New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | December 7, 2004

Ronald Bailey is skeptical about gullibility.

Comments

|12.7.04 @ 9:08PM|#

No, you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can still fool enough of them to run a large country.

(Paraphrased from Will Durant)

|12.7.04 @ 11:11PM|#

I just read a poll where almost 80% of the US population believe God knocked up some Jewish chick about 2000 years ago, but left her cherry intact.

Don't get too excited, Ron.

|12.8.04 @ 2:03AM|#

Henry, take this!

|12.8.04 @ 3:10PM|#

Henry:

After discussing genetics with SWMBO, it occured to me that the whole Immaculate Conception thing would be a lot more plausable if Jesus was a woman. Where the hell did the Y chromosome come from?

gaius marius|12.8.04 @ 4:46PM|#

It's my bet that with the growth and elaboration of media outlets, it's getting harder and harder to fool people for long.

mr bailey makes the charitable error of assuming that more information means a more skeptical public. this would be, i think, an outgrowth of the notion that people are rational disseminators of information.

all evidence to the contrary, mr bailey. extremely well informed people are still only hairless apes with reptilian brain stems making most of their decisions for them. popular delusion remains the basis of democratic government in the age of mass politics. michael ledeen studies d'annunzio for a reason.

gaius marius|12.8.04 @ 5:26PM|#

and i would note similarly the matt welch makes an associated error (imo): that the proliferation of media outlets constitutes a proliferation of real information consumption.

this is akin to saying that the proliferation of christian cults in the 20th century means that christian doctrine is better understood. clearly, imo, not so: there has been instead a proliferation of confusion, opinion masquerading as fact and outright disinformation such that no one knows anything -- even when they are certain they know something -- because truth and near-truth cannot be separated from rumor and falsehood. error and rumor are easily propogated convincingly on the internet. most people (being only animals) cannot critically evaluate what they're consuming; awash in data of varying quality, they assemble their own 'reality' to suit their inclination. the overwhelming tide of choice thus yields a haze of primitive mysticism similar to what the late romans fielded.

i think we are seeing in the blogosphere the beginnings of a paradox in which the death of informational gatekeepers -- ostensibly laudable to a individualist society -- reveals the animal character of the human being far more than the rational. we're likely to learn, imo, that institutional information was, though imperfect and even sometimes disastrous, at least usually trustworthy and ultimately preferable to the mystical fog of uncontrolled information.

|12.8.04 @ 6:58PM|#

I just read a poll where almost 80% of the US population believe God knocked up some Jewish chick about 2000 years ago, but left her cherry intact

Um, once you've actually accepted the existance of god(s), does it really require that much extra credulity to believe in virgin births?

Impregnating a woman who had never had sex with a man is easily within the reach of modern medicine; presumably it'd be a cinch for an omnipotent being.

|12.8.04 @ 9:42PM|#

"He was a real person. Jesus, but he wasn't like God, and we don't believe he is God." Slowly, Ozzie was explaining Rabbi Binder's position to Itzie, who had been absent from Hebrew School the previous afternoon.

"The Catholics," Itzie said helpfully, "they believe in Jesus Christ, that he's God." Itzie Lieberman used "the Catholics" in its broadest sense--to include the Protestants.

Ozzie received Itzie's remark with a tiny head bob, as though it were a footnote, and went on. "His mother was Mary, and his father probably was Joseph," Ozzie said. "But the New Testament says his real father was God. "

"His real father?"

"Yeah," Ozzie said, "that's the big thing, his father's supposed to be God."

"Bull."

"That's what Rabbi Binder says, that it's impossible--"

"Sure it's impossible. That stuff's all bull. To have a baby you gotta get laid," Itzie theologized. "Mary hadda get laid."

"That's what Binder says: 'The only way a woman can have a baby is to have intercourse with a man.'"

"He said that, Ozz?" For a moment it appeared that Itzie had put the theological question aside. "He said that, intercourse?" A little curled smile shaped itself in the lower half of Itzie's face like a pink mustache. "What you guys do, Ozz, you laugh or something?"

"I raised my hand."

"Yeah? Whatja say?"

"That's when I asked the question."

Itzie's face lit up. "Whatja ask about--intercourse?"

"No, I asked the question about God, how if He could create the heaven and earth in six days, and make all the animals and the fish and the light in six days--the light especially, that's what always gets me, that He could make the light. Making fish and animals, that's pretty good--"

"That's damn good." Itzie's appreciation was honest but unimaginative: it was as though God had just pitched a one-hitter.

"But making light. . . I mean when you think about it, it's really something." Ozzie said. "Anyway, I asked Binder if He could make all that in six days, and He could pick the six days he wanted right out of nowhere, why couldn't He let a woman have a baby without having intercourse."

"You said intercourse, Ozz, to Binder?"

"Yeah."

"Right in class?"

"Yeah."

Itzie smacked the side of his head.

"I mean, no kidding around, " Ozzie said, '"that'd really be nothing. After all that other stuff, that'd practically be nothing."

-----------

-- from "The Conversion of the Jews" by Philip Roth

http://www.fredonia.edu/west/pdffiles/roth.pdf

(I always loved the use of the word "theologized" here.)

|12.8.04 @ 11:26PM|#

"Um, once you've actually accepted the existance of god(s), does it really require that much extra credulity to believe in virgin births?"

Anti-semite.