The Religious Bigotry of Academics is Explored

Blogs bring out the base in us. The medium is primarily anonymous and the people who post or comment feel freer to tell others what they think. For a good example of what academics think about Christians, the Volokh Conspiracy has demonstrated that much of the academic world is inhabited by people who are the mirror image of Fred Phelps, right down to bigoted rants. It’s very revealing, yet the participants on that website keep on exposing the rotten underbelly of academia without any apparent self-consciousness.

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Religious liberty and SSM
Bill Stuntz on "Secular Universities and Evangelical Christians"

It’s almost like being invited to sneak a peek at a Nazi re-union where the old party members tell each other why Jews should be exterminated because science has proved they are sub-human.

Even the comments defending the right of Christians to exist do so from the perspective that they are of course wrong, but like any strange psychological or emotional quirk, they should be tolerated as long as they don’t try to do anything about their fundamental beliefs.

There are the inevitable claims that Christians would, if they could, impose a theocracy. What strange quirk of mind would consider the America of, say 1750, or 1850 or 1950 a theocracy? Yet people who appear to have been trained in the law (Volokh is a law professor and attracts a large proportion of legal eagles) seem to believe that taking American jurisprudence in those directions would the imposition of theocracy. You can ascribe this to fear, hatred, ignorance or stupidity, but this is what we find in academia today.

As a Christian, that makes ME afraid. When you are seen as a threat, it takes very little for those who see you as a threat to want to liquidate you.

There are some reasonable people who post; for example this:

Estragon, while I agree that the perceived power and organization are factors, I believe that Prof. Zywicki is closer to a more important and fundamental point. My experience has been that humans are tribal, and have a fundamental "us" vs. "them" outlook. Even in places where the population is culturally and ethnically fairly uniform, like a lot of places in Central and Eastern Europe, people will create "us" and "them" groups, and have negative views of whoever the "them" are. Not infrequently these views are clothed in some pseudo-scientific or intellectual jargon. Of course you (individually and your group) can't take ID seriously, since it's proponents ("they") are just a bunch of ignorant cretins. (And, as Mark points out, "they" have a negative opinion of "you", too).

Decision making by humans is never a wholly logical process. Dr. Temple Grandin, Ph.D (Psy), in various books and articles has described brain damage studies -- people whose decision-making and emotional centers were traumatically severed. Many of these people are quite brillant. However, they end up in analysis paralysis and unable to make even simple choices. An emotional commitment is essential to making a decision. There are also a large number of studies in psychology concluding that people usually decide on their opinions first, and then seek out or intrepret facts to support their opinions, and may seek out people who share their opinions. In trial, I never tried to convince a jury -- I let them convince themselves. My first and most important task was to establish an emotional bond between me and my client and the jurors. Thereafter, "we" explored the facts, and "we" reached a decision -- which supported "our" view -- and which view necessarily concluded that the opposing attorneys and clients were a bunch of ignorant cretins, deserving of sanction.

But many of the comments are like this:

Evangelicals and their fundamentalist brethren are to be distinguished from Jews, Mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics and particularly Mormons, Amish and Buddhists in the extent to which they continually try to force their beliefs on everybody around them. Here in Texas, we have the damnBaptists an damnMethodists who regularly force prayers, moments of silence, Ten Commandments monuments on public space, biblical science textbooks, virginity and teetotaling on all of the rest of us. As a result, Austin and Houston are the only cities where a freedom lover can survive.

You can drive hundreds of miles (literally) in Texas without the chance to buy a beer or (because of that) dine at a fine restaurant. We put up with prayers at public dances and graduations, prohibition of porn and censorship of computers at Senior Citizens activity centers.

If you ever travel in Texas outside of Austin or Houston, you will spend your time cursing the damnEvangelicals. Darwin help you if you ever get caught in Waco or the Child Protective Services ever take an interest in you. You will die and your children will be taken from you for having the wrong religion.

And

Having grown up around many of the proselytizing nitwits, and (at the time) having been considered to be a conservative by most of my peers and teachers, I can say that it was the self-righteous way in which evangelicals handled themselves and the willfully blind manner they treated subjects with which they disagreed which drew the most negative attention and feeling.

How will a biology professor take a student who, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, insists that the world is 6000 years old and evolution is bs? And the English teacher who gets derided for promoting abhorrent lifestyles for assigning 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' or some culturally permissive secular book?

I was very vocal about my politics in college, and never received anything but respect from my very lefty professors. But the blindly dogmatic and irrational evangelicals were not so fortunate, because, by their nature, they refused to engage in meaningful debate.

Have you ever been cornered and harangued? Apparently this one has:

Unlike other religions, evangelicalism's beliefs involve interfering with other people. It is of course bigotry to dislike people based on their religious beliefs -- unless those beliefs cause them to interfere with other people. For instance, it would not be "irrational prejudice" to have an unfavorable opinion of a person whose religious belief caused them to repeatedly crap on your lawn.

For the same reason, it's not "irrational prejudice" to have an unfavorable opinion about a person whose religious belief compels them to "evangelize" everyone else to one particular religious viewpoint.

Of course I will have an unfavorable opinion of someone who believes I'm going to hell and who wants to harrangue me until he convinces me of that fact. That's not "irrational prejudice." It's based on rational aversion to people who refuse to leave me alone to believe what I want in peace. If evangelicals didn't interfere with others, others wouldn't have such unfavorable views of them.

And here's an interesting testimony:

As an evangelical Christian who got his Ph.D. in English at a prominent Division I research university, I can vouch firsthand for the undisguised distaste expressed toward me. One of the faculty members on my committee told me he "hated fuckin' Christianity" knowing I had taught at a Baptist university before coming there to get my doctorate. All but a few were Marxist and it was so bad that a gay, Jewish atheist, who had a chaired position and was the most published member of the faculty, was hounded out of the department because he didn't meet the ideological standards of the Marxist Lesbian chairperson. Presently I teach at an evangelical university where I teach Marxist, queer, feminist, etc. theory. How many secular universities are there that teach a Christian theory of interpretation? I'm pro-life and anti-gay marriage, but who's the "liberal," methodologically speaking, they or I?

UPDATE:
By L.A. Brave

I generally look at a religious believer the same way I look at any "true believer", whether they are a cryptozoologist, a 9-11 Truther, an antivaccine crusader, a ghost hunter, or anyone else pushing the latest pseudo-science. Part loathing, part pity, but rarely fear.

By NI:

And as an atheist, I'm not afraid of belief in God. What I am afraid of is theists trying to make this country into a theocracy. It's not that religious people want to practice their faith; it's that they want to lay the trappings of their faith on American society. It manifests itself in opposition to abortion, gay marriage, evolution, as well as in demands for school prayer and "biblical economics".

I do think belief in God is comparable to belief in unicorns. Now, imagine that unicorn-believers were politically well organized enough that laws were actually passed based on what the unicorns think is best (as expounded upon by a unicorn priesthood), and demands were made that all of us -- not just the believers -- conformed our conduct to what the priests told us the unicorns want. Imagine further that the unicorn-believers have had a near monopoly on the appointment of federal judges for eight years and basically run the Justice Department. Then perhaps you can understand what it's like to be an atheist in this culture, and why there is so much hostility directed at religious belief.

Another by L.A. Brave:

Ironic that he mentions alchemy, because it is exceedingly more plausible than the existence of a benevolent God.

Alchemy was scientific pursuit of a perfectly plausibly theory; that elements of one type could be transmuted into elements of another type. Of course, this goes on throughout the universe in burning stars, as well as in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors here in Earth. In fact, gold particles have been created in a lab.

In hindsight, the alchemists, the proto-chemists, weren't that far off. They were basically right, but had the metaphysics wrong. Moreover, much their methodology was sound and laid the foundation for modern chemistry and science as a whole. Separate the metaphysics from alchemy and it is indistinguishable from chemistry. Indeed, the very techniques of alchemy helped bring about its demise as an acceptable model for the universe.

So while the alchemists dropped their model and became proper scientists, the theologians have held fast to their 6,000 year old model of the universe, producing far less evidence for their model than the alchemists ever did.

And from Eugene Volokh:

But I take it that many irreligious people who are bewildered by others' religious beliefs aren't afraid of the beliefs so much as they find them factually unfounded — much like they would find beliefs in astrology, ghosts, werewolves, or for that matter the Greco-Roman pantheon to be factually unfounded. For that matter, I take it that even many Christian academics would disapprove, on empiricist rather than theological grounds, of those who say they believe in Zeus, Xenu, the Zodiac, or vampires. Why should we be surprised that irreligious academics would take the same view, but as to factual claims of the existence of God as well as to the other factual claims?

This is especially so as to beliefs "in the existence and beneficence of an omniscient and omnipotent God." So perhaps what Prof. Hills is seeing is more disapproval of those who are seen as unduly willing to believe in what the disapproving person sees as fairy tales, rather than disapproval of those who are seen as morally or practically threatening.

Someone living in this country, in a society immersed in religious beliefs is "bewildered" by someone professing a belief in God? Is there a real ivory tower to which academics are banished, never to be allowed to interact with real people in a real world?