of religiosity on children's
> teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories
> 
> Gil Diesendruck and Lital Habera
> 
> Department of Psychology and Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan
> University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel
> Received 9 April 2008;
> revised 3 November 2008;
> accepted 3 November 2008.
> Available online 5 December 2008.
> 
> Abstract
> 
> Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique
> nature and purpose. These implications closely correspond to what
> some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and
> teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what
> extent the belief in God as creator of categories is related to the
> mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli
> secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to
> questions assessing these three types of beliefs. The results
> revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children
> with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of
> animal category membership, and their teleological construal of
> artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox
> children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the
> stability of social category membership, and their teleological
> construal of both animal and social categories. These findings
> intimate that while essentialist beliefs about animals, and
> teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input in
> order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and
> teleological beliefs about both animal and social categories do.
> 
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