This morning's e-mail has a link from a pretty stupid blog commentator to a story at The Guardian that shows, among other things, that folks at that august publication don't know crap about theology. The claim comes in the headline to a piece about the comic hate-monger, Jack Chick by Sam Thielman. The claim is, brace yourself, that Jack Chick's hate spewing comics put him in the running to be, "the most widely read theologian in human history". The story attributes that quote to Daniel Raeburn, a writer for The Newyorker whose cv, in so far as I can piece it together doesn't lead me to believe he has any idea what theology is. He would seem to specialize in the world of cheezy comics, which will get you considered as a kind of intellectual in the stupidity our culture is nourished from, these days.
I have been aware of Jack Chick since I was a kid when some Catholic hater stuck some of his hate material under the windshield wipers in cars parked at our local Catholic church. I've read things about him and looked at his hate-tracts and puddles of paranoia in ink on cheap paper, from time to time, in the intervening years as he continued and progressed in his psychotic lunacy and suspect I might have been more aware of him than the moron who sent me that link. I never recall ever hearing him accused of being a theologian until yesterday. I would suspect that if you polled every person who has ever received a degree in theology from an accredited institution if they considered Jack Chick a theologian you would either get unanimous judgement that he wasn't or one so small that it would virtually be the same thing. Jack Chick was a theologian in about the same way that people who man the most extreme creationist venues could be called biologists, geologists and physicists. Except that some of them actually have credentials from accredited universities in STEM subjects.
Actually, considering the stuff that gets considered to be serious science these days, multi-verse theory, the Just-so stories of Sociobiology and evo-psy (which nurtured and rewarded Kevin MacDonald's blatant anti-Semitism as science, not that removed from the world of Jack Chick) some of the most outlandish ideas of so-called science and its extension into "cognitive science" ... I would say that some topics in science, these days, has more in common with the mind of Jack Chick than any current theologian I'm aware of. And unlike the atheists, I've actually read some theologians.
I must say that this past two years of the election season has made for a steady decline in my regard for the world of magazine journalism and, even more so, webazine journalism. I'd like Daniel Raeburn to list the works of theology he's read in the past ten years.
I mentioned Jack Chick's outfit in several posts over the years. Never positively and never as anything remotely to do with theology. This one, for example.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Maybe This Has Something To Do With Why People Don't Vote for Atheists
The increasingly unhinged blogging of Jerry Coyne is at odds with his professional work in biology. Whereas his blogging is frequently a semi-obscene screed of bigotry and irrationality, seemingly a Chick publication dropped here from an alternate universe, Coyne manages to keep his lid on when he has professional credibility at stake. Coyne's complete oeuvre could serve as a definition of the compartmentalization he and his cult followers are always going on about in relation to religious scientists.
But this is a post about politics and why, despite all my inclinations to ignore it, there is, actually, a huge problem with the ideology of atheism that could lead a reasonable person to wonder if they should vote for an atheist. And it is what many atheists, themselves, say that provides the reasonable reservation....
Now, aren't you glad you sent that to me?
Chick is more accurately described as a "pamphleteer." He is a theologian only in the sense that his subject was Christianity and the doctrines of Christianity as he understood them, but he was in no sense of the word a theologian as in a student of the ideas grounded in Greek notions of philosophy and Christian ideas about God.
ReplyDeleteChick never examined the nature of God (the subject of theology, just as Christology examines the nature of the Christ, soteriology the nature of salvation, doxology the nature of worship, etc.). He wrote screeds and drew cartoons to illustrate them. He was a pamphleteer, in the same vein as people like Thomas Paine. Yes, Paine was a better writer and thinker, but his aim was not that far different from Chick's (far enough different, granted, to make Paine's work notable, and Chick's work dispensable). But Chick and Paine aimed at the same target: to get the attention of the crowd, and to stir them to action.
Both produced arguments intended to motivate. Pastors might produce such arguments as sermons; but theologians are more reflective, more thoughtful (which is not to say their thought is good, it's just closer to contemplative than to alarmist), and more reasoned.
No one ever accused Chick of engaging in an excess of reason. His work was all aimed at what Carl Sagan would call the "reptile brain," not at the "higher" brain functions. Theology is grounded in reason; reason not as narrowly defined by ignorant atheists, but reason as understood by the Greeks (reason that produced both Plato and Aristotle, to put it in as small a nutshell as possible). Chick was not even vaguely interested in reason. He was only interested in emotion, incitement, and fear.
None of which are, or ever have been, the tools of theology.