Magic Statistics

Matt Jones, Regent College student, has posted the 91st edition of the Christian Carnival at his blog, Matt Jones' Random Acts of Verbiage. Check it out.

Rosa Brooks, a defender of Gregory Paul's study on religious belief and social problems, was given air time recently on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show. Based on the show's transcript, however, Ms Brooks made a hash of Mr Paul's study, which was incompetent to begin with.

Mr Paul purported to find correlations between religious belief and social pathologies such as suicide and homicide. Ms Brooks recently wrote an LA Times column promoting Mr Paul's study, saying: "At a minimum, his findings suggest that contrary to popular belief, lack of religiosity does societies no particular harm".

Mr Paul used these data to gauge religious belief: "Bible literalism and frequency of prayer and service attendance . . . absolute belief in a creator . . . [s]elf-reported rates of religious attendance and practice. In her LA Times column, Ms Brooks explicitly endorsed this view of religious belief: absolute belief in God, the frequency of prayer reported by . . . citizens and . . . frequency of attendance at religious services."

Yet, when Mr Carlson proposed that most murders in the 20th century were committed in the name of secular ideologies, Ms Brooks made a complete about-face in her definition of religion:

CARLSON: You say arguably Paul's study invites us to conclude that the most serious threat humanity faces today is religious extremism. And I was just thinking about the last 100 years. All the people who were killed in the 20th Century the vast majority were killed by aggressively secular regimes, fascist and communist regimes. It wasn't religious people.

BROOKS: You know when I think that these have in common though, Tucker, and first of all give religion a chance. Religion's got a lot more millennia behind it of slaughter and mayhem that you can lay at its door than secular ideologies.

That said, I completely agree with you that the major 20th Century crimes many of them had to do with absolutist secular ideologies. I think what these things have in common though is that element of absolutism that once you're out there and you're saying I'm right. You're wrong. I know because I know. Shut up. If you disagree, just get out of the way. I'm going to steamroll right over you. That's when you're getting problems.

CARLSON: So, essentially they're all a kind of religion.

BROOKS: Yes, I do think so. I think that communism in some of its forms during the 20th Century was a kind of religion. I think that Nazism was a kind of religion to its more fanatical adherence [sic], absolutely, sort of a total world view that couldn't be challenged by evidence (or) by logic.

But this definition of religious belief is completely contrary to that analysed by Mr Paul in his study and defended by Ms Brooks in the LA Times.

Now she tells Mr Carlson that Fascism and Communism qualify as religions, despite the fact that these ideologies reject everything Mr Paul used to measure religiosity: Bible literalism, absolute belief in a creator-God, efficacy of prayer, and attendance at religious services.

Ms Brooks, for the sake of your own credibility: if you're going to criticise religion, you should at least keep your story consistent. Just a suggestion.

According to a radical Muslim group in Australia, the WTC towers were destroyed by controlled explosions. And I guess those two hijacked jetliners just happened by at the precise moment the explosives were detonated? What a coincidence!

The Australian newspaper reports on the theory and calls it "bizarre". That's putting it mildly; I'd say it's quite literally insane.

Newly discovered letters of John Knox reveal that he almost moved to Ireland six years before his death, according to a report in the Glasgow Herald. His friend Christopher Goodman, who had been with Knox in Calvin's Geneva and worked closely with him during the early years of the Scottish Reformation, invited him to help spread Protestantism in Ireland.

Goodman had been so close to Knox that he might be seen as a second Knox, and he had been invited to succeed Knox as minister of St Giles's, but was denied permission to leave England by Elizabeth I. Afterwards he went to Ireland, and invited Knox to join him.
. . .
Knox did not go to Ireland, unconvinced the Scottish Protestant cause was secure. He told Goodman he "dared not cast off the burden which God has laid upon me to preach to unthankful (yes, alas, miserable) Scotland".

via Christianity Today Weblog.

via David's Journal.

A new Canadian think-tank has gone online with a growing collection of commentary and other resources. This is the opening line on the home page: "The Institute for Canadian Values is a national think-tank dedicated to advancing knowledge of public policy issues from Judeo-Christian intellectual and moral perspectives as well as awareness of how such perspectives contribute to a modern, free, and democratic society." Canada certainly needs an organisation like this. Check it out here.

via Let It Bleed.