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

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Mon Mar 29 16:02:06 PDT 2010


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>
>___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-



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