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

[shag carpet bomb]

turns out that parenti isn't about proving religion is false. rather, he 
examines christianist religious doctrine, beliefs, and practices and asks 
what kind of god seems to be created by the religious right. he focuses on 
the god created by the religious right, and other religious reactionaries, 
but mostly christians (so far), recognizing that the religious left creates 
a different god (and set of practices. he devotes a chapter to that, also 
pointing out how the media, the government, and religious leaders/officials 
surpress knowledge of the existence of left religious groups and the 
doctrines they teach and practices they engage in.

i'm curious: what does "diagnostically" mean in your para below? wasn't 
sure what you meant.

as far as i can tell, people blew a phrase from the reviewer way out of 
proportion to what parenti was up to. he's not interested in questions of 
biblical literalism or inerrancy - not in a philosophical sense. he's 
simply interested in the dominant trends among the christian right, the 
most widely read translation they use (King James) and how they have 
crafted a god that advances/reinforces capitalist ideology.

shag

At 04:06 PM 3/24/2010, Voyou wrote:
>If that's what Parenti's doing, that's great, but, from the Counterpunch 
>article, it looks more like he's engaging in the same project as Dawkins 
>or Hitchens. Rather than criticizing religion diagnostically, attempting 
>to discover through a critique of religion both the "inverted world" it 
>represents, and explain how it became inverted, they treat religion as a 
>set of truth claims, which they then show to be false. ...


>The problem I have with all these attempts to show that religion is false 
>isn't that they offend the delicate sensibilities of believers, but that 
>they seem so boring. It's obvious that, interpreted literally and 
>evaluated by the norms we use to evaluate most truth claims, the bible is 
>false (even biblical literalists don't deny this!), so why write whole 
>books repeating this obvious statement? If people want to spend their time 
>doing that, it's their time to waste; but I find the mindset of those who 
>want to do that to be almost as incomprehensible as the mindset of those 
>who claim the bible to be (in some curious and never entirely specified 
>sense) true. -- Voyou <voyou1 at gmail.com> <http://blog.voyou.org> 
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