The Battle of the Historical Myths

By -
One guy writes that Glenn Beck teaches "his viewers the much-debunked idea that America's creation was rooted in Christianity." In response, another guy writes that it was so founded on Christianity.

But no serious scholar of the period agrees with either of these disputants. The American Founding was along-simmered stew containing a variety of ingredients, amongst which 1) classical republicanism, 2) non-conformist Protestant ideology, and 3) Deist-tending Enlightenment philosophy were the most potent. Of course, any partisan can dig up a bunch of quotes from 2) and "demonstrate" that we are a Christian nation, or, from 3), to "debunk" that claim.

And neither side, I'd guess, has any interest in hearing the truth. "Well, it's complicated," is not a position that can easily be turned into propaganda to hurl at your political foes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more