Thank God for the New York Yankees! (Yes, you heard that right)

“You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your [bleep]in' fingers and say, ‘That's the bad guy.’”—Tony Montana (Al Pacino), Scarface

The Yankees are in last place. Dead last. They lost 7 in a row last week, have currently lost 8 of 9, and stand at 9-14, a .391 winning percentage that ranks them as the third worst team in baseball, behind the perpetually putrid Nationals and Royals. As a Mets fan (and any baseball fan whose favorite team is NOT the Yankees), you would think this would bring me a measure of joy. Instead, I sit in sadness, writing this essay with a heavy heart.

Have I gone soft? Did I become one of those guys who root for all the local teams, hoping the Mets AND Yankees do well? No, I hate That Guy and so should you. There is room in America for many types of people, of all political and religious stripes, but there is no room for someone who can’t make up his mind choosing sports teams. I loath sports bigamists. For all self respecting sports fans (non-Yankees fans), you can breathe a sigh of relief. I still despise the Yankees. I still think Derek Jeter is the most overrated player (and the worst defensive shortstop) in baseball. I still hate that corporate arrogance espoused by all Yankees fans who choose to not hate other teams back, but rather condescendingly pity them. Boston fans know this like no other.

I simultaneously maintain my hatred of all things Yankee while lying in a state of dismay over the Yankees poor season start. You see, it’s not just that I hate the Yankees; I ENJOY hating the Yankees. But there needs to be a reason to hate them. I hate them because they spend way more money than all the other teams, they win 90 games and make the playoffs every year, and their fans condescend to you. I hate them because they act like they are entitled to championships, when I would be willing to trade getting stuck on a deserted island with Jessica Alba just for the chance to see the Mets win one title during my young adulthood. If the Yankees suck (a distinction from the YANKEES SUCK T-shirts, which imply sucking in the metaphorical sense described above; I’m talking literally now, in a wins and losses sense), then they become the Royals or the Arizona Cardinals or the L.A. Clippers. They would be objects of pity, not hate. Hate is enjoyable. Pity sucks the life out of both the pit-ee and the pity-er.

Sports are a metaphor for life (maybe not, but they should be). There are villains in real life, and there are bad guys in sports, real life’s metaphor. The Yankees, Duke basketball, and Notre Dame football serve as the athletic enemies of all things good and sporting. They have much wider fan bases than their geographical bases deserve. But, with other sports teams that have large fan networks extending beyond a team’s natural sphere of interest, they don’t harbor neutral feelings from other teams fans. No true sports fan is neutral to Duke, Notre Dame, or the Yankees. If you are not a direct fan, then you scorn the Blue Devils, Irish, and Bronx Bombers with your whole fiber of existence. Nothing is more enjoyable, save rooting for your own team and seeing your own team win, than rooting against the Yankees, Irish, and Blue Devils, and seeing them lose. Even if, say, you are a North Carolina fan, and you need Duke to beat Wake Forest to guarantee your Tar Heels first place, you will still root for Wake to defeat Duke. If you are a Red Sox fan, and the Yankees have the opportunity to beat, say, the Blue Jays and guarantee your beloved Boston a playoff spot, you will still root against the Yanks out of spite.

The paradox in this desire to see the Yankees, Notre Dame, and Duke lose is that in order to maintain this enjoyable hatred, they must NOT lose. They need to win—early, often, and regularly—or that hatred will recede. No one wants to see the Yankees win, but if they did not have those 26 World Series banners hanging in The House That Ruth Built, we wouldn’t hate them. Every good-hearted college basketball fan would not hate Duke if Mike Krzyzewski did not take them to 3 National Titles and countless Final Fours the past two decades. Deep down, even though we hate them, we wouldn’t really want them to lose.

The common man’s hatred of all things Yankee, Duke, and Notre Dame does not come just from their constant winning. It’s the way they win. There are other good basketball programs, such as Kansas, Kentucky, and UCLA. But Duke coach Krzyzewski can’t just win, he has to go on every commercial and rub it in our faces that he does things the “right” way, that he recruits true scholar athletes, and he gets all the clean cut polished McDonald’s All-Americans to sign with his program.

Nebraska, Penn State, and USC all have great football programs. But Notre Dame is hated because they are ALWAYS on TV, they are always played up in the media as college football royalty, and they always get to go to whatever bowl game they want, without the requirement to join a conference like every other major program in the country.

The Yankees can’t just win multiple pennants. We must constantly be bombarded with their “aura” of greatness, and we can’t go two commercial breaks without hearing about Babe Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, and Jeter.

So we don’t hate the Yankees just because they win. We hate them because of those other “qualities” that are rubbed in our faces. But, the catch is, they have to win, or else they would be an object of pity. All those annoying Yankee traits, such as not allowing the players to have facial hair, and no names on the jersey (as if that makes them better than other teams), would be still engendering nothing more than pity from us if they didn’t win. We can see this with Notre Dame. Hatred still exists, but it doesn’t seethe like Yankee or Duke hatred. Notre Dame hasn’t won a National Title in almost two decades, and hasn’t been relevant since the Bush I administration. Duke’s last title in 2001, and the Yanks last in 2000 are at least fresh in our minds. They are close enough to keep that hatred fueled.

In the 1990’s Duke won back-to-back titles with Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, and Grant Hill, and the Yankees won 4 titles in 5 years with the emergence of Derek Jeter and Joe Torre. Thankfully, this first decade of the 2000’s has been a reprieve from the horrific ‘90’s. Duke and the Yankees have been right where we want them to be. Duke is always ranked number one most of the season, and gets a top seed in the NCAA Tournament, only to lose in the Sweet 16, letting us bask in the glory of watching Coach Krzyzewski crying, hugging his token graduating white All-American senior (the role played in 2006 by J.J. Redick). The Yankees always sign the big name free agent who isn’t quite right for the team, and coast to the playoffs, where they choke and get upset before the World Series, leading George Steinbrenner to do his annual re-evaluation. They are good enough for us to hate, but not quite good enough for them to rub it in on us. But this year—2007—might ruin that.

Duke had a mediocre season and got upset in the first round in a game that really shouldn’t even be considered an upset. The Yankees have pitched 4 rookie starters and look like they will be lucky to get out of last place, let alone make the playoffs. If Charlie Weis can’t finally return Notre Dame to national title contender, there will be no one left to hate. This is a real existential crisis. We need our sports villains. The Yankees are That Guy at school who always gets the pretty girls. You know who I’m talking about. Billy Zabka played That Guy in The Karate Kid and a host of other ‘80’s teen movies. He is That Guy who goes to the gym with his hair perfectly gelled, and looks at himself flexing in the mirror. He is That Guy who always has that smile on his face that says “I know I’m getting the girl tonight, so me being nice to you is my way of looking down at you because you aren’t me.” We might think we’d be better of without him, but we need That Guy as an object of hate (and we know, realistically, if he wasn’t around, the pretty girls still wouldn’t go for us. They would conveniently happen to be in that period where they are “taking a break from dating”). But, here’s the caveat: we want That Guy to get the pretty girls. We want him to get all the pretty girls except for one. We DON’T want him to get the pretty girl we like (in case you couldn’t tell, I’ve been using the “Royal We” for some time now. By “we” I mostly mean “me”).

If That Guy couldn’t get the pretty girls, there would be no reason to hate him. He would be the Royals or the Clippers. And if he were the Royals or Clippers, and he did get the pretty girl, we couldn’t possible be mad. It would be like—you guessed it—seeing the Royals come out of nowhere to win the World Series. True, I would be disappointed like every other season the Mets don’t win it. But, it’s nice to see an underdog win and it’s always nice to see the Yankees NOT win the World Series. Sports fans collectively felt this in 2006 when the Tigers erased a decade of mediocrity with a trip to the World Series. So no, we don’t want to see That Guy go without. We want him to get pretty girls, just not the pretty girl of our dreams. And what if he does get the pretty girl of our dreams? What if That Guy ends up on top of the world, like the 1991-1992 Duke Blue Devils or the 1996-2000 Yankees? We can pray that he made a deal with the devil and has to pay some sort of price. As painful as it is to have seen the Yankees win the World Series 4 times in 5 years, it has been an utter delight to see them give up their team-first philosophy, buy me-first superstar free agents, and start losing every year in the playoffs. As awful as it was to see Duke go to all those Final Fours, every basketball fan can take solace in the fact that Duke superstars end up sucking in the NBA. Hello, Christian Laettner? If That Guy does get the pretty girl of our dreams, we can always hope he gets fat and bald and still wears his Varsity jacket at the 20-year class reunion.

The catch: there is always a fine line that must be balanced. The object of hatred (The Yankees/That Guy) must be good enough and obnoxious enough to warrant loathing, but not good enough to rub it in. But, even this does not suffice. If the Yankees continue this streak of going to the playoffs and losing, they will become the Buffalo Bills and Atlanta Braves, objects of laughter, not hate. As much as it hurts to see them win the World Series, they need to win another one soon, or risk declining as an object of hate. Then again, maybe that is good thing. Yankees fans seem to enjoy our hatred of them. What could be better than having the opportunity to give them some condescending pity, a taste of their own medicine?

The Death of Words

A beautiful woman walks down the street. Her radiant smile accentuates her wavy hair, brown eyes, shapely curves, hourglass figure, and perfect breasts and butt. That freckle on her left cheek sends me into a deep blush (you can tell I’m not a romance novelist). She is flanked on one side by a Rachel Dratch look-a-like, and, if I’m not mistaken, on the other side by a cross between Rosie O’Donnell and Roseanne.

“That woman in the middle is beautiful,” I say, mouth wide open, salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the ring of a bell.

“What about her two friends?” asks my female companion.

“They fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

“You are so judgmental,” huffs my female companion. “How can you call the one girl beautiful and not the other two? You are only looking at outward appearance. It is inner beauty that matters.”

The above conversation is fictional, but similar discussions happen all the time. One person will describe as beautiful someone’s outward appearance, while another will say that it is inner beauty, what the eye cannot see, that really matters. Yes, in the deepest, ‘truest’, sense, it is inner beauty that matters. But if we start using words in their ‘truest’ sense, they risk losing descriptive power and become meaningless.

We all know the word “gentleman.” Gentleman comes from the Latin “gentiles,” meaning a man from a good family. It later came to be a descriptive word for a man of noble rank or honor. Unfortunately, not all “gentlemen” acted virtuously or treated others honorably. Because of this, people began to say that the mark of a ‘true’ gentleman is not his official title or rank, but the way he treats others. While this is ‘true’ in the deepest sense, the unfortunate result is that now the word “gentleman” is nothing more than a synonym for nice guy. It no longer has descriptive power.

Similarly, the word “Christian” faces this same danger. In its descriptive sense, “Christian” is a word we apply to one who believes in Jesus Christ and the teachings of Christianity. Rightfully, it is pointed out that any ‘true’ Christian is a good person who serves others. But again, focusing exclusively on the ‘truest’ sense of the word can lead to “Christian,” like “gentleman,” becoming a synonym for nice person and no longer helpful in describing any particular person.

Why do we take previously descriptive terms such as gentleman, Christian, and beauty, strip them of their outwardly descriptive power, and find their ‘truest’ sense by turning them into synonyms for internal characteristics such as ‘good’ or ‘honorable?’ For, there are many descriptive words that become synonyms for value judgments. Old-fashioned rarely means “antique” or “from the past.” It now means “not as good as the things we use now.” “Medieval” no longer means “from the Middle Ages.” It means “bad” or “intolerant” or any other negative term you can think of. “Modern” and “current” no longer mean “pertaining to the present day.” They are synonyms for “good” or “worthy.”

I think it is a combination of relativism and conceit. Because of moral and cultural relativism, we no longer believe in any absolute value for concepts such as “good” or “bad.” God forbid we say one thing is better or worse than another. In reality, we cannot escape making value judgments. If we never decided that one thing is better than another, we would never make any decisions. So, to be fashionable, we substitute words like “modern” to describe the things we like and call those awful traits “medieval” and those backward people “dinosaurs,” because what can be further in the past (meaning what can be worse)?

Don’t take it from me. Take it from a great classic author (Yes, classic means in the past, but things from the past can be as good as, if not better than, modern things). C.S. Lewis, in the book “On Stories and Other Essays on Literature,” writes a great essay titled “The Death of Words.” For a better understanding of this issue, I recommend you read it, since he is a far greater and far more entertaining writer than I.

Don Imus and Rutgers

Last week, radio shock-jock Don Imus tried to be funny by calling the national runner-up Rutgers women's basketball team a bunch of "nappy-haired ho's." He got fired, first by MSNBC then by CBS radio, and has done a constant stream of mea culpas. to help our national healing, the Today Show has brought out Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Spike Lee, Tavis Smiley, and Cornel West to give their two cents.

I haven't been sure what to think about this, but African American sportwriter Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star (and formerly of ESPN) has some great words to share. I encourage you to read his column: http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html

Get Anyone to do Anything, by David Lieberman, PhD

What do women want? What do men want? David Lieberman, a man I never heard of, but a nationally recognized leader in the field of human behavior, told me (in his book) how to make people like me, how to get girls to be attracted to me, how to get people to listen to me, how to get people to do what I want, and how to win in gambling. And if I found his book at Barnes & Noble instead of the public library, he could have made $12.95 off me too.

Familiarity does NOT breed contempt, says Lieberman. We like someone more if she is around all the time. We like people who show an interest in us. And, we like people who talk to us when we are in a good mood, since it causes us to associate them with happy feelings. If you want to be liked, go up to that charming fellow, compliment him on his fashion tastes, and take your coffee break at the same time and place each day… but only on days he is smiling.

That is all well and good, but I think most of us knew that anyway, from experience. The fun part is Chapter 2, “Get Anyone to Find You Instantly Attractive.” This chapter I shall parse point by point. These are the six points: “Emotional Arousal,” “Walking Styles,” “Gazing into a Person’s Eyes,” “The Law of Contrast and Association,” “Self-Esteem and Attraction,” and “Reciprocal Liking.”

People get turned on, says Lieberman, when they engage in adrenaline building activities, like watching scary movies and riding roller coasters. If you hang out with a pretty girl (or boy) when she is doing something like this, you will automatically be more attractive to her. We are also turned on by youth, so if you walk like a young person and have good posture, this won’t hurt. Make sure, too, to gaze into the other person’s eyes. Do this and she will be instantly smitten. These all seem fine; the youth one is true for sure (I was attracted to 18-22 year old girls my freshman year of college, and I still am), I never thought about the adrenaline thing, and the eye gazing thing seems like it might be a little stalker-ish.

Point four, the “Law of Contrast and Association,” is where Lieberman gets interesting. How should I meet girls? Should I hit up the bar scene with four or five of my studly buddies, hoping to entice a beauty’s eye with attraction by association? No, says Lieberman. Bringing good-looking buddies makes you look bad in comparison.

Maybe I should go clubbing with a group of ugly friends. Would that catch a babe’s eye by making me look good in contrast? One would think so based on the previous example, but ugly friends in reality make you look worse than you are. It’s bad to go chick-hunting with Zack Morris and A.C. Slater, and it’s just as bad to look for chicks with Screech Powers.

What is the right approach to meeting women? Leave the friends at home, says Lieberman, and go out by yourself! Or, if you have to bring a wingman or two, make sure they are in your range. Nobody too handsome or too ugly.

Of course, this applies only to bringing friends of the same sex. If a guy is going to hit the town with female friends, not only can they be extremely attractive, it is best for them to be. This will make other girls find him better looking.

Point five is all about self-esteem. But, not in the way I would have thought (I have been told in real life by girls who rejected me that I don’t have enough confidence and self-esteem). Lieberman does NOT say that boosting your own self-esteem will make you more attractive to others. What he does say is someone with low self-esteem is more likely to be attracted to a person she meets. Why do you think there are so many rebound daters?

Of course! I need to seek out women with low self-esteem. The emotionally stable ladies don’t need me to make them feel good.

Point six, the final point, “Reciprocal Liking,” I completely agree with. When we find out that someone we find attractive is interested in us, we automatically find this person more appealing. This is definitely true for me personally. In high school, I had some crushes on girls who never gave me the time of day, but every romantic interest since then has been a girl I initially found pretty who, after meeting me, was nice to me, friendly, and showed an interest in getting to know me and stay in touch with me (The flip side, for me personally, is that if an unattractive person shows interest, I will still not be attracted to her).

Based on this chapter, this is what I now must do to get a girlfriend: leave my guy friends at home, call up my attractive female friends, bring them to an amusement park, walk with good posture, find a pretty girl with low self-esteem, gaze into her eyes and invite her on the roller coaster, then seal the deal by saying, “I like you.”

Once I do this, will I live happily ever after? Not so fast, says Lieberman in Chapter 4, “Get the Instant Advantage in Every Relationship.” If you are too available, she will leave you for someone more mysterious. People want what they can’t have. So make yourself distant. Always let her know that there are many other fish in the sea just waiting to be caught. She is more likely to keep vying for your love knowing she can be thrown back in the sea if need be.

Guys, if you want a girlfriend (and girls, if you want a boyfriend), follow this advice: leave your same-sex pals at home, call up the good looking opposite sex friends, go some place where you can get an adrenaline rush (or bring a case of Mountain Dew), strut like you mean it, meet that pretty person with low self-esteem, stare into her eyes, and give her a Mountain Dew or Red Bull. Make sure you finish the night by professing your undying love with the caveat that you will always keep your options open. This, my friends, is the path to true love.

Positive Attitudes

We all know John Belushi’s samurai sandwich server, Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri’s cheerleaders, Will Ferrell’s James Lipton, the Coneheads, the Ladies Man, the Night at the Roxbury boys, Wayne’s World, and Chris Farley’s motivational speaker Matt Foley. Some became real bad movies, some didn’t. But they were all recurring skits on Saturday Night Live. Sadly, the talent and writing have gone way down on the show, almost to the point of unwatchability. One of the few watchable current sketches is a recurring skit called Debbie Downer. Rachel Dratch plays Debbie, always ready with a depressing response to any joyous news brought by friends, followed a trombone-played “wah-wah.”

“You’re enjoying your day
Everything’s going your way
Then along comes Debbie Downer

Always there to tell you ‘bout a new disease.
A car accident or killer bees
You’ll beg her to spare you, ‘Debbie, Please!’
But you can’t stop Debbie Downer!”

We all know a Debbie Downer. We probably know many. This got me thinking…you know, in an introspective sort of way: “Am I a positive person?”

I just read a book called “Get Anyone to Do Anything,” by David Lieberman, PhD. I will discuss the book in greater detail in a later blog entry, but a key point in an early chapter on getting people to like you is the insightful comment: people like positive people. We like to be around, and we like to become friends with, positive and happy people. Which brings me back to my question: Am I a positive person?

When I am around people, playing games, having discussions, eating dinner, and everything else people do together, I am positive. I always smile and make people feel comfortable. But, when I write (which I do a lot, probably too much; most of my writing I don’t even post online), I tend to be negative and critical. I point something out, and critique or make fun of it. Why is that? Why do I turn critical when I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard)?

I think when it comes to the written word it is natural to find conflict. Conflict drives narrative. Especially in fiction, we like to see a problem followed by either a resolution or a complete fall. The protagonist is attacked by bad guys, or is in love with the meathead’s girlfriend, or even does something himself to cause problems, and the story plays out through his quest to resolve the conflict. We close with a happy ending, a tragedy, or stuck in neutral with an option for a sequel.

Even in non-fiction, conflict drives narrative. It is much easier to write about what’s wrong with the world than to glowingly praise the pretty daisies in the backyard. It need not be this way, though. If we look hard enough, there are many things to praise. In my opening anecdote, instead of getting a jab in about the demise of SNL, I could have praised the show’s ability to keep churning out skits week after week.

Beginning now, I will make an effort to write more positively. Even though you won’t see it, I will have a smile on my face as my fingers hit the keys. I will look for the good in situations. I will compliment people as much as possible, even if I have to occasionally give backhanded compliments (example: ARod’s purple lips aren’t that big when compared to Barney the Dinosaur’s)

Short Stories

I will continue to post blogs on this site, but I have added another blog where I will post short stories and other assorted items. The link to the site is http://seanshortstories.blogspot.com/

By short stories, I mean short stories. I will make sure that each story can be read somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes. If a story is too long, I will cut it into parts and post it separately.

Enjoy!

The Ugliest Baseball Player Ever

I could talk all day about ugly professional athletes. The Major Leagues, the NFL, and the NBA are filled with them, to the point I could write an ugly athlete essay without even mentioning the WNBA. I even wrote about this subject a year ago in my blog entry “Ugly as Sin” (http://spidgetales.blogspot.com/2006/04/ugly-as-sin.html). But when we talk ugly, 1950’s baseball player Don Mossi takes the cake. I would describe him to you, but I’ll instead let baseball writer Bill James do the honors:

“The Man Who Invented Ugly” by Bill James. From his Historical Abstract

“I always kind of identified with Don Mossi. Don Mossi had had two careers as a major league pitcher, one as a reliever and one as a starter, and he was pretty darn good both times. No one who saw him play much remembers that, because Mossi’s ears looked as if they had been borrowed from a much larger species, and reattached without proper supervision. His nose was crooked, his eyes were in the wrong place, and though he was skinny he had no neck to speak of, just a series of chins that melted into his chest. An Adam’s apple poked out of the third chin, and there was always a stubble of beard because you can’t shave a face like that. He looked like Joe Torre escaped from Devil’s island…

Don Mossi was the complete five-tool ugly player. He could run ugly, hit ugly, throw ugly, field ugly and ugly for power. He was ugly to all fields. He could ugly behind the runner as well as anybody, and you talk about pressure…man, you never saw a player who was uglier in the clutch.”

The Dubious Babe Ruth Homerun/Strikeout Ratio Analogy

Babe Ruth hit 714 homeruns. He reigned as baseball’s home run king from the day he passed the previous mark in the early 1920’s until Hank Aaron passed him in 1974. To this day, Babe Ruth stands at an impressive third on the all-time list. Along with his 714 homeruns, he struck out 1330 times.

Motivational speakers and others who know absolutely nothing about baseball bring these two stats up when advising people to move beyond their failures and strive for success. “Look,” they will say, “Babe Ruth struck out almost twice as often as he homered. This means the Babe saw every two strikeouts as a step toward his next homerun. Think of your failures as steps on the road to success, too.”

The assumption implicit in this analogy is that offense in baseball is comparable to, say, offense in basketball. A made jump shot or lay-up is a success, and a missed shot an equivalent failure. Similarly, in baseball, the analogy maker assumes, a homerun must be the sign of success and a strikeout the sign of failure. In the absolute simplest terms, a homerun is a successful end result of an at-bat for a hitter and a strikeout is a failure. However, they are not proportional and to say that someone who strikeouts more than he homers fails more than he succeeds is simply not true.

A homerun hit is a successful at-bat. It certainly is the most successful at-bat a player can have in any one trip to the plate. Yet, there are plenty of other ways to succeed at bat. A single can drive in other base runners, or set the hitter up to be driven in by the next batter. Doubles and triples do likewise. The most underappreciated offensive stat, the walk, puts a hitter on base just as solidly as a single. Even a batted out such as a grounder to the second baseman or a deep fly ball to center can advance other runners and not be entirely futile. There are many ways to succeed. Would we conclude that the hitter who hits one homerun, four singles, two doubles, yet strikes out three times in twenty trips to the plate has failed more than he has succeeded because his strikeouts triple his homerun output? No way.

And, to label the strikeout as the epitome of failure is untrue, as well. It is just one, among many, ways of making an out. A batted ball to a fielder results in an out, too. When no runner is on base, an out is an out is an out, whether the batter strikes out, grounds out, or pops up. A batted out is only superior to a strikeout when it advances a runner. Sometimes, a strikeout is less damaging than a batted out. It is better to strikeout than ground into a double play. Plus, a strikeout uses up more of the opposing pitcher's stamina than a groundout on the first pitch. As a former pitcher myself, known for wild streaks, I would rather the batter weakly hit the first pitch than have to attempt to throw three out of six pitches over the plate for strikes and risk a walk.

The truth is every player strikes out more than he homers. It is the rare player who even has a season or two with more homers than K’s. Yet, there is a truth to the notion that a batter fails more often than he succeeds. A great hitter is seen as someone with a .300 batting average and .400 on-base percentage, which means he hits safely (gets a base hit; a batted ball that the fielders are unable to put him out on) only 3 times every 10 at bats and reaches base safely only 4 times every 10 times to the plate. Every player fails at the plate more than he succeeds. If a motivational speaker wishes to use a baseball analogy to show how even the greatest players fail more often than they succeed, the correct analogy is hits to at-bats, not homeruns to strikeouts.

Should Non-Believers Teach Religious Studies?

In 1971, Jerry Falwell founded tiny Lynchburg Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Today, that school, now known as Liberty University, has grown into a school of 9,558 undergrads and 4,192 grads (if Wikipedia stats are correct) and competes at the Division I sports level, even sending its basketball team to the NCAA Tournament a few times. The goal, according to Falwell, is to turn Liberty into the Evangelical counterpart to the Catholic Notre Dame University. Liberty wishes, like Notre Dame, to rise beyond the status of religiously affiliated school and rank also as a premier academic and athletic school. In addition to developing a steadily rising athletic program (don’t think Liberty won’t jump from the mid-major Big South Conference to the ACC or SEC if it ever gets the chance), Liberty is seeking out professors with PhD’s from top-notch academic institutions as a way of cementing its legitimacy. But, what happens when a PhD from a Yale or Harvard does not believe in the tenets of the degree he was awarded?

Marcus Ross, according to the New York Times article “Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules (2/12/07),” received his PhD in Paleontology from the University of Rhode Island. He turned this degree into a professorship at Liberty University, helping Falwell “show” the world that Liberty is serious about hiring top-notch faculty. But, Dr. Ross is a creationist who believes in a less than 10,000 year old earth. Is it appropriate for a professor teaching college students about the age of dinosaurs to believe that the earth was created millions of years after dinosaurs were proven to go extinct?

Ross, in his dissertation, accepted the findings of science in describing the disappearance of the mosasaur at the end of the Cretaceous era 65 million years ago. He gave his dissertation advisors what they wanted to hear in order to get his degree, even though he believes that what he studied in grad school is bullshit.

Is it right for someone to teach a subject to students that he regards as false? Thankfully, we don’t see this happen much in fields of science. One would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of creationists teaching evolutionary biology, paleontology, or a number of other fields that go on the notion that evolution happened. But, unfortunately, this academic dishonesty is prevalent in Religious Studies, Biblical Studies, and Theology.

Sadly, Divinity Schools and Theology departments are riddled with professors who deny the Virgin Birth, the historicity of the miracles of Jesus, or His Resurrection. They see the Bible as solely riddled with mythology, parables, and metaphor. Are these the right people to mold the minds of the next generation of Protestant ministers and Catholic priests? Notre Dame professor, and known Catholic dissenter, Fr. Richard McBrien noted the NY Times story on Ross by raising the fear of fundamentalist Theology students getting degrees and infiltrating the teaching ranks. Yes, that is a risk; but the bigger risk comes not from the handful of fundamentalists who deny any form of biblical criticism. The greater risk comes from the John Shelby Spongs, Elaine Pagels’s, Robert Funks, and Jesus Seminar people of the academic world who take biblical criticism too far to the point of denying any real religious truth claims; truth claims that are the entire reason for studying religion in the first place.

It is no more appropriate for a non-believer to teach Religious Studies than it is for a creationist to teach Biology, Paleontology, or Archeology.