Yes, everyone’s favorite fraudulent historian is back again… and again he’s back in a big way.  Seems he believes that people on welfare wouldn’t be on welfare if they simply read their bible.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a study between those that are on welfare and see how much and how often they read the Bible. You know, if Booker T. Washington is right that Christianity and reading the Bible increases your desires and therefore your ability for hard work; if we take that as an axiom, does that mean that the people who are getting government assistance spend nearly no time in the Bible, therefore have no desire, and therefore no ability for hard work? I could go a lot of places with this. I would love to see this proven out in some kind of  sociological study, but it makes perfect sense

PoliticsUSA did a great job of dismantling this asinine bit of verbal and mental glop from Barton.

He says something that has not been proven – what they call a false premise – and that gets him in immediate trouble: “if Booker T. Washington is right that Christianity and reading the Bible increases your desires and therefore your ability for hard work…”

He hasn’t established that this is true but he is already running ahead of himself and using the assumption that it is true as the basis for a further study, that people who read their Bibles and practice Christianity are less likely to be on welfare. Proving that people on welfare don’t read their Bibles isn’t going to prove Booker T. Washington’s thesis that Christianity and the Bible make you work harder. Those are two entirely different theses.

Unfortunately for Barton, a Socioeconomic Status (SES) study on this topic, from Oxford University, has already been performed.

Surprise, surprise… the results were the exact opposite of Barton’s thesis.

That study concluded that “The findings challenge the view that SES is uniformly associated with lower levels of beliefs about God‘s engagement and causal relevance. “ In fact, the author of the study looks at “the hypothesis that SES is associated negatively with beliefs about divine involvement and control. That is, individuals with lower levels of SES should tend to report the highest levels of belief in divine involvement and control.”

The problem for Barton is that this study at least shows “individuals with high SES tend to report the lowest levels of belief in divine control.” In other words, in simplistic Bartonian terms it’s the people who are well off who don’t read their Bible.

Why do people still listen to this charlatan?

Related articles

• The Tendentious David Barton (scottpaeth.typepad.com)
• Once again, Barton falsely claims the Constitution reflects the Bible ‘verbatim’ (secularnewsdaily.com)