Authoritarianism, Religion, and Evolution

Posted on August 20, 2006 by mikethemadbiologist

Over at Orcinus, guest blogger Sara Robinson has a series of posts (I, II, & III) about the psychology of the authoritarian mindset, and how this affects communication with many religious conservatives. The posts are definitely worth a read in and of themselves, but I want to throw open for discussion what these ideas mean (if anything) for the evolution political controversy.
Is there anything from these posts we can learn about how to communicate, about what should be and should not be communicated, and about who the best communicators would be?

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3 Responses to Authoritarianism, Religion, and Evolution

  1. Corkscrew says:
    August 20, 2006 at 7:55 pm

    I think the primary thing I learned is that I’m kidding myself if I think I stand any chance of changing a fundie’s mind by reasoned debate. That’s a conclusion I’d been resisting for some time.
    The other main thing was that psychology and sociology are a lot more practical than I took them for 🙂

  2. The Christensen Squad says:
    August 21, 2006 at 8:49 am

    Of course, the problem is that the authoritarian mindset afflicts the left as well, and especially atheists.
    Bakunin (the real father of terrorism in the modern age) Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot;, all were committed…even fanatical…atheists who were first rate examples of authoritarians.
    All hated religion, and were dedidcated to eliminating it, even when doing so adversely affected their other political programs.
    Only Stalin let up when he found it expedient to do so during the war, and quckly put the clamps down again when he got what he wanted. (Nobel Prize winner Solzhenitsyn details this brilliantly in The Gulag Archipelageo.)
    So to paraphrase Corkscrew, theists are of course kidding themselves if the think they can have ANY kind of discussion with fundamentalist atheists like Dawkins, Dennet, or even Sam Harris (who hates religion with a passion unequaled but ironically goes off on his own mystical tangent) that will not turn into an insult and riducule fest.
    Whatever.

  3. skunqesh says:
    August 22, 2006 at 12:46 am

    oh, the irony..

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