"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason."    - G.K. Chesterton.

BadUFO points to an example of the lunacy of the true believer.  Radical Lawyer/Ufologist Peter Gerstner intends to leap from the top of a 200 foot Bells Rock in Sedona, Arizona on the Winter Solstice of 2012 because he is certain that at that time and at that place a rift in space and time will open up.  Apparently, the immutable laws of physics - or magic - have chosen that time and that place for their deep physical/magical properties to manifest a "transdimensional vortex."

BadUFOs makes the gibe that "[w]hen Faith clashes with Reason, Faith wins out nearly every time."

I think that BadUFOs is missing the point of Mr. Gersten's mania. Mr. Gersten is not without his reasons, and he certainly has a logic that is internally consistent and defendable from his perspective, and he seems to have a firm grasp of the facts that are of importance to his reasoning. Of course, the only problem is that Mr. Gersten's logic is disengaged from the truth in that he is not properly apprehending the nature of reality.

In short, Mr. Gersten suffers from a bad metaphysics, not bad facts or bad logic.

Ignorance and Bigotry

When I was a youth, it was commonplace to link bigotry with ignorance. We were taught that racial bigotry came from ignorance of other people. That linkage probably did more to isolate and undermine the culture of explicit racial bigotry than any law or court opinion.

This NCR interview with P.Z. Myers shows the same linkage between Myers' bigotry and his own palpable ignorance.

Some excerpts:

That Myers has the equivalent of a junior high school education in religion is glaring. He understands little about the history and function of the Catholic Church and even less about the place of the Eucharist in the lives of Catholics. When I told him that many have laid their lives on the line to protect the Blessed Sacrament, he recoiled in disbelief, saying, “Really? People really do that!?”

Although Myers goes on and on about the "death threats" he received - by which he refers to an e-mail where the sender expresses his anger in the hyperbolic form of "if you were here, I'd kick your ass" - the overwhelming majority of e-mails he received were as he described later in the interview, statements by people trying to explain why his actions caused individual harm to them as individuals. Myers response on his blog was to sneer at these e-mails and absolutely refuse to credit the underlying sentiments as having any truth whatsoever.

As his interview makes clear, Myers is totally ignorant and, worse, his pride allows him to project his ignorant opinions as the norm for other people.

That would be the picture next to the definition of "bigotry."

There is also this:

I decided to call his bluff. “Has Christianity contributed anything to humanity?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “there is this general property of religion — it’s great at building community. Religion has been a good thing for many individuals; it has brought them together and given them comfort. But over all, religion … holds back humanity.”

What, I asked, about the Church’s role in founding the first Western hospitals, universities, banks and even many breakthroughs in science? He interrupted me, irate and incredulous:

“No, people made those contributions to Western Civilization.”

That the Church was involved in the very foundations of our Western culture is, according to Myers, irrelevant.

“That’s like saying,” he continued, “that because for so many years people got smallpox, smallpox is to be credited for all the virtue men have done.”

As I talked with Myers I was struck by an irony: For a scientist whose job it is to observe cause and effect, he has a poor understanding of the cause, Catholicism, and its effects on world culture. He does not see Christianity as an elevating force in the world, but rather as a strange superstition — akin to banging a pot to scare away the moon.

I like the point about Myers' refusal to see cause and effect.

But, of course, Myers does see cause and effect when he wants to. Hence, when something bad happens it is not "people" who do the bad thing, but Christianity.

Double standards are a classic symptom of bigotry.

Thre is also this:

I asked Myers, “You have, throughout your blog, described Catholics as stupid, stupider, scary, dark age fanatics” and words that we can’t print. This language doesn’t strike you as bigoted?”

“Why should it?” he replied. “I am making honest characterizations of individual people.”

“But in desecrating the Eucharist,” I continued, “you have insulted and hurt thousands of Catholics. What do you have to say for that?”

Myers’ answer was true to form: “The whole silly part of this whole episode is that I’ve got so many people writing me and saying that I have seriously hurt them. But what have I done? I have thrown away a cracker.”

Amazing.

"I was born and raised a Catholic...": Nature's way of warning you that whatever will be said next will be a raving farrago of nonsense.*

Funny stuff...Jesuit assassins, the Vatican's long-range plan to destabilize the United States, our rights as members of the "corporation" founded by the Constitution....

There's probably a best-seller in there somewhere.



[* Via Mark Shea.]