Fundamentalist Christians believe that Satan is a real being, and that he is always around, dogging people and tempting them to sin. They teach that one must always be on guard against Satan’s trickery. The Bible calls Satan, amongst other things, the father of lies, implying that Satan invented dishonesty. So you would think that said Christians would reject deceit as a recruiting tactic, seeing the use of deceit as falling for one Satan’s tricks. But on the contrary, they love deceit. As I’ve written about before, they seem to prefer it over straightforward proselytizing, because lying to people to get their attention feels dangerous and exciting, and if your lies are successful in gaining someone’s attention for a time, then it can make you feel very clever indeed. Almost as clever a liar as Satan himself!
You can see that self-congratulation for the cleverness of their deceit written all over this creationist scheme to distribute copies of “The Origin of the Species” that has a forward by Ray Comfort where he spews ignorant creationist crap and accuses Darwin of starting Nazism. The idea is clearly to “trick” people they perceive as “disciples” of Darwin and the “religion” of secularism by giving them what the fundies mistake for a holy text for atheists. This makes their deceit less clever and more, as Laura Miller notes, deeply pathetic. After all, to dupe someone, you have to have some understanding of how they tick. Treating people like they believe “The Origin of the Species” is an inviolable holy text to deceive them is about as likely to work as trying to lure college students to a witnessing invent by highlighting that there will be square dancing.
The plan, innocuously named “Origin Into Schools,” was announced this September in a video featuring Kirk Cameron, a former television child star who co-founded a ministry called Living Waters with Comfort. There’s something almost pitiable about the way Cameron crows over the scheme; he truly seems to find it ingenious. He points out that the University of California at Berkeley cannot prevent the action because “their own Web site” dictates that “anyone is free to distribute noncommercial materials in any outdoor area of the campus.” “Besides,” he gleefully adds, “what are they really going to do? Ban ‘The Origin of Species’? That would be big news! Especially when their own bookstore sells it for $29.99!”
As Miller notes, under those rules, straightforward religious tracts will also be permitted, though Cameron makes an excuse about why they have to attempt deceit, by falsely claiming that Berkeley bans religious displays. The claims that Berkeley tightly monitors nuts who show up at campus trying to push religious tracts on people was amply disproven by a story you might have heard lately---remember how Phillip Garrido, the guy who kidnapped and held Jaycee Lee Dugard for years, was caught? That’s right. He was on campus handing out pamphlets, and the Berkeley police were concerned, not because of the pamphlets, but because the two little girls with him seemed broken and malnourished. Hard to sneak that one by people. What Cameron’s lies demonstrate is that fundies have to lie to their own when engaging in tactics that involve lying to others.
By the way, even if Berkeley was super interested in censoring religious materials, all they would have to do is censor certain editions of “The Origin of the Species”. Surely Bible-thumpers who are constantly arguing about this edition of the Bible over that can grasp that.