Phil Torres - IEET writer - publishes e-book: “A Crises of Faith”

Crisis*

While I’m fully in agreement with the ideas of the book, I feel like it will be even less useful in actually convincing anyone who it needs to than, the other Four Horsemen’s books. The addition of a focus on singularity technologies on top of what is essentially the same book as those is adding yet another circle into the Venn diagram of the increasingly unlikely target audience.

than, say,* the other Four Horsemen’s books.

@Stefan: Your criticism would have some weight to it had the world not been teeming with scriptural literalists. The kind of theists who recognize that the scriptures are allegorical human creations are not the kind that anti-theists are generally concerned with, as they do nowhere near the same level of damage to society.

@Stefan: Both sides? What scriptures are atheists taking a literalist approach to, thereby damaging society?

@Stefan: We are obviously using the terms “scripture” and “literal” in very different ways. Religions have scriptures that claim to be imbued with some sort of magic that makes whatever they say unquestionably true. Atheists have books (that is, individual people who lack a religion, not people who claim some sort of unquestionable authority) arguing that such scriptures and ways of looking at the world are harmful. I fail to see the similarity.

@Stefan
The claim that atheists tend to adopt literalistic interpretations of scripture is one I’ve seen you and others make frequently, so while I don’t wish to reignite any renewed polarisation or acrimony concerning this topic I do wish to clarify my own position, from my FAPP atheistic perspective.

As an atheist, I do not in the first place “interpret” religious scriptures at all. They exist, and one can interpret them any way one wishes. What I’m more interested in, as an atheist, and more particularly as a utilitarian, is the practical effect that devotion to such scriptures has on people’s lives, and is likely to have in the future.

I think this is essentially the position of atheists generally, and what prevents atheists from thinking about religious scripture in the same (non-literalistic) way we think about other works of fiction is precisely that they tend not to be regarded as such by the religious, or at least that is our impression, and there is plenty of evidence for it. It may well be that some atheists overestimate the extent to which the religious tend to interpret their scriptures literally, and that this can give the impression that they themselves are interpreting them literally, but I think the latter is a misunderstanding.

I also want to recall that during the very heated debate on this subject a couple of months ago I took the positions (i) that religion does a great deal do harm, and (ii) that whether it does more harm than good OVERALL is debatable. I stick by these positions. I tend to agree with much that atheists say about religion, but in our (understandable and in some ways commendable IMO) zeal to promote their POV I think some of us have tended to be overly dismissive of the good that religion also does.

It would be good if, through debating this issue here and/or elsewhere, we could help to facilitate some degree of evidence-based consensus on this important but highly sensitive topic. Perhaps Hank can re-post his article announcing IEET’s adoption of Buddhist Right Speech as its policy for commenting here to help guide us through the minefield?

@Pete: Yes, the tendency for some theists to interpret their scriptures literally (or, if not literally, at least as having enough factual weight to them as to guide their reasoning and actions to many awful conclusions) is what most atheists object to, not the mere fact that someone is believing something that isn’t true.

The extent to which atheists downplay the good that religion does is debatable. On the one hand, one could argue that religion inspires acts of beneficence. On the other, one could say that religion is merely a tangentially related filter through which our innate sense of morality expresses itself. The relatively higher charitable giving of irreligious nations certainly supports this. Plus, religion can be an excuse to act in self-interested ways that one can pass off as magnanimous, such as missionaries making their charitable donations contingent upon conversion, or certain current POTUS candidates claiming the lack of a need to disclose their tax returns because of their demonstrated unimpeachable moral character (as seen from their boosting of their in-group through donations to their own church). Plus, treating humans as objects of inherent moral worth without the need of infantilizing otherworldly carrots or sticks serves to further the intellectual and moral health of the species in general. Simply put, there are much “cleaner” ways to achieve the good that religion purports to achieve, without all the concomitant fallout.

I have reposted the Buddhist Right Speech policy under News - Peter requested I do that, to keep a lid on possible wrong speech now that there’s another religious/irreligious article online.

Thanks Hank!

@SHaGGGz Yes, your comments correspond very closely to my way of thinking. I think some high-profile atheists express these points in less nuanced ways, and this can cause offence, but while on this site we are going to stick rigidly to Right Speech, out there in the wider world it is difficult to get much traction without engaging in polemics. To a large extent this is what Dawkins et al are doing in my view, and they do it very effectively.

Without reading the book it would be unhelpful to try to comment on this particular author’s method of interpreting both scripture and religion. I will try to look up the book and put myself in a position to give an intelligent reply.

I must admit that yet another book “disproving” religion doesn’t having me running out to read it. I find the arguments on both sides of the question get very tiresome after a while.

@Stefan
I agree with much of what you write. I also don’t believe that empirical truth is the sole criterion we should be using when we choose what to believe. On the other hand, by definition to believe something means to believe it is empirically true, so to deliberately use other criteria for one’s beliefs is problematic. For this reason I tend to use those other criteria - primarily usefulness, and whether the belief is more cheering or more depressing - as guidance about which ideas to focus on. I don’t generally try to warp my consciousness into believing things that don’t seem to me to be supported by evidence.

Of course, in general we do not need to make a deliberate effort to believe things that are unsupported by evidence. There are various ways to trick ourselves, without even really trying. So when we are engrossed in a novel, for example, many of us are capable of temporarily believing that what we are reading is really happening. Similarly when we watch a film. My guess is that many religions, with their associated rituals and scriptures, work in a very similar way, and it’s not immediately obvious to me why those of us who abstain from such practices should see them in any worse light than going to the cinema or reading a novel.

What is clear, though, is that for many religious believers the experience is far more immersive than movies, novels and video games. The “useful [one hopes] fictions” often permeate entire communities, and there isn’t always the awareness, once one steps outside the church into the “real world”, that the liturgies one has been repeating inside are indeed fictions. And this can lead to one very serious problem that occurs when one invests emotionally into non-evidence based beliefs, pace Nietzsche: one starts to filter out any evidence that contradicts those beliefs, and in extreme cases this can lead one to get completely out of touch with reality and behave in ways that one would otherwise easily recognise as repugnant. I seriously believe that much of the toxicity of the religious Right in the US today is the result of this type of neurotic reaction, and this is a problem that needs to be understood and addressed.

Personally I don’t think we should be against all religion, in general. Apart from anything else the meaning of the word “religion” is so ambiguous that it’s not clear exactly what one is supposed to be “against”. But when I talk about the harm that religion does (in addition to its obvious benefits, in providing a frame of reference for thse who lack a better one, facilitating the formation of communities, and in having provided some of the altruistic memes that motivate people, including the irreligious, to do good), the above is the kind of thing I have in mind.

Re “sugar is sweet”, to be able to determine the empirical truth of any statement one first has to be clear about definitions. The evolutionary dynamics etc help to explain WHY sugar is sweet, and why we used words like “sweet” in the first place, but I don’t think it makes the truth of that statement quite so contingent and non-empirical as you want it to, Stefan.

That said, I would agree that sweetness is not a fundamental property of sugar, it’s rather a property of how sugar interacts with human taste-buds. Similarly, I don’t think scripture can be “wise” in any kind of objective sense. I suppose that some of the statements it contained could be considered “wise”, but the real wisdom comes in the way we interpret it and what we say about it more generally. To describe scripture as “the Word of God”, for example, does not seem to me to be especially wise, even if one adopts a non-literalistic interpretation of it. That is not to say there aren’t plenty of very wise people that do use such language, but on the whole my inclination is to find such descriptions unhelpful.

When you say that trying to base one’s belief on evidence works well in science, but not when it comes to spirituality, perhaps the best point I can make is that my personal experience has led me to a very different conclusion. “Spirituality” is itself a very ambiguously defined word, but of we loosely associate it with the concept of psychological well-being I can say that I have tried both evidence- and non-evidence-based beliefs, and the former work much better. Believing that Jesus was the Son of God never really did it for me, whereas learning about mindfulness and the importance of clarifying one’s values, staples of (highly evidence-based) positive psychology, as done wonders for my enjoyment of life. Of course this is anecdotal - it has the character of “personal testimony” as opposed to peer-reviewed scholarship, but I hope you can see some value in it nonetheless.

I agree that “pointing out that scripture is contradicting science” will not, in itself, take us far in addressing the neurosis of the religious Right in the US, and it’s not a particularly precise formulation anyway, but as long as there are people claiming scripture as literal truth, I do see value in people indeed pointing out that it isn’t. And those whose devotion to scripture is non-literal should not always respond by accusing them of missing the point.

I broadly agree with your last para, but with the caveat that once life-giving truths have been identified and are circulating, it makes little sense to persist with the life-giving fictions that the truths have been designed to replace. And again, this is not to say that “useful fictions” have now become obsolete in their entirety, nor that we should rule out the possibility of turning the word “God” into something useful, only that some of those fictions ARE obsolete, and should be getting less attention rather than more, especially while there are so many who take them literally.

I agree that there is limited value in pointing out that religious scriptures should not, in general, as literally true on this blog, since readers who think they should are presumably few and far between. But my point was a wider one: beyond “our circles”, as you put it Stefan, I think there is very great value in constantly repeating this point.

I think your description of human cognition as “a concoction of biases, errors, heuristics and personal preferences is a little pessimistic”. Not much, but a little. It IS such a concoction, but not only, and evidence only “trickles through” in the sense that there is always vastly more data coming in than we can possibly process, so necessarily we filter most of it out, and yes, the way we do so tends to introduce biases. But if you run through a random series of things you believe, I think you will find that most of them are pretty well supported by evidence. (And if some of them aren’t, it might be a good opportunity to question them!)

I agree that spirituality is about more than just feeling good, and especially about more than feeling good at any one time. Then again, so is psychological well-being. I would not describe someone as “psychologically well” if they felt no guilt or shame when they did something that was clearly anti-social (a better word than “bad” IMO, because who them gets to decide what constitutes “bad”?).

I also think that we can do better than “science advances one funeral at a time”; in fact, while there obviously is a lot of truth in this dictum, it also looks suspiciously like a limiting belief to me, or it can be if it prevents us from trying to do better.

In that spirit, I’d like to understand better why you disagree with my statement that the real wisdom (with regard to scripture) comes in the way we interpret it and what we say about it more generally. Indeed some texts are easier to interpret than others, but obscurity is not always the main problem. “Homosexuality is an abomination against God” is not particularly difficult to interpret, in fact it’s meaning is rather clear. In fact it’s precisely its clarity, along side it’s objectionable nature, that presents a problem, as long as there are people out there inclined to regard it as the Word of God. If it was more obscure it would be less dangerous.

In the above there’s a “be interpreted” missing in the first sentence and in the second para the quotation should of course end before “is a little pessimistic”. Apologies.

“Aside from that my believes follow a distinc pattern of ‘I believe the sky is blue although I know it really is not’. Surely it is the same for you.”

I put “the sky is blue” in the same category as “sugar is sweet”. Obviously, what’s really going on there is that the electrodynamic radiation from the sun gets refracted by the atmosphere in such a way that there is plenty of light coming from other parts of the sky (i.e. not looking directly towards the sun) that falls in the frequency spectrum that we perceive as “blue”, but very little falling in the test of the visible spectrum. Hence, we see it as blue. Some of us understand these things better than others, and yes, some might mistakenly see “blueness” as a more objective property of the sky than it really is, just as they might see “sweetness” as a more objective property of sugar than it really is. But that doesn’t mean that when you or I describe the sky as blue, or sugar as sweet, we are deluding ourselves. We are describing, albeit in a necessarily simplified way (reality is ALWAYS more complicated than we can describe) a phenomenon that is constantly (when therr are no clouds!) being confirmed by evidence. So it’s not blind trust in other people’s science or evolutionary illusions: it’s trust, yes, but trust that is from time to time questioned, but in these two cases maintained because it is supported by evidence.

Now let’s move on to scriptural support for the idea that homosexuality is an abomination against God. By homosexuality, of course, we mean the corresponding sexuality acts, not emotional bonds that we may suspect have a sexual undercurrent. What we can surely say clearly from passages in Leviticus and Romans is that the respective authors clearly believed homosexuality (in this sense) as an abomination. If you are able to come to a different conclusion please tell me.

Having noted this, the question is then what we do with this information, and this will depend very much on one’s worldview, and especially in the place in which one holds scripture in that worldview. If one believes that the Bible is the Word of God, then one is obliged to come up with some kind of “interpretation” of those passages that accords with that belief. Many will favour interpretations that do not oblige them to actually believe that homosexuality is an abomination, but, as you know well, there are far more who go with the simpler assumption that if the authors of those passages thought it was, then it must be. One can deplore the faulty logic, but you know it is prevalent. By contrast, if one doesn’t accord any special importance to Christian scripture, and in particular doesn’t subscribe to the statement, “The Bible is the World of God”, then one is not tempted to draw any such conclusion. The issue becomes mainly one of historical interest…and current interest of course, given the large number of people who DO take those passages literally, as God’s word.

This is the kind of thing I mean when I talk about being wise in the way we interpret scripture, and what we say about it more generally. We do not try to squeeze the evidence into supporting the interpretations that we favour, nor do we regard it as unimportant to understand what the original authors are likely to have intended. We just ensure that we do not give more importance to that intended meaning than it deserves, and it is this that becomes more difficult if we insist on regarding scripture as sacred.

“Am I right that scripture for you is a bunch of out-dated nonsense laced with a gem here and there? Correct me if I am wrong.”

Christian scripture is far more than that to me. I was brought up to believe that the Bible was the infallible word of God. At least, part of my upbringing sought to instil that idea in me. Other parts took a more nuanced position (which was however somewhat unconvincing and confusing for a maths/science- rather than a humanities-gifted kid like me), while from the ate of 9 onwards my school education, and some of my friends, were determinedly secular.

A turning point came for me during puberty, when fear of death coupled with exposure to the charismatic and evangelical movements eventually convinced me to buy in to the evangelical version of the faith. Not that we Brits ever bought into the “God wants you rich” nonsense (haven’t these people even read the sermon on the mount), but there were parts of the New Testament where that presented a pretty clear, and eve moderately coherent, version of the Christian faith, ambiguities in translation notwithstanding, and we did our best to stick to it.

Did I have my doubts? Sure. But in my characteristically mathematical way I essentially bought Pascal’s wager (which I had reinvented myself when I was around 12), and it took me a few more years to figure out its obvious (but apparently not obvious enough!) flaws. When I did finally reject my previous evangelical Christian stance, scripture became more of a wound than anything else - it was just associated with too much cognitive dissonance. But also, eventually, a subject of curiosity: for example, around 10 years ago I read Karen Armstrong’s excellent History of God.

So no, I do not see the Binle as a bunch of out-dated nonsense laced with a gem here and there. It is far more poignant, and far more significant than that, both for me personally and, analogously, with regard to the role it has played in building Western civilisation.

As for the ambiguities regarding what the Bible says about homosexuality, I categorically refuse to base my opinions on fear of agreeing with people I despise or disapprove, or wish to be seen as disapproving of. I have too much respect for the truth for that. Perhaps the passages in Leviticus are more ambiguous than I thought, but in the absence of any particular inclination to study the matter further (because, in the end, THIS SHOULD NOT MATTER) I’m inclined to go with Occam’s razor and assume that the respective authors really did consider homosexual acts to be an abomination. It has, after all, been a common enough view throughout human history.

“That is good to hear.”

Why? Why is it important whether the Bible has a special significance for me?
In a way, this is my whole point: I don’t think it SHOULD have anywhere as near as much significance as society places on it.

“That is also the reason why I brought up the 2nd amendment in my earlier post. It is in fact glaringly obvious what the sentence means and yet it is constantly being reinterpreted in modern times - some would say with good reason.”

Indeed I think this example illustrates well the nature of our disagreement. For me, rather than trying to “reinterpret” it it would be better just to change it. Of course, that is easier said than done, so the reinterpretation has value, and a similar case can be made with regard to religious scripture, but surely there is also value in pointing out that, even if the Bible DOES say this, that or the other, in the words of a pop song from 20 years or so ago: “it ain’t necessarily so”.

[To the comments Moderator: This is a rewrite of the post submitted earlier today, including some light editing with an eye on the Buddhist principles of Right Speech. (The writer is a Vajrayana Buddhist in a Tibetan tradition. The previous comment may be discarded.]

Activist proponents of atheism (vis-a-vis the more temperate “non-theism”) need to come to terms with the findings of Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s magisterial “American Grace,” the most ambitious sociological study extant of religion in the US.  One hopes the ideological predilections of such atheists won’t prevent them from investigating the pro-social behavior of American churchgoers for how such behavior may be encouraged and facilitated.

Putnam and Campbell (see Chapter 13, ‘Religion and Good Neighborliness”) found that the most frequent churchgoers were four times as generous in their financial donations—which included both secular and religious charities.  Those who volunteer for religious groups are two or three times more likely to volunteer for secular organizations.  They are more likely to give money to a homeless person, donate their own blood, and help a person find a job.  Using a set of 15 indicators of helpfulness, Putnam and Campbell found “... not a single one of these fifteen indicators is more common among secular Americans”—even those indicators without a high degree of correlation with churchgoing.  Indeed, religion was found to be the highest predictor of altruistic values.

The most frequent churchgoers (highest quintile) belong to upwards of a third more civic organizations, e.g. the Red Cross and youth-oriented groups, professional and labor groups, than the most secular quintile (i.e. with little or no churchgoing).  They are three times as engaged in local politics, and almost twice as likely to report belonging to organizations working locally for political or social reform. “Religiously inclined liberals” were found to be more likely than their secular counterparts to participate in “protest marches and demonstrations.”  The most religious among us were more than twice as likely to serve as officers and committee members of civic groups.

It is worth noting that Pew Trust polling found that physicians are among the most religious members of American society, in terms of churchgoing and belief.

I agree that activist atheists generalize from a literalist reading of scripture; I have yet to read any atheist who is familiar with modern biblical scholarship, e.g. on the supposed views re homosexuality in Genesis (the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha is about inhospitality to strangers), or the Deuteronomist (“abomination” may be about ritual impurity, same as menstruation) and Paul (with a Hellenistic view of virility - not morality - in the background).  But the measure of one’s beliefs is his behavior.  Activist atheists would do best to desist from uninformed claims to the moral high ground (I’m thinking of Hank Pellisier’s Nov. 21, 2011 post here) and engage with their churchgoing neighbors in making this world a better place for all of us.

Pew Trust interview with David Campbell: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1847/how-religion-divides-and-unites-us-david-campbell-conversation-transcript

@Steven Deedon

I don’t wish to dispute the findings you report about volunteering etc, nor of course do I have any issue with the idea that atheists should engage with our churchgoing (or otherwise religious) neighbours to make the world a better place. Nevertheless, as I think the debate I’ve been having with Stefan Pernar illustrates, the fact that atheists tend to take relatively literalistic interpretations of scripture may be less a result of our relative lack of familiarity with certain kinds of modern biblical scholarship than a cause of that lack of familiarity.

To put it bluntly: if I want to know what the author of a work of scripture meant, I will apply Occam’s razor to whatever theory we might have, based on factual evidence. I will not use the “code of compassion”, or any other normative benchmark, because this will inevitably bias the result. And because atheists do not regard scripture as necessarily providing positive guidance for our lives (it can of course, but only to the extent that it is relevant to modern life and resonates sufficiently well with our chosen values), we do not see much need to give it benign interpretations.

That being said, I do want to emphasise again my full endorsement of your statement that atheists need to work with the (well-meaning) religious to bring about a better world. I do have a real problem with normative reinterpretations of scripture, for reasons stated above (and elsewhere), but I do understand that there are more important issues. If religion is making some people more altruistic, then atheists need to make an effort to understand why this is the case, and draw appropriate conclusions. (Alain De Botton’s Religion for Atheists is an interesting read in this context, although personally I find some of his conclusions rather suspect.)

@Peter Wicks

Peter, I certainly would use Occam’s Razor discriminatingly; otherwise we’d be throwing evolution out the window

The Historical-Critical method has been the reigning paradigm in academic biblical studies for over a century, with origins in the European Enlightenment; it is in fact officially promoted by the Catholic Church (though perhaps sometimes begrudgingly by the current pope).  In general the methods are the same whether one is in a Div School program like that of Harvard, Yale and U of Chicago; or a “secular” Religious Studies program like that of the University of North Carolina, or the University of Iowa.  Catholic and mainline moderate-to-liberal Protestant seminaries generally follow the same, and it is also practiced by Reform, and I’m told, many Conservative, Jews.  Although extremely conservative evangelical and and Fundamentalist seminaries may not, they still have to come to terms with it, and may find that their own biblical studies professors are trained in it and prefer it over “party line” literalist readings.  The historical critical method aims at contextualizing scripture within historical periods and situations, and finding the most PROBABLE meaning intended by the author/redactor(s) of the text when it was written or edited into either its final form or some small integral unit (e.g. “Deutero-Isaiah”, chapters 40-55 of Isaiah, the Priestly or Elohist strain of material in the Pentateuch, of the reconstruction, “Q”.)  The relation of oral to written traditions is a subject for another day. 

I’m sure it was no surprise to mainline biblical scholars when John P. Meier, a Catholic scholar and priest announced that his magisterial Historical Jesus project, “A Marginal Jew,” would follow methodologies in search of a Historical Jesus that would be acceptable to a group of like minded biblical scholars who could include a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew and an agnostic.  (Meier’s fifth volume is currently in progress.) Historical Jesus studies uses historical methods that any self-respecting historian might employ, along with critical analysis of ancient texts, independent archaeology, and social science models.  (See Volume 1 of “A Marginal Jew” for the main methods used by Meier.)

I can testify from my own experience when trained in the practice of exegesis at Yale that grad students were instructed over and over to be hyper-aware of the personal motivations and epistemological assumptions that influenced their analysis, and to explicitly name and describe the school(s) of critical thought (feminist, post/structuralist, etc.) used in framing their analysis of scriptural texts.

I’ve never heard the term, “code of compassion” before, and I couldn’t imagine what “normative benchmark” might mean, other than the above, let along “normative reinterpretation.”  I don’t say this to to be combative, Peter; but there are a lot of assumptions buried in these expressions, and they don’t match what really goes on in the practice of biblical scholarship that iis subsequently used to educated ministers in the mainline (non-conservative) churches in the US.  It must also be said that even conservative scholars engage the work of their professional peers who are not so constrained by the Fundamentalist and other ideologies dictated by their employers, and agree with them more than you might expect.

@Stefan

“I consider this a matter of life and death.”

In a sense so do I (even though we disagree on what we should be concluding from that), although as I said in my reply to Steven I do actually think there are more important issues to focus on.

Re life, truth, and falsehood, my general position is as follows. Among the space of all possible beliefs (I’m a mathematician, remember?!) I believe that there are sufficiently many that are, if not “true”, at least not obviously false, and also life-affirming, that we can do without the obviously false ones in many circumstances, and a site like this one is a good example of where we can do better than peddling useful fictions.

“Homosexuality is an abomination” is an awful belief, but “parts of Christian scripture pretty clearly describe homosexuality as an abomination, translational ambiguities notwithstanding, and that’s a problem because so many people regard it as God’s truth AND take it literally” is just fine, and has the benefit of being not-obviously-false.

Your reference is Nietzsche, mine is more recent: have a look at the post by David Eubanks from a couple of months ago. He makes an excellent argument against useful fictions, by demonstrating that they work better in the short term than in the long term. It is exactly for a bias in favour of the truth that he pleads, and I for one am with him all the way.

@Steven

I wasn’t arguing against historical-critical scholarship; indeed, at its best I see that precisely as an application of the scientific method (Occam and all). (And if you can find a simpler theory than evolution that has the same explanatory power, do tell!) What I was objecting to was allowing a motivation other than the desire to understand (i.e. respect for the truth) to motivate our beliefs about scripture.

Re “code of compassion” and normative benchmarks, read Stefan’s comments above to understand what I was responding to. Again, I am certainly NOT objecting to religion in general, still less to historical-critical scholarship, except to the extent that I still believe that these texts receive more attention than they deserve.

Another point to make about the interpretation of scripture is that it is one thing to try to discern what the authors originally intended and how their writings might have been understood by their contemporary readership, and quite another to discern what message, if any, we should take with regard to how we live our lives now. In the latter context the Code of Compassion to which Stefan refers is of course supremely relevant and helpful. N the former context, historical-critical scholarship is indeed the way to go.

Where we may perhaps differ, Stephen (or perhaps not), is with regard to the connection between the two. Essentially what I am advocating is precisely that we rely exclusively on historical-critical analysis, and any other relevant (non-normative) evidence in the former context. Whether scripture is or should be relevant at all in the latter context depends, of course on one’s upbringing and on one’s values and other preferences. On the whole I would like to see less attention paid to traditional religious scriptures, rather than more, but of course this depends on what people will focus on instead. One can certainly do worse.

A further point to make about historical-critical scholarship is that, while it is indeed the norm in theological schools, this doesn’t mean it is necessarily popular among the congregations. Even in the more liberal denominations, the constant repetition and reading of scripture by people who might be ill-equipped or disinclined to engage in such scholarship is likely to lend itself to relatively literalistic interpretations.

The above is in no way intended as advocating any kind of censorship (as reflected, for example, in the reluctance of the church to disseminate vernacular translations), but rather as a note of caution with regard to any reassuring claims about how religious scriptures tend to be interpreted by religious segments of the population. (How they are interpreted by the less religious is of course less important, since they are less inclined to look to those scriptures for practical guidance.)

“have a look at the post by David Eubanks from a couple of months ago. He makes an excellent argument against useful fictions, by demonstrating that they work better in the short term than in the long term. It is exactly for a bias in favour of the truth that he pleads, and I for one am with him all the way.”

Agreed; unfortunately people have always preferred fictions to truths, they cannot take reality straight—they want chaser.