On the Canon and Trick Questions

So there was a point in late elementary school or junior high where teachers, for some reason, loved passing around sheets of trick questions. Things like "How many of each animal did Moses bring on the ark?" or "If a rooster lays an egg on the top of a slanted building, does it roll off to the east or west side?" (The first one there is especially good for catching up well-read little missionary children who will smugly explain the whole issue with the special numbers of particular animals beyond the "two by two" point while missing the twist.) After a while you start to recognize them, which breaks them--you're not really catching the twist if you already know it's there--but it's a useful thought exercise. It teaches kids that sometimes the problem lies in the question, not the suggested possible answers.

Late in high school--in my school you got to pick which Bible classes you took in the junior and senior year, having been in standardized ones until then--I took a class on Church History. Our primary textbook was a tiny dry all-text book, smaller than a standard paperback, that ran briskly through the basics. There was this conference. Some people were exiled. Another conference. People were exiled. Another conference. Books of the Bible were standardized, based on these criteria. Another conference. More exiling. The teacher (Mr. Quiring, who we adored for his strictness, wit, and vaguely British air) frequently had to stop and explain exactly what point of theology it was that people were being exiled over disagreement on, and many of them seemed to be completely unworthy of debate, much less kicking people out of the church, over.

And it was around this point that I realized a lot of the witty, clever, or otherwise smoothly presented Reasons Why Our Religion Is Totally Right that I'd been presented with earlier on were, essentially, trick questions.

See, there was this one essay or the like that was phrased as a sort of Socratic debate between a True Believer and a Non-Believer, about the books of the Bible. After all, says the believer, if you asked dozens of people over hundreds of years in wildly variant circumstances to write about similar topics, wouldn't you expect a wide variety of opinions? But look at these books! They all agree! Doesn't that prove to you that it must've been a higher power guiding them all?

...except it's a trick question. It doesn't. Dozens of people who were adherents to one religion, or to another that claimed to be its successor, wrote on similar topics. Over hundreds of years, but while occupying a fairly limited geographical region with a lot of cultural continuity in there. And the books disagree on a lot of points too. (Hell, you can, with the right quotes, make Jesus and Paul argue with each other pretty effectively.) And...it's not like these books were miraculously found all lumped together; they were deliberately chosen by a group of people who specifically picked them for adhering to what they already believed! Of course it's not surprising that they agree on the broad generalities of things!

And this was the problem with all those smug little "See, this easily and logically proves we're right!" arguments that got passed around so fervently in that community. Once you realize that one of them is actually a trick question--it's palming a card before any of the bidding starts--then all of the other look suspect, even if the trick to them isn't immediately obvious. (When someone asks "What country makes Panama hats?" you know the answer isn't going to be Panama, even if you're not quite sure where they come from.)

It was around that age that I started wondering why it was that the more I learned about Christianity, the less sure I was of any of it. Especially since I wasn't sure if those trick questions ("Christianity must be more right than Judaism, because it came afterward and improved on it!" "...but what about Islam?") were being presented that way because the people asking them were deliberately lying, or if the people asking them just...hadn't noticed the flaws in their own Clever Logical Proofs.

And I honestly don't know which it is. Which sometimes bugs me more than the actual religious debate. When I see a blatantly false and easily checked bit of "proof" being passed around, do I assume that the people passing it on are liars or fools? Or, as Fred Clark over at Slacktivist points out, the sort of people who carefully don't examine things that support what they already want to believe? (Because god knows I do that myself, sometimes.)

Did the people who gave me terrible religious proofs in childhood honestly think that I'd never see the flaws in the argument? Or did they think that by the time I realized what was wrong with those arguments, I'd be sufficiently one of the tribe to not care? (After all, something that's entirely true can be argued for with logical fallacies. It is the fallacy fallacy, to think that if something is argued badly it must inherently be false.)

These are things I think about when I'm too sick to pack or study for finals.

(And usually when I talk about religion, I get a fair number of "Religion is composed entirely of idiots who are bad people, and also stupid! So fuck them!" comments, so I will note that I'd rather people not post such. If you think so, do continue thinking so. It's your head. But that's my family you'd be talking about, and a fair number of my friends, and it makes me feel all sorts of awkward when people post hostile things about other people I love.)