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“By no means would I ever believe that evangelicals are necessarily or always or only more gullible than anyone else. What I am asking is if American evangelicals TEND to be too gullible for their own or anyone else’s good?” - Roger Olsen

Discussion

Mon, 02/12/24

I don't know if we're any worse than others, but one of my hypotheses about the relatively high level of fundagelical gullibility is that in many churches, you simply don't question what the pastor says from the pulpit--and I think this leads people to largely shut off their "nonsense detectors", at least as far as they deal with authority figures.

My favorite nonsense story is the one about the guy who crushes his son in the railroad bridge. I remember going through that story with a fine toothed comb and I found that (a) there was never such a bridge in the city mentioned, (b) there would not because the city in question (Memphis if I remember right) is on such a height that a lift bridge makes no sense, (c) the railroad signals say "stop" until the guy at the bridge changes them, and (d) there was no mention of this in newspaper archives.

On the light side, did ya hear that they took the word "gullible" out of the dictionary?

(but my kids looked in Webster's 1828, which does not feature that word....a truly lame joke ruined, sad to say)

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.