But is the title I finally settled on too in-your-face? An op-ed column reprinted in today's Burlington, North Carolina Times-News by Miani Herald "Pulitzer Prize-winning" columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. contains an apology for asking of Sarah Palin last week, "Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth?" Pitts writes now that that column
unleashed a flood of e-mails from people angry that I had demoted the Christian creation story [Christian?!] to the status of parable [sic] and suggested by implication that anyone who believes it is, as one reader put it, a "fool."After apologizing (Pitts has to try to keep all of those readers; he's a paid columnist, after all), he tries to regain his self-respect:
Let me be clear: I don't believe the Bible's account of creation. Never have. Leaving aside Darwin [why? afraid of offending yet more of those valuable readers?] and taking the story on its own merits, there are still holes in it big enough to walk a dinosaur through. Not least of which is the conundrum of how, short of incest, humanity reproduced itself if there was only one family on earth.Then, after maligning atheists, too, for a paragraph, he steps back in a sort of apology to them!
And had I framed my question more narrowly—Does Sarah Palin really want the Bible story of creation taught in schools?—you'd be reading no mea culpa here. Science classes are for science and faith is not science. Nor, in a pluralistic society, does anyone have the right to impose faith on someone else.
But I didn't pose a narrow question. Instead, I airily dismissed a belief which, in and of itself, hurts no one, marginalizes no one, and is a fundament of faith for millions.
That was needlessly...disrespectful. It also was arrogant. Which is, oddly enough, the one trait of the lately resurgent atheist movement that vexes me....
In fairness to atheists, though, I've always suspected that was a reaction to the equally irksome arrogance some religious conservatives—let the Rev. Jerry Falwell stand as avatar—have exuded upon the rest of us for 30 years.Poor Leonard Pitts! The guy's trying to please everybody, but is surely pleasing only the most complaisant.
An unfortunate consequence of trying to please everybody is that Pitts fools himself into thinking that a religious belief can be "in and of itself" and (therefore) "hurts no one [and] marginalizes no one," and should (therefore) be given a bye because it "is a fundament of faith for millions." But there is no such thing as a religious belief "in and of itself." A person's basic beliefs affect everything. They affect what parents want taught in schools. They affect how people vote—or whether they vote (jehovahs, I'm told, abstain). They affect whether people sign up to detonate themselves in a crowd.
It's important to believe things because you know they're true (and not otherwise)..
