When Those Who Are Supposed To Have More Integrity Skate By It In Real Life

Oh, I could have gone a lot farther with those posts about the atheist practice of turning probability and random chance into gods they insert into the enormous gap left when you take God out of an explanation of why things are the way they are.  NOT that inserting God into such explanations has any place in science,  no more than, in an ultimate sense of the phrase, why things are as they are are properly considered by science. Such questions were not supposed to be a part of science as I was taught, science being incompetent to go past what a rigorous evaluation of physical evidence could show.  Back when I was young I was exposed to enough real science to have heard scientists who had a more realistic view of the limits of what science can deal with.  Today I'd bet there are not a majority of scientists who really respect the importance of that limit.

When I, much to my surprise, found that I couldn't deal with the political issues without dealing with the issues of atheism so stylish in the long gone '00s of this century, I was surprised to find that virtually every fault that can be identified in the Biblical fundamentalist desire to insert Genesis into science has its direct counterpart in atheists far more successful insertion of their ideological preferences directly into science and, especially, into the then much cited "pubic understanding of science".   Such "understanding" was, I was shocked to find out through my direct interactions with myriads more of mid-brow and even higher-brow secularized college credentialed people than I ever had before, how saturated with deeply wrong and often quite flawed such "understanding" of science into the credentialed culture is.  It is, more often than not, coupled with an absurdly false narrative fiction conception of "history," which itself could figure as an example of how low the integrity of such modernism is, and of the damage done to education in the modern period. 

One of the oddest things about Biblical Fundamentalism is that it is a product, not of medievalism but of modernism, not only in a reactionary sense against the modern world but in its fundamental understanding of how you read the text of The Bible.  The expectations of literalism, of an assertion of superficial "literal truth"  of the texts from Genesis through Revelation being mistaken as modern science or history writing is a feature of modernism.  It was a tendency that had been on display before the 18th century, form time to time, but the culture of modern science and history exacerbated that.  The Protestant veneration of the text of the Bible in the way that kind of veneration arose in Western culture may have made that inevitable, though there are plenty of Protestants whose reading of those texts is some of the most honest and nuanced and deeply respectful of the contexts they were composed, complied and written down in that I've read.  It's too bad that that hard road to reading them isn't more wide spread. If it were, I doubt the Mammonist anti-Christianity that is - due to the media - the popular view of American Protestantism and, now, with the financing of corrupt billionaires and multi-millionaires, a neo-integralist fascism that is rising in the Catholic Church.*

But it's even odder that the direct insertion of atheist ideology directly into the literature and the culture of science has been far more widely successful when such ideology isn't supposed to be inserted into science by scientists.  Yet it pervades it.  

The lack of integrity in modernism is as deep as the lack of integrity in any previous iteration of human culture, maybe the assertions of virtue contained in all human culture, all human movements, certainly in all human institutions should be taken as a given and watched out for.  It's one of the things that allegedly makes science superior to other parts of human culture but I think that pretense of integrity can mask a heightened practice of hypocrisy and convenient cutting of corners.  Religion, as it deals so intimately with temptation, weakness and sin has its own work cut out for it in that regard but science starts in a state of denial to match that of the Catholic hierarchy during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.   Francis, to his credit, starts out with more modesty in that regard and, as his papal writing shows, a more practical and realistic view of human thinking.

*  I remember, reading about John Paul II's scandalous activity in regard to Central America thinking he was acting like a CIA asset.  The activity of the Bishops and Cardinals he appointed and, in reaction to Pope Francis, their openly working with fascists like Steve Bannon and ultra-right billionaires and millionaires to try to destroy him does nothing to dampen my suspicion that Roman Catholicism has been undermined by that kind of effort for the past thirty three years, probably longer.  A recent such "Catholic" event financed by Tim Busch in Napa featured the double-life, gay Southern Baptist, Lindsay Graham as well as the cream of American anti-Francis Catholics. I, like a lot of other Catholics are getting fed up with the power of such people as Raymond Burke and the influence of billionaires and millionaries on the US Catholic Conference of Bishops.  This picture of the self-exaltation of Burke, as part of a liturgical service, the alleged worship of God, says more than a thousand words could.