Religion Fact Check

Victor Stenger over at HuffPo has an article titled Did the Universe Come From Nothing? in which he says …

Of course, creation ex nihilo, the creation of the universe out of nothing, is a major component of virtually all religious belief.

I don’t know Mr. Stenger’s religious views, but in my experience a person who says something that uninformed and ignorant about religious belief is most likely an atheist. They seem to feel the liberty to say anything they like about religion — and to lecture all the rest of us with their superior knowledge — without even checking some basic facts.

I’m no expert on Hinduism, but I don’t get the sense that they believe in creation from nothing. (See this for a quick and simple post on the subject.)

While I know a little bit more about Buddhism, I’m certainly no expert, but again I don’t get the sense that they believe in creation from nothing. (See this for a Buddhist take on creation.)

That’s somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the religious people in the world right there. But I guess they don’t count.

There are also about 300 million Animists out there, and I don’t think they believe in the creation of the universe from nothing.

It took me all of about a minute to look this stuff up. I certainly don’t believe that I have discovered the final answer, but it’s pretty clear that Stenger has no basis for saying that, well, “of course” creation from nothing is a component of “all” religious belief.

Mr. Stenger — do your homework!

The main stream media should just shut up about religion. It seems that whenever they talk about it they make idiots of themselves.

MSNBC’s Hardball Guest Tries To Explain Why Burning The Koran is Worse Than Burning The Bible

There are distinctions to be made in theories about how sacred texts are authored. There is dictation — where God tells the author what to write — and then there is inspiration — where God inspires the author (and may protect him from error) but the author nevertheless uses his own words.

But that has nothing to do with whether or not the resulting text is “the word of God.”

The Roman Catholic Church has been somewhat squishy and unclear on its condemnation of the death penalty, so I can understand this mistake, but still…. A decent religion editor should know better.

The Catholic Church has always held that the state may resort to the death penalty in some cases. Recently, Catholics have been been trying to narrow that “some cases” down to virtually none, saying that modern prisons and such make it unnecessary to ever execute anyone.

However, a straight-forward condemnation of the death penalty would contradict established Catholic dogma, so Catholic anti-death penalty advocates have to be careful with their language.

Some bishops in Ohio recently came out with a statement urging an end to the death penalty. If they are urging this as a matter of prudence, or as a matter of just application of the law, that’s within the bounds of Catholic moral teaching. So I suspect that this article quotes them correctly …

Our Church teachings consider the death penalty to be wrong in almost all cases.

Several other news sources also use the “almost all” or “nearly all” language.

Leave it to the HuffPo to get it wrong. This article says the bishops condemn capital punishment in all cases.

“Our church teachings consider the death penalty to be wrong in all cases,” the 10 bishops said in a statement issued Friday (Feb. 4).

I haven’t been able to find the text of the actual statement, so I can’t verify it. But either the bishops actually said that the Catholic Church condemns capital punishment in all cases (which would be false, and they should know better), or some of the reporting on their statement erred.

A friend of mine says that when the media talks about religion, you can deduct 20 I.Q. points. I think the larger problem is that the media simply doesn’t believe that fact checking applies to religious stories. Religion is an entirely personal thing, you see, so there are no facts to check.

If a story came across the editor’s desk claiming that Bill Clinton said such and so, the fact checkers would verify it. But if the story says “the Bible teachers X,” nobody seems to lift a finger to see if it’s true. It would take all of a minute to find out, but they don’t bother.

Reuters decided to start off 2011 with some good material for the “media people don’t know beans about religion” meme.

… the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

See God was behind Big Bang, universe no accident: Pope

I wonder if the editors were scheming to see how many errors they could pack into one short phrase.

First of all, the Bible doesn’t give a date for when the wise men visited Jesus.

Second, they were “magi” (wise men), not “kings.” Yes, lots of us sang “We Three Kings” as kids, but the article claims that “the Bible says” this, not that popular Christmas carols and manger scenes say this.

Third, who says there were three of them? There were gifts of “gold, frankincense and myrrh,” but that doesn’t mean there were three gift givers.

Fourth, the magi didn’t necessarily visit Jesus at the manger. In fact, it’s quite unlikely. They visited Jesus at “the house” (Mat. 2:11), and it was possibly two years later. (Remember that Herod told the soldiers to kill all the babies two and under.) Be that as it may, the Bible certainly doesn’t claim that the wise men were at the manger on Christmas, let alone set any date.

Check your facts, Reuters!