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

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Mar 31 15:46:42 PDT 2010


At 01:47 PM 3/31/2010, Carrol Cox wrote:


>Dennis Claxton wrote:
> >
> >[clip[
> > Here's the quote:
> >
> > "Assessing the Bible in the light of literal interpretation as
> > advocated by fundamentalist Christians, rather than inspiration
> > Parenti finds a deeply troubling narrative ..."
>
>What precisely does Parenti expect his book to achieve? Fundamentalists
>will pay no attention to it, and if they did would dismiss its
>arguments. Hence he can't be trying to change the mind of
>fundamentalists.
>
>Non-fundamentalists, left or right, are by definition
>non-fundamentalists and reject fundamentalist use of the Bible. Hence he
>can't be correcting fundamentlaist ideas held by non-fundamentlists.
>
>So what is he doing?
>
>Carrol

He doesn't really say. I suspect it's a project he's long been interested in and simply wanted to write about it. nothing wrong with that.

OTOH, this is definitely a book written for someone entirely new to the subject. It's very broad and not very deep. It's well-researched, but little time is spent on in-depth discussions of things that might be controversial.

he takes as axiomatic the relative deprivation thesis, an old and much argued thesis in the study of religiosity. Jeff Fisher and I once had a discussion about it -- IIRR. I found that troubling, but I'm not the audience. the audience is people who probably:

1. religious lefties who haven't thought too much about the issues but are troubled by the rise of the religious right

2. people who aren't especially religious, never went to church much, and don't really have much of an idea of the stories told in the bible

3. people who have been harangued by rightists about their supposed "intolerance" toward religion that they've been cowed into believing that there is such as thing as bigotry toward christians in the country and might find it eye-opening to read arguments against such claims.

4. peole on the left who are, as you say, already anti-fundamentalists but who often feel alone, that no one else is with them on the topic -- such as I could have easily experienced living in limpdick.

5. finally and probably most importantly the book is common text to share among like-minded people. Sometimes, the purpose of propaganda is to put into easy-to-read form the ideas that galvanize a social group and/or social movement. it builds solidarity by creating a shared text around which to affirm ideals.

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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