Patriotic Weekend Open Thread

Happy 4th of July weekend! I imagine many of you are traveling or are driving around looking for parking at the beach. It’s going to be very hot this weekend, so be careful! Let’s get started with this open thread. Where else will people have to go to get into flame wars?

Here’s an American tradition: scamming the gullible. Ergun Caner is the now former dean of Liberty University’s seminary, spent the last decade telling people about how he was raised to wage jihad on the U.S. and his conversion to Christianity. Turns out it was an exaggeration at best:

Last month, PFAW Senior Fellow Peter Montgomery wrote a piece for AlterNet examining the allegations that Ergun Caner, head of Liberty University’s Baptist Theological Seminary, had exaggerated about about his Muslim past.

After 9/11, Caner became a popular Religious Right speaker, telling audiences how he had been raised in Turkey to wage jihad against America before converting to Christianity and presenting himself as an expert on both Islam and Islamic terrorism.

…Although LU didn’t provide any more details about the discrepancies, Caner said in several speaking engagements in 2001 and later that he was raised in Turkey before coming to the United States as a teenager.

He also said he was trained in Islamic jihad, a term associated with terrorist activity, according to recordings made in 2001 of his comments at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., and Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas.

However, his parents’ divorce papers, on file in a Columbus, Ohio, courthouse, indicated the family moved from Stockholm, Sweden, to the U.S. when Caner was about 4 years old, and continued to live in the Columbus area.

Caner’s father was a Muslim who sought to raise his children in the Islamic faith, although he had only part-time custody after the divorce, the documents indicate.

Caner is no longer dean, but is still a faculty member of their seminary. I guess he’ll spend many more years misinforming people and getting paid for it.

I’m sure you’re not surprised to learn that people rationalize away scientific evidence that doesn’t fit their world view. A new study finds that people challenged in their beliefs about science are much more likely to say that science in general can’t answer questions.

The first group were given five research studies that confirmed their pre-existing view. Students who thought homosexuality was associated with mental illness, for example, were given papers explaining that there were more gay people in psychological treatment centres than the general population. The second group were given research that contradicted their pre-existing view. (After the study was finished, we should be clear, they were told that all these research papers were fake, and given the opportunity to read real research on the topic if they wanted to.)

Then they were asked about the research they had read, and were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement: “The question addressed in the studies summarised … is one that cannot be answered using scientific methods.”

As you would expect, the people whose pre-existing views had been challenged were more likely to say that science simply cannot be used to measure whether homosexuality is associated with mental illness.

But then, moving on, the researchers asked a further set of questions, about whether science could be usefully deployed to understand all kinds of stuff, all entirely unrelated to stereotypes about homosexuality: “the existence of clairvoyance”, “the effectiveness of spanking as a disciplinary technique for children”, “the effect of viewing television violence on violent behaviour”, “the accuracy of astrology in predicting personality traits” and “the mental and physical health effects of herbal medications”.

Their views on each issue were added together to produce one bumper score on the extent to which they thought science could be informative on all of these questions, and the results were truly frightening. People whose pre-existing stereotypes about homosexuality had been challenged by the scientific evidence presented to them were more inclined to believe that science had nothing to offer, on any question, not just on homosexuality, when compared with people whose views on homosexuality had been reinforced.

It’s often said that scientists have trouble communicating with the public and that’s true. But the playing field may be weighted against them in some instances.

Anyway, I hope you all have a happy and safe 4th of July holiday.