Poor Alfie. He really, really is left with only numbers to evaluate. I mean, for a man that makes all these claims for paradigm shifts, he just doesn’t have the academic goods to actually theorize those shifts. You’ve got to understand the thinking behind something in order to deliver the shift away from it.
In “Do Religious People Help More?” he concludes that religion does no material good for the community based on several quantified studies. Religious people are no more altruistic.
But he does little to uncover the ideological and historical reasons for that resistance. I, as a pretty staunch conservative Evangelical myself, am neither surprised at nor proud of that conclusion. But I do understand that the premillenialism of the 20th-century (itself a reaction to the Social Gospel of the 19th century) left me and mine with a social isolationism that resisted community service. That’s what you learn in 200-level American Religious History.
Yet Alfie doesn’t trust Judeo-Christian faith as far as he can throw it. In his book Unconditional Parenting, Kohn concludes:
“While many religious people equate the idea of unconditionality with aspects of their faith, a case could be made, drawing on the holy books of Christianity and Judaism, that the deities in these religions offer the ultimate in conditional love. Both the Old and New Testaments repeatedly promise extravagant rewards for those who are properly reverant, and horrific punishments for those who aren’t. God loves you if and only if you love Him–and, in some cases, if you meet various other criteria.”
He doesn’t bother to understand the Faith or its history just like he doesn’t bother to understand its adherents or the history of their ideas. He’s simply uninformed at best or dismissive at worst.
Doesn’t sound too unconditional or respectful, if you ask me. That’s one of the things I love about being a fundy. We turn pseudo-altruism and seeming democracy on its ear. If you can’t theorize the roudiness of me, you don’t have a very good theory.