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too much.
"Science made too much sense and had pushed traditional beliefs into a tight corner. When their church insisted that its version of creation, the story of Adam and Eve, the sundry miracles and so on had to be taken on faith, the fledgling apostates eventually found that preposterous. Faith for them was not a virtue, although they could see why their religion taught people it was. It meant surrendering rationality. From its earliest days fundamentalism has drawn a line in the sand over scripture versus science, and some of its young people eventually felt they had to step over the line, and then they kept right on going."
And finally in regards to the third problem, for some, what they learned from their families and from the pulpit was how valuable integrity and truthfulness was in defining one's character. And the implacable demand that one submit their belief and their reason to something they found irrational became too much. Here's how Altemeyer described the problem:
"Their families will say it was Satan. But we thought, after interviewing dozens of "amazing apostates," that (most ironically) their religious training had made them leave. Their church had told them it was God's true religion. That's what made it so right, so much better than all the others. It had the truth, it spoke the truth, it was The Truth. But that emphasis can create in some people a tremendous valuing of truth per se, especially among highly intelligent youth who have been rewarded all their lives for getting "the right answer." So if the religion itself begins making less and less sense, it fails by the very criterion that it set up to show its superiority.
Similarly, pretending to believe the unbelievable violated the integrity that had brought praise to the amazing apostates as children. Their consciences, thoroughly developed by their upbringing, made it hard for them to bear false witness. So again they were essentially trapped by their religious training. It had worked too well for them to stay in the home religion, given the problems they saw with it."
Is Altemeyer correct? Anecdotal evidence says yes. One of the more thoughtful bloggers writing about ethics and morality on the web is Fred Clark, the proprietor of Slacktivist. Fred is a gifted writer who is deeply engaged as an evangelical Christian in discussing what it means to live as a true Christian. Recently he wrote about what caused him to reject the teachings of his family's faith where homosexuality and evolution were condemned.
"In the footnote to the previous post, I mentioned an epiphany of sorts that occurred when I was confronted with the disparity between the "trap street" [Ed: an imaginary street shown on the map to detect copyright violation] shown on my county road atlas and the actual terrain of the actual county. The analogy is not precisely perfect, but that disparity between the map and the terrain somewhat paralleled the disparities I was also encountering between the text of scripture and the actual world around me.
So there I was, at the end of what was, undeniably, a dead end street, consulting a map that claimed otherwise. It was something of a Groucho moment: "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" I sided with my own two eyes, thus accepting the principle that reason and experience were essential considerations for evaluating the meaning and application of the text. In a sense, I was fumbling my way toward something like Wesley's "four-legged stool."
No one was claiming, of course, that my county road atlas ought to be read as the inerrant, infallible and authoritative Word of God, so my fundamentalist teachers would not have disagreed with my choosing, in this case, to regard my own experience of the terrain as worthy of consideration.
Nor did they deny that I would encounter similar disparities when consulting the "map" of scripture. In that case, however, they taught that I must always side with the map. That is what it means to be a fundamentalist.
Thus, to cite one of the more infamous examples, we were taught that evolution was a lie. The map, the Bible, said that the world was only 6,000 years old, and if that's what the map says, then this must trump any claims of "science" or any other observation about so-called reality. If reality and the map conflict, then we must reinterpret reality to conform to the map."
Fundamentalism has gained enormous power in our country today. Yet, fundamentalism continues to have a hard road to hoe in gaining a majority in the United States without a severe disruption. Altemeyer's observation that fundamentalism has some inherent flaws that will keep it from becoming the overwhelming worldview is reassuring. Because we are now seeing how far the Christian Right will go to create a world walled off from alien (liberal and scientific) thoughts. What Altemeyer's research tells us is that despite the attempt to create a fundamentalist haven where no dissenting thoughts are allowed, there is still a reservoir of common sense that will resist the pressure to reject reality. Nevertheless, we need to find ways to make it easier for people to resist the lure of fundamentalism which paints a picture of black and white, the rejection of rationality and promises an end that satisfies the apocalyptic dreams of those who are targets for enrollment into the fundamentalist vision.
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