Free Lunch For You

    I dislike professional evangelists -- and not only the con artists who are in it for the money. I'm troubled also by others who may in their way be utterly and terribly sincere.  
    They are not offering free lunch, exactly, but they do advertise a kind of cheap grace. Each claims to offer a grand "Open Sesame," an ultimate password. They reduce the mysteries of spirituality to the idiom of a late-night kitchen gadget commercial:  Just follow these simple steps ...
    And -- when the preaching reaches a crescendo -- if the exhortation to follow a higher call begins to sound like an exhortation to follow me, I don't think my ears are playing tricks.
    In any case, I was predisposed to be annoyed by an article about Richard Dawkins.
    His enterprise fits the standard parameters.  He claims to know the only right view of human spirituality.  If you veer from his charted path, he says, you will go astray.  He travels to preach.  He sells books. He has a foundation and, yes, he will be glad to take your check.
    He does differ from some of his brethren in one particular: He is an atheist.  If he is not the first atheist to turn pro, he is notably enterprising.  He is a prolific author, speaker and blogger.  His website offers T-shirts, water bottles, a newsletter and a Twitter feed.
    A Google scamper through his work does not equip me for a balanced review.  However, a couple of specifics seem pertinent in considering his type and making our way to a larger point.
    He begins from a premise that reality consists only of what science can measure.  He then ventures to apply a yardstick to infinity and points out that the results are droll.
    But of course in disguising his conclusion as his premise, he simply evades the essential question altogether.  As a scientist and former Oxford professor he does, surely, know better. A first-year student of logic would be faulted in this for a lack of intellectual rigor.  In everyday language, he would be charged with shucking and jiving.
    Asked by an interviewer what he would say if he met God after his own death, Dawkins replied  "The first thing I would say is, well, which one are you? Are you Zeus?  Are you Thor? Are you Baal? Are you Mithras? Are you Yahweh? ... "
    Here he is shucking and jiving again.  He was asked how he would react if he discovered that his own beliefs were false.  An inventory of other people's beliefs does not constitute an answer of any sort.  It is a classic non-sequitur.
    And as an array of ideas, his response is the bottom of a slob's shoe closet.  It represents a jumble of religion, myth and cultic mumbo-jumbo.  It is as if Dawkins had been offered a serving of fruit, and he asked if it would include apples, doorknobs  stepladders or soup spoons.  He purports to compare concepts that are not sensibly comparable.
    If Dawkins does not know this he is remarkably ill-informed.  And again, if he does know it -- well, I need not go further toward accusing him of ignorance, flabby thinking and rhetorical sleight of hand.  A variety of his peers, including several distinguished scientists, have already done that.
    All my fun at Dawkins' expense is highly selective.  Enough of it.  The larger point is that the professional Christian and the professional atheist are in similar games.  Both deal in caricature.
    The anti-religionists peddle caricatures that are easy to ridicule. 
    The styled and blow-dried Bible-wavers peddle caricatures that are easy to swallow:  Why, grasping the ultimate truth of the universe is as easy as falling off a log.  Just praise the Lord, catch the vibe and put another dollar in the pot.
    The dissemination of spiritual junk food is not inconsequential.  The appetite for it rises, I think, from two sources.  One is an earnest inner desire of most people to know what is right and what is true.  The other is a hankering for simple answers, for quick fixes.  It is cousin to the yen that sustains a market year after year for fad diets.
    Religious hokum would be harder to peddle were it not for a widespread climate of Biblical ignorance.  This deficit is lamentable in its own right. Wholly apart from considerations of faith, Judeo-Christian scriptures are among the foundation documents of Western culture.  Yet our systems of  education routinely grant credentials of literacy to people who have never read them.
    Meanwhile, hokum milks money from the gullible, aggravates cultural divisions and infects our politics.