COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Blogger Ezra Klein, in his rebuttal of this piece by a man who was once the token evangelical on the New York Times' editorial staff, exhibits a number of rhetorical blind spots on the American left.

Blind spot #1:) "But while no holy war lies on the horizon, it's hard to deny that skirmishes are being fought. Terry Schiavo, the campaign against an independent judiciary, the enormous and obvious power the Christian Right exerts on Republican legislation, and so forth."

This logic ONLY makes sense if one accepts the postulate that it's a bad thing for the Christian Right to exert power and influence on Republican legislation. Of course evangelicals have an influence on Republican legislation. Evangelicals are one of the Republicans' key constituencies. Now, given the sheer number of churchgoers in this country, and given the sheer number of people who have problems with such things as partial birth abortion, it's entirely natural that evangelicals would have a prominent place in the only party that does not reflexively try to demonize them.

News flash: I hate to break it to Ezra, but we live in a representative democracy, last I checked. And in a representative democracy, elected leaders represent THE PEOPLE. Not, say, the faculty senate at Columbia.

The difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives just want singers not to go topless at halftime. Liberals want entire swathes of the electorate silenced.

Blindspot number 2:) So John will have to excuse the hyperbole of his colleagues; there's no jihad occurring, but they can be forgiven for mistaking the unarmed war raging in the public sphere and perverting the government's ability to legislate effectively for something more than it is, as it's already reached a level much worse than it should.

Ezra doesn't bother to get very specific about what he means by "perverting a government's ability to legislate effectively." I can think of a good example, though. How about allowing a Senate minority to hold up a boatload full of judges in order to prevent YOUR Senator from voting on them? How does that not disenfrachise the majority of voters, whose elected representatives are de facto shut out from the debate? YOU elected YOUR Senator to ensure that your views and values are taken into account when it came time to confirm presidential nominees. Only one party is perverting that process. Only one party is disenfrancising the majority of elected representatives in the Senate. Hint: It's the party that wants to silence inconvenient voters.

Blind spot #3.) That said, contemporary public interactions between religion and science are characterized by faith's remarkable hostility to theories and findings that don't support a theological worldview.

Yes, the church jailed Copernicus. That was quite a while ago, though. But I don't even think Klein begins to understand the nature of the issue he's raising. If he thinks that James Dobson and his gang of halfwits characterize the majority, or even a vaguely representative sample of the "public interactions between religion and science," he's so divorced from reality he's got to send monthly alimony checks to the third dimension.

All he seems to be aware of is the interaction between religion and science that is dumbed down enough for even the media to understand. He lives in a world where the media is so mindlessly ignorant about the dynamics of intellectual Christian life that whenever a controversial issue comes up, the only way they can imagine to write about it is by concocting a paint-by-numbers formula interviewing two university professors - at least one of whom will have been suggested by PR firms on the left- and then sleepily log on to the Family Research Council's website to see what the latest knee-jerk idiocy is from the FRC, and then think that that represents the sum total of Christian thought.

Boom. All evangelicals are suddenly tarred with Dobson's baby talk, when the true depth and breadth of the Christian conversation on any given issue is well beyond the depth and breadth of the average reporter.

What's more, I don't believe for a second that serious thinkers within the Church are hostile to empiricism, because empiricism cannot speak to that singular kernel of faith which illuminates both a theistic or atheistic world view.

The theist must deal with Occam's Razor. But logically, an atheistic world view must contend with the question: What caused all this? After all, the doppler shift demonstrates that a rapidly expanding universe did not always exist as it is now. If theism does not prove itself except by self-reference, Atheism fails to explain the evidence. Which is OK, but hardly scientifically sound.

Serious thinkers on both sides of the atheist/theist divide recognize that modern empirical methodology is silent on the existence of God one way or the other. God is not something to be proven or disproven. If God exists, He is beyond the senses upon which the scientific method must rely.

All this is totally lost on Klein, though.

Blind spot #4.) So while religion may not have been separate years ago, and while scientists of faith certainly roam the earth (much like dinosaurs did, by the way),

You can't get much more arrogant and prideful than this, folks. This is one of the biggest blind spots on the pseudointellectual left: Their tendency to look down condescendingly on people of faith. There is nothing mutually exclusive about sound science and faith in God, any more than there's something mutually exclusive about kissing and hugging. Indeed, one is better when combined with the other.

Blind spot #5.) Government vouchers that send four year old kids to schools with indoctrinating curriculums,

Again, the ONLY way this sentence makes sense in context is if one shares the absurd assumptions that A.) Public schools themselves do not attempt to "indoctrinate," B.) That "indoctrination" is neccessarily a bad thing - in fact I would regard it, in most cases, as neutral to good, and C.) If there is indoctrination going on, parents should not be the ones to select it.

All these assumptions fail on their face. But they are commonplace on the left.

Blind spot #6.)Christian leaders arguing that Hindus and Muslims shouldn't be allowed into the judiciary.

Ok, who said this? And why are we considering these knuckleheads representative? Besides, even if true, is this really any different than certain Democrats opposing juducial nominees because of "deeply held religious beliefs?"

Blind spot #7.) Indeed, the story of the past few years has been an ever-increasing, ever-more successful attempt to insert religion into the public sphere without forfeiting any of its perks or constraints (i.e, special tax status).

And again this nonsense only computes if one first accepts the idea that religion does NOT belong in the public square.

Again, liberals don't seek to converse with religious Americans. They don't seek a dialogue. They seek to silence entire congressional districts.

Splash, out

Jason