Dodgy Belief Bandits: The Hawks, Pigeons and Sparrows

 

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.