For those of you who may have been catching up on the hard times Darwinism has fallen on and the maledictions of Dawkins & Dennett, you might want to read this. There is another bad actor out there: Edward O. Wilson.

Tom Wolfe anticipates a funeral.

You might want to send your black suit out to the cleaners.

Nat:  Hey, Jack. Have a seat and let me buy you a coffee.

Jack shot out his left arm, cocked his elbow and checked his watch.

Jack:  Sure, if you don't mind my leaving in the middle of something; my ride is due shortly.

Nat:  I don't see a major problem with that.

Jack:  I did want to tell you about my experience at Riddance Gathering.

Nat smiled.

Nat:  What did you learn?

Jack:  Well, I'm more confused than I was the first time I went. But I did learn that ignorance is not the end of life as we know it, and it actually qualifies one to be an emergent-in-good-standing.

Nat:  So public stupidity is a growth strategy; who knew?

Jack:  If I talked like these guys at work, Security would be following me back to my desk and helping me out to the car with my office kaboodle.

Nat:  This is clearly a movement of credentialed buffoons, I don't think anyone challenges this.

Jack:  You don't like this movement.

Nat:  These guys are charlatans and carpetbaggers. It might be possible to view them with some sympathy if they just sat there in their sofas with a dumb-and-desperate look of earnestness on their faces, but they really are a gang of intellectual junior flyweights. I saw Tony Jones embarrass himself on a video the other day. He clearly crossed the line between stupid and criminal, and this is typical of the movement. I think they must be having some sort of competition to see who can be the first to win a Darwin Award. I'm taking out a loan to bet on Tony.

Someone trying to peg his theology asked him if he had been born again, to which Tony said, "Yes. What does that mean?"

What the guy should have said was, "Well, Tony, what did it mean to you when you said Yes?" Or he might have asked what Jesus meant when he talked about being born again in John 3. But Tony chuntered on about how when he was five he was pressured into confessing to an experience at camp when his body whooshed. I can well imagine how easily led someone like Tony would be at five seeing how pathologically naïve he is now. I'm sure this boy lost a lot of lunch money at school. But the grim inanity of characterizing a second birth as nothing other than an exercise in manipulation is too pathetic to accept. There has to be dishonesty here. Stupidity can take someone only so far.

Jack:  If these people are this dumb, how can they survive in a world full of seminaries and evangelical theological societies.

A beamer tooted its horn.

Nat:  Ah! That is a question I would like to answer, but I think your coach awaits.

Jack:  Hold that thought...

As topics change and as readership adjusts, it is possible that new Remonstrans readers could benefit from an orientation class. We'll give some thought to that. Meanwhile we should remind everyone of the environment we find ourselves in. (You are all as concerned about the environment as I am, right?)

"This is a country with all too much civility...especially on important issues." I think Berlinski is essentially right. I wouldn't quite say he has the authority of an Apostle, but he does have a sense of proportion religious folk now lack, and besides, religious people don't seem to have much regard for Apostolic authority anyway. Issues of orthodoxy were never more important, never have the clerics so quickly abandoned their flocks, never under more frivolous pretexts, and never with such impunity.

Elsewhere someone posted Ephesians 4:1-6. This would have been a slightly more effective reprimand if the speaker had not already told someone to go masturbate, effectively ending the "dialogue" altogether. To defend the normal meaning of theological terms and to question inane doctrinal fancies is to be, in this person's mind, a demagogue.

And what we have reviewed recently are assorted carpetbaggers, interlopers and dilettantes pretending to know theology and instructing the church on its obligations. We have read moral failures who preach at us about global responsibilities never mentioned in the New Testament. We have dabbled in views of how sexuality aims at the eschaton. We have heard threadbare pleas for "a conversation" from the very same person who creates YouTube videos wherein he accuses others of heterodoxy.

Clearly this is conversation of an extremely low order.

We are at a moment in church history where it can be suggested that the perfect church is one where people can sit around and say whatever they want.

What should be our attitude toward these wolves?

If these pretenders were consistent, if they were honest with the facts of church history and theology, if they showed a willingness to converse with the MacArthurs, Mohlers, Carsons, and Driscolls, Remontrans might welcome "dialogue". Dialogue can be illuminating and enjoyable. (It rarely is, but it can be. I think it happened at the Algonquin Hotel on occasion.) But most of us have grown up observing that this kind of cheap "dialogue" is merely war by other means. These chatterboxes are not after conversation, and nothing could be clearer. We are not obligated to consider your heresy just because you call it a conversation.

This alleged dialogue, this bogus conversation is not aimed at understanding, it is to insinuate error.  I will give you a simple case in point. Find a bookstore or library with a copy of The New Christians, turn to Appendix B, page 229, and read the fifth point—top of the page—which purports to be a "response to our critics".

Fifth, because most of us write as local church practitioners rather than professional scholars, and because the professional scholars who criticize our work may find it hard to be convinced by people outside their guild, we feel it is wisest at this juncture to ask those in the academy to respond to their peers about our work. We hope to generate fruitful conversations at several levels, including both the academic and ecclesial realms. If few in the academy come to our defense in the coming years, then we will have more reason to believe we are mistaken in our thinking and that our critics are correct in their unchallenged analyses.

In other words: it may be apparent to you that we are talking rubbish, but before you tell us we're talking rubbish, talk to other academics, and if in the coming years they say we are talking rubbish, then we will reconsider our position.

Now there is the bracing wind of a Reformation is it not? Imagine that sentiment rife among the Wycliffes, Huses, Zwinglis, Luthers, Melanchthons, Knoxes, Calvins....

If few in the academy come to our defense in the coming years, then we will have more reason to believe we are mistaken in our thinking and that our critics are correct in their unchallenged analyses.

Like a mighty army moves the church of God.

Contrary to what Doug Pagitt tells you, this is not how theology was done in the past; this is not a continuation of a venerable Christian tradition.

This is malarkey.

This last Wednesday the evangelicals (or some evangelicals anyway) produced a manifesto. They called it a Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment. I don't know what further proof we need that evangelicalism is not a force to be reckoned with.

It's a little sad, really, but evangelicals periodically cobble together some statement of their importance, relevance or existence. ⁱ   So this would be the manifesto for 2008 in case you are collecting the entire set. You can get a copy here. Actually you can get two copies, the abbreviated six-page embarrassment or the full 20-page humiliation.

On page 14 they want to rethink their place in public life, and to do so they repeat that now widely recognized falsehood that

...fundamentalism was thoroughly world-denying and politically disengaged from its outset, names such as John Jay, John Witherspoon, John Woolman, and Frances Willard in America and William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury in England are a reminder of a different tradition. Evangelicals have made a shining contribution to politics in general, to many of the greatest moral and social reforms in history, such as the abolition of slavery and woman's suffrage, and even to notions crucial in political discussion today, for example, the vital but little known Evangelical contribution to the rise of the voluntary association and, through that, to the understanding of such key notions as civil society and social capital.

Don't I wish fundamentalism was thoroughly world-denying?

So this document intends to a) reaffirm evangelical identity and b) make a public statement of evangelicalism's intention to reform its own behavior which, as is common knowledge, ranks right up there with other equally obnoxious moral lepers in the public eye.

"We confess that we Evangelicals have betrayed our beliefs by our behavior."

You don't say!

They admit to having replaced biblical truths with therapeutic techniques, worship with entertainment, discipleship with growth in human potential, church growth with business entrepreneurialism...and all too often they have "set out clear, high statements of the authority of the Bible, but flouted them with lives and lifestyles that are shaped more by our own sinful preferences and by modern fashions and convenience."

What a pretentious way of admitting not only hypocrisy but abysmal judgment and incompetent leadership, and now they want us to trust them as moral guides.

Yes, last month we lost 46 people up on the mesa, and in March there was that unfortunate incident in the canyon, and before that, it's true, we lost those kindergartners at ChuckE Cheese's....

Just who requires these moral guides, I wonder. Maybe Frank the suicidal Trucker.

"All too often," we read on page 12, "we have prided ourselves on our orthodoxy..." which is a Houdini-class trick because, as we all know, evangelicalism hasn't even produced a consensus let alone an orthodoxy. What could it possibly have been proud of?

Anyway, our readers' knowledge of current events can provide the appropriate backdrop as they read these pompous camera whores.

But before you leave, along with these two pathetic documents there is a third, a Study Guide. Can you believe it?! They have a 20-page remembrance of sins and sighs and a 29-page Study Guide.

Talk about chutzpah.

If we were to discuss this travesty amongst ourselves (which they are inviting us to do), we would do well to think it through at four levels [page 3]:

1. Understanding (What is being said here?)
2. Agreement or dissent (Is what is said here true-most of it, all of it, or none of it? Why?)
3. Implications (What of it? What should this mean for my/our lives?)
4. Action (If I/we embrace this vision, what needed changes and practical next steps will I/we take?)

Ok, since you asked.

1. Nothing is being said here; this is political theater. How dumb do you think we are? How many crooks, addicts and buffoons have we watched cry their way back into the limelight? We learned all about these stunts years ago when we were still playing with our Cheerios.
2. Tough call but I'm guessing you should put me down for dissent.
3. Implications? Be serious, wouldja? One salient implication is that no one believes you anymore, and you have discredited evangelicalism at an astonishingly unpropitious moment in Western history. You are leaving people better than your sorry selves at the mercy of men like Hitchens, Dawkins...
4. Personally, I plan to take no action. I took no notice of you before and I don't anticipate any change in that policy. And if I find others taking notice of you I will warn them off with threat of locust, frogs and blood.

You cannot succeed in simple morality and you want to preach about justice? You wallow in obscene wealth and you wish to speak to us of poverty? This is just me thinking out loud here, but I think you ought to reconsider your place in private life. Very private life.

Secluded life.

Make like Amelia Earhart and never be heard from again.

_______________
ⁱ It is important to evangelicals that we capitalize evangelical. It is conspicuously less important to them that they capitalize fundamentalist.

Sensing the need for a break from the rigorous philosophical demands of Emergence, semantic plasticity and clichéd innuendos, I retreated into some light reading of ID, black holes, singularities, the Standard Model, bosons, fermions (both quarks and leptons), hadrons, fields, forces and symmetries.

Some of you may remember Shane Magee, thinker, theologian and giggling sidekick to the pastor without raiment. I've watched with the patience of Job for the next installment of FakeNaked which was to deal with hermeneutics. But here instead he speaks softly about William Haley, Richard Dawkins, his god, and education.

As something of a counterweight I also read Berlinski.

David Berlinski got his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton and was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has written in the fields of analytic philosophy, differential topology, the philosophy of mathematics, systems analysis, and theoretical biology. He's taught at the City University of New York, Rutgers, Stanford, and the Universite de Paris.

Berlinski claims to be an atheist.

I can't speak to Magee's qualifications, if any qualifications there be. I think you will find his lecture instructive in a most perverse way.

Magee claims to be a Christian.

Berlinski discusses the following questions with some sense of humor and irony:

Has anyone provided a proof of God's inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.