There are lots of mistaken
belief systems that depart from the facts and logic of their counterpart. The
cure to the disease is always the medicine that corrects the damaging symptoms.
The cure for atheism and false religion is Christianity; the cure for socialism
is good economics; the cure for young earth creationism is biological evolution
and sound theology; the cure for astrology is astronomy, and so forth.
But it's clear that people afflicted by dodgy belief systems are not particularly keen to take their medicine. Instead, they often take an ironically absurd view that the medicine they are being offered is really a poison. Having quite a bit of exposure over the years to proponents of these dodgy belief systems, I've observed that the members of these groups largely fall into one of three categories: what I've defined as Hawks, Pigeons and Sparrows.
Hawks
The Hawks are the ones
most heavily influencing the perversion of the truth; they are usually public
figures who use the dodgy belief systems to establish their own careers,
publish their own material, increase their own following, and widely influence
the Pigeons and the Sparrows with their distorted views of the world. Most of
the untruths and fabrications that make up these dodgy belief systems start
with the Hawks - they have a set of carefully rehearsed arguments and
statements - and their influence trickles down into the minds of the Pigeons
and Sparrows. The Hawks make up the smallest group.
Pigeons
The Pigeons are not as
influential or as damaging as the Hawks, but they establish their own perverted
influences on the basis of what the Hawks are doing. They forage around for the
scraps, and use the influences of the Hawks to share their interpretations of
the bad beliefs wherever they can. Whereas the Hawks are likely to be in
mainstream newspapers, on TV, and creating their own institutions based on the
bad beliefs, Pigeons are more like to be blogging, posting on social media and making comments in
debating groups and on other people's pages. The Pigeons make up the middle
sized group - they are much larger in number than the Hawks, but much smaller in number than the Sparrows.
Sparrows
The Sparrows are the group
that play a much more passive role in the proceedings. They have been influenced
by the Hawks and Pigeons, and they believe the same misinformed things that the
Hawks and Pigeons believe, but more as background noise, in a much more
innocent fashion. If you asked the Sparrows to explain why they believe what
they do, their answers would be circumspect, non-engaging and deferential -
usually just a brief justification of their naked assumptions, while being
unable to formulate proper justifications. The Sparrows are the main victims of
the Hawks and the Pigeons - they do not know any better, but they blindly trust
their influences, while not being wide influencers themselves. The Sparrows
make up the largest group.
You can use the basic algorithm of thinking of an individual and one of their primary dodgy beliefs, and it will usually be fairly obvious whether they are more like a Hawk, a Pigeon or a Sparrow. Consider evolution-denying creationists who hold the absurd belief that the earth is only a few thousand years old. The Hawks are people like Ken Ham (Answers In Genesis), Grady McMurtry (Creation Worldview Ministries), John Mackay (Creation Research) and Kent Hovind (Creation Science Evangelism) - the intellectual fraudsters who make a living and a career out of deceiving people, and whose false teachings gain them a significant following.
The Pigeons are those doing the most to propagate the falsehoods of the Hawk charlatans - you'll find them scattered throughout churches, writing and commentating online, telling fellow Christians how erroneous and compromising it would be to accept evolution, and being the main champions of the Hawks. The Sparrows are far more innocuous in terms of the pernicious influence of evolution denial - they are not out to cause trouble, but they are, in a sense, the biggest victims of evolution-denying creationism, as they are more numerous, and have remained uncritical enough to have swallowed the fabrications whole.
The falsehoods of those dodgy belief systems are usually equally false, whether they are spouted by Hawks, Pigeons or Sparrows - but the folk who believe in them are not all of the same influence or persuasion.
