The Inheritance of Beliefs!

Satoshi Kanaza­wa is a blog­ger at Psy­chol­o­gy Today. He blogs about evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy. Not every­thing he has post­ed has sound­ed right to me, but some of it seems OK. But enough is enough.

the fact that Barack Obama’s father was a Mus­lim Kenyan, descend­ed from a long line of Mus­lims, will remain true until the day he dies, and noth­ing he ever does in his life can change half of his genes that he inher­it­ed from his father. His genes are for keeps. The fact that he has attend­ed Chris­t­ian church for the past 20 years is not going to change that…Obama is still as (half) Mus­lim as the day he was born.

It would seem that Mr. Kanaza­wa con­fus­es eth­nic­i­ty with reli­gious belief. And yes, Mr. Kanaza­wa is talk­ing about reli­gion here…

34% state [Oba­ma] is a Chris­t­ian (down from 48% in March 2009). It is dis­heart­en­ing to know that 34% of the pop­u­la­tion has a dim under­stand­ing of human genet­ics.

This does open a door to an out if and when peo­ple become embar­rassed about claim­ing that Oba­ma is Mus­lim. Now they can say that they sim­ply meant that his eth­nic­i­ty is Mus­lim (although I do not believe that Mus­lims con­sti­tute an eth­nic­i­ty, but why be con­cerned with details at this point).

2 thoughts on “The Inheritance of Beliefs!”

  1. I would guess that if being born to Mus­lim par­ents, makes you Muslim…

    Then being born of Chris­t­ian par­ents, makes you a Christian.

    So, appar­ent­ly, the only thing one has to do, to be guar­an­teed of going to heav­en, is to have the good sense to be born of Chris­t­ian parents.

    There are fun­da­men­tal dis­par­i­ties between the truth, and/​or com­mon sense, and what this guy is saying.

    He knows it. And he is count­ing on enough peo­ple to not pay atten­tion, that he will be tak­en seriously.

    Pret­ty much like sleight-of-hand tricks. What you ‑thought- you saw was not what the magi­cian ‑real­ly- did…

  2. There’s actu­al­ly a doc­trine preva­lent in the more Reformed strains of Chris­tian­i­ty where­in “covenant chil­dren” — or chil­dren born to Chris­t­ian par­ents — are assumed to be includ­ed in the New Covenant as well.

    Although I have a feel­ing I’m gross­ly sim­pli­fy­ing that one.

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