Atheists like to talk of the hypocrisy of believers as it were practically impossible to find someone who lived their faith to the fullest. Moreover, they proclaim it as if they were under no demand of intellectual honesty or scientific rigor to prove the near-universality of the flaw. And in one sense, they don’t; when there are no well-policed borders between the merely inconsistent and the duplicitous, even the best-intentioned efforts to deal with an often messy reality can be portrayed as two-faced.
(Case in point: Gov. Sarah Palin’s support for her pregnant teenaged daughter. If she had thrown the young baggage out on the curb for her bad judgment, the governor would have been cited for her un-Christian self-righteousness and lack of mercy. Not having done so, she’s taken to task for supposedly giving an implicit OK to teen pregnancy at odds with the rest of her political message. Having hummed a few bars, I’m sure you can fake the rest of the song.)
