Understanding does not mean what John Reynolds thinks it means

So I just stumbled across this piece by John Mark Reynolds in a recent column in The Washington Post entitled, “Trivia kings, but bad thinkers: understanding over facts.” In which he writes his opinion on the newest of a series of religiously weighted surveys, this one done by the Pew Forum. This recent survey shows that atheists (along with Jews and Mormons) are dramatically more likely to know facts about the religious doctrines of other cultures whereas the religious grade much more poorly. His assertion is that atheists, bolstered by the Internet and books, happen to be good at learning facts but do so without understanding what they’re reading. Thus the title of his piece which boils down of the survey’s results to “atheists are good at trivia.”

He blames the entire society of the United States for having become an entertainment culture where people don’t actually read, spend time ruminating, or actually examine their opinions. As he comments on entertainment culture, he points out that Christians make up a majority of the population yet,

Weirdly, Christians must clean up the mess of broader culture, but we have had little power to create pop culture in the last fifty years. The poor and the disadvantaged are always the first to bear the brunt of bad cultural ideas and only the religious remain on the ground to try to help.

Also weirdly, the poor and the disadvantaged are more likely to be religious, and since “three-quarters or more of the American general population” happen to be Christian... They're more likely to be mostly Christians. So, according to him these bad cultural ideas are coming from a strange minority but being absorbed gluttonously by the Christian majority the very same majority who must “clean up the mess of broader culture.” Something tells me that Reynolds doesn’t seem to get precisely what the word “broader” means.

In this sense it is easier to be an agnostic or atheist. You have rejected the mainstream of American history, which means you don't have to take responsibility for its failures, though you can appropriate its successes.

What the hell is he talking about here? Atheists (and agnostics of both stripe: theist and atheist) don't reject American history as a matter of their atheism or agnosticism in relation to the existence of a god or gods. This sentence sits here all by its lonesome. He cites absolutely no evidence for his assertion and fails to support it with even a single scintilla of rationale. American citizens both suffer the failures of our history and appropriate the successes of it. Perhaps this is a veiled attempt for him to prop up the false notion that the United States is somehow a Christian nation when the Constitution and its supporting documents go out of their way to cultivate a secular government.[1]

Third, we must demand that our government schools teach religion, not just the "facts" but with understanding. Wisdom will only come when we recognize why billions of the world's people believe what they do. This means that majority Christians must also accept charitable expositions of other faiths. When the state of Texas demands less coverage of Islam this is a bad step.

This “understanding” that he’s been crowing through most of this strangely sanctimonious article is actually what the rest of the world would refer to as indoctrination. What’s really odd about this is that he refers to the Pew research and notes how theists fail awfully at knowing even their own doctrine, but claims that they understand their doctrine. He then went winging around about how a person can know a bunch of trivial facts but not understand them; but he really didn’t get around to how precisely a person can have no grasp of any of the facts yet maintain an understanding of a subject nonetheless. After all, that’s exactly how he describes the theists who took the test.

Sure. Teach religion in government schools, but he’s going to be in for a nasty surprise when people realize he’s just basically stated that he wants government schools to teach children to be religious not just about religions.

He will really have to clarify that position before it’s even readable. Certainly he could explain exactly what the difference between knowing that Catholics believe that the communion becomes the actual blood and flesh of their god and understanding that bread and wine turn into bodily fluids and tissue. (This is one of the questions in the survey.)

We must do unto others as we would have them do to us. We must allow students to read books that come from different traditions, from atheism to paganism. The intellectual growth that will result will not be the sort that can be captured in a fill-in-the-blanks or multiple choice exam. Instead, we are going to have to support government school budgets that to allow for small discussion classes that can produce a deeper understanding of important ideas.

We already do this. No special, soppy religious understanding is needed in social studies. Answers are already available with an anthropological context as to why Catholic doctrine includes transubstantiation and the Ancient Greeks believed that their gods rested on Mt. Olympus and sometimes turned people into spiders and skunks. These aren’t even important ideas on the grand scale of living our lives among one another.

For example, one of the most influential books first published by an American is the Book of Mormon. It appears in almost no American government school curriculum, though it exercises a global influence and impacts the lives of millions of Americans. This is foolish. I am, to say the least, no Mormon partisan, but there are entire states in our nation that cannot be understood without some grounding in Mormon thought.

This unsourced claim isn’t for a moment backed up with anything more than mentions of Salt Lake City and Utah. The state is a secular entity due to the force of the Constitution of the United States and while Utah may contain a large number of Mormons, it doesn’t mean the state government gets to run off with their religious convictions in their throats. Utah isn’t some island nation separate and untouched by the rest of the United States. Want to read something extremely influential first published by an American try The Federalist Papers.

Places where he does hit the nail on the head, however, seem to be when he’s talking about trends of anti-intellectualism that seem to be rooted sternly in the austere grasp of American Christian thought. He mentions that Christians “should demand that their churches do more intellectual work.” If only it didn’t seem compelling that this is actually the source of the problem. The Pew Forum survey shows not only that Christians are the worst at knowing basic facts about other religions but they largely know neither their own doctrine’s facts nor could they understand them either (in Reynold’s logic).

He seems to make the weird argument that atheists and non-Christians, according to recent surveys, show better in IQ surveys, general knowledge of culture, and reading level & comprehension because atheists are simply good at absorbing facts. He argues that the intellectual elite reject the religious from their ivy-covered towers, and so forth. When he himself must rail against the brick wall of anti-intellectualism rooted deeply within organized Christianity.

I am not convinced the problem lies where Reynold claims it does.

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[1] Salon.com: America is not a Christian Nation http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2009/04/14/christian_nation

Mill Avenue Nights Friday November 21st 2008

Dawn, Shamancat, Sebastian, Vince

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Dawn and her dog. They used to come out to Mill Ave pretty much every night years ago, but since I haven’t seen her around much at all. It wasn’t long after I reached the red bricks that I found her sauntering past, hippy skirt and dusty-gold dreadlocks in her wake.

I managed to stop her for a bit and inquire as to her health and whereabouts, which are both good. Apparently she’s spent most of the summer in Chicago. A place rapidly getting cold so she’s returned herself to these warmer climes—which has precisely been my idea on the matter.

She used to spend her time selling hemp jewelry bound up with the requisite glass and plastic beads in interesting designs. However, two years ago or so she stopped due to harassment by the local police who had taken to mistreating transient-looking individuals and Mill rats in order to “clean up the streets.” Even now there are propaganda messages posted alongside some of the Mill information signs.

This has changed slightly, according to Dawn.

“Yeah. I was set up near ASU the other day and the police came to tell me that I couldn’t sell there. ‘Go to Mill Ave,’ they told me, ‘It’s okay. We know who you are and we like you, it’s okay.’ In their words a Mill Avenue Council has been set up and word has come down from the mayor not to mess with vendors selling stuff on the Ave. The shops and culture have taken several major shakeups and hits due to the economic downturn; and he’d like to see a return of musicians and other reasons for people to visit our little carnival. However, they still don’t like spanging (panhandling)—but it’s interesting to see this change in attitude by the distant powers-that-are.

Sebastian Rain Valintino is an interesting fellow who I’ve seen a few times on the Ave already and it was good to be able to stop and talk to him. He has close cropped hair that curls in tight bunches—possibly due to his Italian ancestry. Looking at him from a distance you’d think that he had a very light goatee or beard, but really it’s a carefully pinned tattoo around his lips that extends in sharp fang-like markings. At first it reminded me of a Celtic brooch pin, but upon closer inspection it’s designed from two bridled-arcs and fangs around his mouth. He also has his left eyebrow tattooed (no hair) and a small teardrop from his left eye.

By way of explanation the tattoos around his lips are an Irish-Italian mixture relating to a Bear Clan and Wolf Clan, hence the fangs. I did not properly document his reason for the eyebrow—but he explains that the teardrop is for his uncle who is in a Federal penitentiary for killing several police officers in a firefight.

I also ran into Shamancat who was standing around with an older gentleman. We didn’t discuss much but he might be making his way down to Sedona. Which, he suggests, that he might go see the “spaceships.” Sedona is well known for its alien and UFO cults, occultists, esotericism, and other supernatural activity. It’s a real hub of the weird.

Vince appeared on the Ave today. He was wearing a gigantic tweed/wool trench coat that reminded me of a German barrack coat. Grey and dismal, but possibly massively warm. Turning him into a giant, woolen version of Cousin It.

I also had a moment to visit with some of the other newer street rats. One in particular, a girl who kindly warned me not to sit on the ground due to an anti-homeless law that the police do like to enforce. She mentioned she’d had a wound on her foot, thus her boot was loosely tied. I couldn’t get her to let me look at it, but the skin lividity in the area was fine, no visible signs of infection (shooters or puffiness) outside of the region. She also promised to go to the medical van tomorrow and get it checked out.

The Preachers Tonight

Out tonight were Jim and Valerie. They brought with them a number of props. I had some discussions with Valerie about typesetting, desktop publishing, cover design. A lot of the things that go into my prints of Mill Avenue Vexations—my seminal work that is attempting to capture the evanescent zeitgeist of Mill Ave in fiction.

I gave her a book but warned her that she might be outside of the audience. Being neither street-rat nor goth.

She described an interesting in writing but never knew how to properly get it printed. I told her about how manuscript creation is often very separate from the editing required to produce a book. Fortunately, when writing a work thou need concern thyself little with how it’ll format when it’s done—it’s the words that matter. Let the typesetter and binder (even if that person is thee at a later date) worry about that when it comes around. Plus, Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop can be used to produce an extremely professional work and the learning curve is only a few months.

Maybe she’ll decide to write something and take my advice. I even explained to her that booklets come in pages of 4. Since every letter-sized page is folded in half producing two pages to a side, and two-sided, meaning each sheet creates 4 pages.

They eventually got set up with amplification in front of the Post Office and the SFTS showed up to talk to them. Pretty much tying them up the entire night.

The rest of my observations of them is available on my Better than Faith observations blog.