Whenever personal ideological viewpoints are challenged to the point of overturning them, one of three things tends to happen: the ideological views get abandoned, they evolve and adapt to change, or they retreat into a state of fundamentalism and are reinforced for one last fight to the death. It seems that Gleaner columnist Martin Henry is falling back on this third option given some of his recent articles.
In his article of July 7 entitled “Science and Religion: Clash of Two Faiths” Henry suggests that science has dismissed a “mountain of evidence of non-material reality” to defend its own ends. This “mountain” that Henry speaks about is more fitting as a description of his own ignorance of the material world rather than as a description of evidence for a supernatural realm. There’s nothing wrong with ignorance – it is a necessary precursor to enlightenment and new discoveries. It is promoting ignorance to the status of certainty, a famous past time of religionists, which is problematic. Henry also makes the common relational fallacy of calling modern science a “product” of Christianity, which is no different I suppose from calling Christianity the parent of modern science. Well, I would gladly accept that Christianity is the parent of science if Henry also accepts that it was a foster parent, had a relationship characterized by incessant abuse and repeated attempts at infanticide, and which ultimately ended with the child leaving the home, becoming successful and then returning to enroll the parent into a nursing home.
Henry follows up this article with “Divine Intervention for Crime” published on August 11th. In this article Henry claims that he could provide readers with “a whole battery of examples of crime reduction by divine intervention, including Kingston and across Jamaica” while constantly alluding to the need for a “revival” in Jamaica. I misinterpreted his use of the word revival; I thought he meant it in the sense of resuscitating a once successful crime prevention plan. It was only when Henry used the antics of two time mental asylum patient pastor Alexander Bedward as an example I became aware that Henry was actually talking about good old tambourine-beating, snake-handling, get-in-the-spirit revival. I shit you not.
Henry’s main argument in this article is that when the revival tents roll into town crime decreases. Oddly, he uses 100 and 200 year old examples to demonstrate this in Jamaica and the USA respectively. These examples demonstrate a simplistic and almost cartoon like understanding of crime – if criminal elements are distracted from committing crime, it means the crime problem is solved.
Clive "Cool Dude" Forrester.
