The Army of God, or Hezboallah, as it might be called

Finally, after nearly half of century of allowing religious nutcases to use the United States Armed Forces as their own personal recruiting tool, we’re beginning to see some rollback on the use of Federal dollars to promote radical right wing Christianity. In a display of enormous cajones, the Obama administration has finally put an end to spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to help promote radical right wing separatist Christian groups in their “God and Country” festivals on Independence Day. Damn fucking right. Independence from the state promotion of noxious religion!

     Conservative Christians should really be ashamed about their beliefs, and they certainly shouldn’t expect to have free reign over the tax dollars collected from a nation where 1/5th of the population doesn’t believe in any kind of gods (much less their sadomasochistic deities), and where they comprise under 1/3rd of the population. Yes, there are more conservative Christian wackos than there are non-Christians, but the gap isn’t that large. It’s 30% versus 20%, and that’s only talking about the 20% who aren’t Christian. Many Christians are also disgusted with these neo-Nazi, pseudo-patriotic, festivals of warmongering. Pandering to the radical Christian right has made it certain that the U.S. Armed Forces continue to be a hotbed for breeding domestic terrorists, and it is no accident that NEARLY ALL Christian Nationalist terrorist acts have been accomplished by people trained to kill by the US Military.  The little Christian nationalists are already squealing like fucked pigs. How could some commie, negro, homosexual, muslim take away their jesus-given rights to have federal funding for their missionary efforts and crusades against the evil doers? Ah, poor little babies. Next up, I hope they’ll can all this faith-based “aid to Africa” crap, where they use BILLIONS of dollars of our tax money to proselytize the indigenous and turn them into genocidal maniacs and “witch hunters.”

Iranian Redneck Revolution

Taliban Council declares Ahmadinejad the Winner!

Gee, seems like that goatfucking prick Ahmedinejad got his Gore vs. Bush decision from the Taliban Council. The election totals by region and city look cooked. However, my take is that the ugly moron would have won even if he didn’t rig it. We’re now sitting on 57 years of selective migration out of Iran. First, the fucking CIA installed a fascist tool to prevent oil nationalization and make certain that glaring social inequalities would fester and prevent Iran from becoming a developed nation. Everyone with a brain either left the country, got murdered, or became a toadie of the fake king (it’s really horrifying to see the “Shah’s” fat, pathetic son whining in the right-wing US media). Then, of course, the toadies got their comuppance, and they all moved to Los Angeles. Notably, unlike the CIA stooge, the Islamic radicals didn’t kill their vanquished foes, but instead killed religious liberals, Socialists, and Kurds.

    This, of course, left Iran with a bare minimum of  functioning brainpower. The majority of people left in the country are a bunch of religious nutjobs, you know, just like in Texas. Same shit. A class of people who get rich from shit that comes out of the ground. Nothing but stupid farmers and oil tycoons. You don’t need no education or nuthin’ to have BP pump oil from beneath your pomegranate orchard. Praise Jesus, or Allah Akbar, or whatever.  Depends on whether you’re in Dallas or Tabriz. Any kid with a brain wants to get out as soon as they have enough cash for the plane ticket to LA (this is true for both Texans and Iranians).  You feel sorry for the people on the North side of Tehran (closer to the ski slopes), and in Austin. But, that’s what you get when all the brainpower leaves a region populated by farmers and miners. And, like old Clark Kerr and Abbie Siegel pointed out, those bastards are all prone to violent collective action. Now, the shit’s just for fun. The affronted minority is gonna try to put some whoop ass on the victorious majority.  Yep.  Iranians and Rednecks.

Rethinking Public Sociology

 

“Public Sociology” has been all the rage in left-wing circles. The notion harkens back to neo-Marxist conceptions of “praxis” whereby theory and research should be applied for political ends, to serve the revolution!!! Yes, ah, the revolution. Thanks. In reality, it often gave way to irresponsible and often poorly constructed attempts to influence policy. A classic example is the embarrassing report the ASA did some years back on crime. In contrast to a multi-volume interdisciplinary effort put forward by the American Academy of Science, some glorified secretaries at ASA put together a 100 page double spaced glossy. Great. That makes us look like scholars, eh? Everyone should listen to us! I’m all for sociology having more of a voice in public policy, but sometimes there needs to be a clear dividing line between research and advocacy, separating politics from social facts and theorizing. And, mostly, I feared how public sociology would be used.

Those on the left were confident that an increased focus on public sociology would mean that activist scholars could pursue political commitments AND have these be valued by the discipline (and by their home universities). So, political opinion writing and consulting could be put on your vita along with articles in peer-reviewed journals. You really want that? Really? Think about that, now. Are you sure? Really sure?

Unfortunately, my fears have come true. As I suspected, public sociology would fall primarily into the hands of right wing partisans. While left wingers can hardly get their political opinions into minor league blogs–or can publish in Contexts (which nobody reads, except for other left wing activist sociologists), right wing sociologists are becoming valued public intellectuals! Great. Lefties “publish” in Crooked Timber, while Christian nationalist sociologists are plastered on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and secular right wing sociologists find easy outlets in the NYT. Wonderful. Predictable. So, what is public sociology doing? It’s advocating early marriage, railing against socialism, and claiming that contraception is the cause of teen pregnancy and unwed births.

Thanks Lefties!! Great Job! The reason why this is predictable is that right wing political and religious organizations have superior resources and low-cost access to big media mouthpieces. Left wing sociologists have never realized that there are lots of conservative sociologists, and they benefit from close associations with far right wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation. So, they have full blown media brochures politicizing and stretching their legitimate sociological findings, press conferences hailing their work, speaking tours at colleges and civic and political groups–all of this paid for by grants from right wing foundations. Oh, and let’s not forget those web sites with Glamour Shots pictures!!! There they are, your right wing boys wearing their little tweed jackets posing for a professional photographer. They have their hair parted on the side, in that little Ted Haggard way. Oh yeah. Public Sociology. Let’s keep it in the men’s room where it belongs.

Hitting 50….

 

19 years after the publication of my first paper in Social Science Research, I have had my 50th paper accepted for publication, fittingly in Social Science Research.  50 peer-reviewed publications. 22 of them in general interest sociology journals. 14 sole authored articles. 1o articles  in Social Forces. 10 in Jrn. Scientific Study of Religion. 6 in Social Science Research. 11 publications in medical sociology (a secret sideline for a while, until all the grant money dried up), including papers in Journal of Aging and Health, Women and Health, and Research on Aging. My papers have been cited 1248 times, in 719 different publications.

And, over the last couple of decades I also somehow was connived into contributing 9 chapters to edited volumes, and into reviewing 20 books for various journals. Several of the chapters present some of my best work, not that anyone will read any of it. And, my book reviews have even attracted attention, or at least consternation.

I think I’ll celebrate by not going to the ASA meetings. And, working on more publications!  I’ve written some of the best shit in my career in the last couple of years. And, the good does push out the bad, eventually.  If strong sociologists continue to publish good papers on the sociology of religion, then the wackjob nonsense put out by religious activists will eventually fade into the background.

Christianist Terrorism in the US

Well, another physician is murdered by a Christianist Terrorist. It appears on the face of it that Christianist terrorism increases in the face of perceived threats posed by Democrats holding national power. I’d like to see more systematic analyses of this, but it mirrors the trend in Christian hostility towards interviewers found in my 2008 Soc. of Rel article. When Democrats are in power, Fundamentalists Christians are hostile, and they appear to be more prone to commit terrorism against other Americans. It’d be a nice dissertation on the intersection between religion, politics, and violent social movements. Unfortunately, most sociology graduate students who are interested in religion are “evangelical” Christians and are too busy proving that Jesus H. Christ (and not one of those other gods) cures cancer.

Sully goes to Betty Ford

John, you look like shit, man.

My old high school buddy, John Sullivan, is taking a sabbatical from his seat in the United States House of Representatives to rehabilitate himself from substance abuse at the Betty Ford Clinic. Too bad they don’t do soul transplants, because somewhere along the way John lost his.

     John and his family moved into our neighborhood, a modest development in what they now call “midtown” in Tulsa, probably when we were in 4th grade or so. He always attended Catholic schools, so I didn’t really get to know him until I was kicked out of Tulsa Public and had to attend Bishop Kelley in 10th grade. John was an extremely popular kid in high school, despite lacking  athletic or academic talent. But, the fact is, he was a nice guy. He seemed to truly care about people. Unlike most popular high school kids, he treated unpopular kids with kindness, maybe even empathy. John invited me to parties and to hang out at football games, and nobody else who was popular did that.

I only saw John a few times after I left Kelley. I wasn’t surprised that he went into politics, and was successful. But, I was exceptionally disappointed that he became a simpleton tool of the far right-wing of the Republican Party. John wasn’t a radical right Catholic, and Bishop Kelley had a social justice orientation among the Christian Brothers and lay people who taught there. Particularly Mr. Rossi, the football coach and history teacher, who taught a rigorous and inspiring American History sequence which focused on the struggles of workers, immigrants, and minorities, and Rossi was highly critical of the warmongering fostered by American policies based on notions of manifest destiny.

I wrote to John three times since he was elected to Congress. The third time I even sent the letter from Tulsa, hoping that maybe the postmark from his district might inspire someone to give it to him. But, he didn’t want to deal with anything which questioned the far right wing policies of the Republican Party. Many analysts are now calling Tulsa a “blue trending” district, and a Bush toadie like Sully is going to have a hard time come reelection.

I hope John sobers up, thinks about his life, his family, his country, and the world community. He could change. He could become a politician who could unite reasonable economic conservatives and social liberals, like former House Speaker James R. Jones. Hell, he could even become a Democrat. I wonder if they can do that at Betty Ford?

Jesus ‘God of Torture’ vs. Jesse ‘the Body’ Ventura

 

you're goin' down!

Conservative Christians have no morals. They only follow rules, and their rules prescribe one set of treatments for devotees, and another for normal people. Conservative Christians lack a moral compass, because all behaviors are linked to sets of rewards and punishments meted out by their sadomaschochistic gods. This is brought into striking relief by a Pew study investigating who supports torture. Not surprisingly, 64% of sectarian Protestants support torture, compared to 40% of the unaffiliated. Jesus, the Christian god of torture, whipped up on some poor people trying to make a living at the God factory (beat them with a whip!), and of course, he got a little torture himself. So, evil doers must be punished, and torture is good medicine! 

It is an embarrassment that any American voices support for torture (notably, Pew did the right thing and called it torture in their question wording). Moral, sane, rational individuals understand that torture is wrong, for both moral and practical reasons. Unlike the closeted, draft dodging, warmongering, torture loving Christians, Jesse “the Body” Ventura hates torture. You see, Jesse didn’t dodge the draft. He experienced torture as a Navy Seal in the SERE program that was the basis for the Christian “torture some Moslems” pogrom. Jesse, being a moral individual, believes that the full weight of the law (which, ah, forbids torture of prisoners) should be levied against those who tortured and who ordered torture. I sure wish we could get that Jesus asshole to come back and jump in the ring with Jesse! Or, better yet some of those Christian torture apologists.

Goat fucking Child Molesters

The Supreme

Well, Geez. Talk about outing. A conservative columnist, who is obviously in the know, is exhalting the soon-to-be-outgoing Supreme Court Justice David Souter as a “goat fucking child molester”. The Republican activist claims that Souter is the only goat fucking Republican child molester on the Supreme Court. These liberal blogger types just don’t get it. Erickson is in the know, he’s one of them. If he says Souter is a goat fucking child molester, then Souter is a goat fucking child molester. My only problem is that the totality of the claim is clearly untrue. You can’t tell me that Scalia isn’t a goat fucking child molester. Souter isn’t the only one.

“Eric Erickson (@ewerickson), Editor-in-Chief of RedState didn’t just toss off that gem. He wrote it, then deleted it, then re-wrote and re-sent it adding the proper hashtags (“LMRM” = Let Me Repeat Myself, “TCOT” = Top Conservatives on Twitter, “RS” = RedState). Made sure he got it just right. See for yourself.

This is the leader of the right’s most prominent online community, not some carefree flame-throwing commenter or diarist. RedState is not an official GOP site, but it’s a center of the conservative movement with a stated desire to take over leadership of the party. I’m not interested in flame wars. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. As a matter of strategy, however, I just can’t understand why someone in a leadership position would act so publicly self-destructive. This stuff turns states blue. Put simply, a serious leader looking to amass political power does not publicly call a sitting Supreme Court Justice a “goat f**king child molester.” A seemingly obvious point.

I’m surprised he took the time to think it over at all, but then he actually posted it.

Erik Erickson: The nation loses the only goat f*&king child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court in David Souter’s retirement.

Revenge of the Geeks in Tweed

 

Blue tweed, very serious

Ah, it must be Spring. Yesterday the NYT had a slow opinion day, so they published a pithy little essay by a Mark Taylor (a theologian) on how “the University” is hopelessly arcane and of little value. Funny, the same day the Census Bureau released a report showing that university education continues to yield enormous benefits to those who pass through the doors. The constant drone of dipsticks who claim that a real (not online diploma-mill) college education provides no preparation for the “real world” is simply pigshit. Even philosophy majors are better off than people who go to vokie-techie to pick up a $10-an-hour-and-no-benefits service job.

But, the anti-intellectualism (as Andrew Perrin correctly penned it) of Taylor’s essay was just the hook. Taylor is really talking about GRADUATE education. Taylor argues that nobody gets jobs, that it is pointless to even try to publish, and that because of this we need to transform the structure of education by getting rid of departments and disciplines (which teach people how to do research and publish it) and instead forge working groups around big questions or problems—like Water, and Mind, and shit like that. This whets the hackles of the “interdisciplinary” types, who are always whining about the constraints of disciplines (what with their nasty attention to things like theory, method, and evidence). And, since it’s pointless to even hope that graduate students (those poor little things) could ever produce a book or article worthy of publishing, we should instead give them degrees for making web sites and video games. Shitfire, I should put my blog on my vita!! Except I don’t even put half of my conference presentations on my vita.

Why is he saying shit like this? Because he’s a geek in tweed. A humanities whore. A guy who likes to go to meetings and make things happen. And, to make sure that what happens continues to benefit the geeks in tweed who have always controlled academe (while the rest of us are doing research and shit). It is true that most people who go to graduate school ain’t gonna make it in academe. Big fucking deal. It’s a great job, but there’s a lot of work involved. And, you have to be genuinely interested in your scholarship in order to make a contribution. But, shitloads of people DO make it. They DO get their dissertations published. They DO get jobs. They DO make tenure. In sociology and most social sciences, the proportion who do make it is about half of graduate matriculates. So, yeah, half of the grad students won’t make it. And, it may have been a total waste of everyone’s time and of scarce resources. But, for the other half, they finish their dissertations, they get tenure tracked (yes, tenure tracked) jobs, they publish, and they wind up having a nice career in a cool industry that doesn’t require you to steal pensions from old people.

Ah, but there’s the problem. Unlike Taylor, I’m describing what happens in graduate education in a real discipline. Sociology, the queen of the social sciences. In other discplines, Zoology, psychology, physics, economics, political science, chemistry, etc. the story is pretty much the same. Taylor’s gloom and doom view reflects his position in an arcane arena of the humanities. Religion. What the fuck is that? Nothing. Why? No discipline. A fractured bunch of remnants of divinity schools. Their specialization isn’t the problem. The problem is that there are too many people studying the topic, and NO, there is no demand for scholarship on the citation style of 14th century monks. When I was at Vanderbilt, we admitted hoards of students into each of five core areas of the PhD program in the Graduate Department of Religion. My area was “history and critical theories of religion”, I still don’t know what that means. Notably, “church history” was a different core area. In my ten years at Vanderbilt, only two of my students in the GDR finished and got tenure tracked jobs. The problem is that SOME DISCIPLINES NEED TO BE SCALED BACK. Most graduate programs in English, philosophy, religion, and such disciplines need to be eliminated. Others need to be cut back in dramatic fashion.

Notably, almost all of the overenrollment of graduate students is in the humanities. The graduate assistantship budget for the Department of English in my humble university is more than ten times that for Sociology. All of our graduates get tenure tracked jobs, while almost none of theirs do. Taylor’s right about one thing, a lot of this is being done to staff courses with cheap labor. And, that’s bad. The answer is not to eliminate all departments or disciplines. The answer is to get rid of the graduate programs in most of the humanties, and hire the excess PhD’s into permanent jobs to teach the remedial and core courses.

Ah, but the geeks in tweed need to keep their status–they don’t wanna teach remedial writing or intro to humanities or art of the western world. That’s why they wear tweed. So, instead of eliminating their departments and disciplines, they want to eliminate ours! Then, they’ll lord over us by making sure that every new working group is headed by some humanities moron in a tweed jacket. Some philosopher/theologian will be the head of a “working group on Mind”,  and she’ll divvy up the department budget to give herself and a few other humanities folks $20k in travel and book money, while the poor biologist who needs $50k just to start her research project will get $20k. I mean, it’s only fair, right?

Interdisciplinary organization is almost uniformly a ruse used by humanities types to coopt university resources. Women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, whatever. How many social scientists benefit from these? Who is the head? Whose students do they fund? Who gets credit for the bodies in the classrooms? The answer is almost always “english, history, and philosophy.” We get token appointments (freebies), no credit for joint listed courses, and no influence over any real resources. Interdisciplinary programs are a clever mechanism for herding more bodies into required humanities courses, which then requires expanding the graduate programs in the humanities, which then produces more PhD’s than jobs….

Religion and Science

 Table 1

 

Adjusted Mean Number of Correct Answers on the 2006 GSS Science Exam by Religious Affiliation and Religious Belief  

Religious Belief	Mean	Std. Error	95% Confidence Interval
			Lower Bound	Upper Bound	% of Sample
Bible is literal Word of God	7.8	.100	7.6	7.9	33%
Bible is Inspired Word of God	8.6	.078	8.5	8.8	50%
Bible is a Book of Fables	9.1	.136	8.9	9.4	17%
Religious Affiliation
Sectarian Protestant	8.0	.117	7.8	8.2	26%
Catholic	8.1	.121	7.9	8.4	23%
Other Protestant	8.7	.097	8.5	8.9	28%
Non-Christian	8.8	.122	8.6	9.0	23%

 

 Religious activists, funded by religious foundations, have become fond of asking idiotic survey questions which appear to blur the lines between religion and science. I don’t know what ”Religion” or “Science” really mean at this level of abstraction (that’s for philosophy and theology), but I do know that particular variants of religious beliefs which are promoted in particular religious institutions generate considerable hostility towards scientific research and pedagogy. Still, many like to dress up their ignorance in a veil of pseudo science, hence we have “creation science,” and “theories”of intelligent design.

The 2006 General Social Surveys included a brief science examination. I shorten it to 13 items to exc lude a question on evolution, since fundamentalists may reflexively get that one wrong. Using data from 1780 respondents to the most recent General Social Surveys, I found that that Americans who believe that the Bible is the literal word of god (about 30% of respondents in the nationally representative sample of U.S. Adults) scored substantially lower the other respondents on a test of basic scientific literacy. Bible believers averaged 54% on the 13 question examination, which included questions about basic scientific understanding (like experimental design, and probability), earth science (such as whether the core of the earth is cold or hot, and whether continents have and continue to drift), and biology (such as whether antibiotics kill viruses). The test excluded controversial items such as evolution. In contrast, more skeptical believers averaged 68% on the exam, and non-believers answered 75% of the questions correctly.

     Notably, my findings are not a function of race, social class, region, or gender. Even after statistical controls for these factors, religious conservatives scored significantly lower than non-Christians and non-believers. In fact, the effect of conservative religious identifications (affiliation with Baptists, Pentecostals, and other sectarian groups, or with Catholicism), and fundamentalist beliefs in the Bible have a stronger predictive effect on scores on the science examination than do income, race, or gender. While much has been made about racial and gender differences in scientific ability, my results suggest that cultural factors like religion are much more important impediments of scientific literacy.