Logical Fallacies

In the post below, I mention how a misreading of cause-and effect can cause bad things...faulty inferences...to occur. I mentioned religion as a misreading of causality. This is the old Post hoc ergo propter hoc (After the fact therefore because of the fact) fallacy. I found a good example of this as it pertained to the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Excerpt below...article here.

One of the things that fascinated me, not least because it seems to have happened in the aftermath of Krakatoa, was that [the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906] had an effect on religion. After Krakatoa, you had a lot of people who were Islamic saying this is clearly a sign from Allah. This volcano is a sign that he's angry. We must rise up and kill our rulers, the Dutch, and drive them out. And essentially they did. And one might argue that Krakatoa triggered the first militant fundamentalist Islamic uprising in the world-a long, long time before Israel 1948 and all those things. A similar thing happened in California not, however, with the Muslims but with fundamentalist Christians. There was a church down in Los Angeles in a place called Azusa Street, which was a fledgling church of people who called themselves Pentecostalists. They spoke in tongues, they waved their arms around and did all sorts of crazy things. All things that would appear to others as crazy. And all that sort of direction came about because of manifestations as they saw it from God. He would send signs down. Miracles would be called. People would, as I mentioned, talk in tongues. On the week before the San Francisco earthquake, this little church had a modest-size meeting, and a couple of people spoke in tongues, and it was all going along quite nicely, but the Pastor stood up and said we are expecting a sign from the Lord.

Three days later San Francisco, arguably the most sinful of all American cities given over to drinking and whoring and gambling and all those fun things that happened in the aftermath of the gold rush days. But a city that lived for fun, for sin was destroyed by an earthquake. And so the Pastor, not unreasonably, said, well there's no doubt about it, this is the sign from God that we've been waiting for. And suddenly this little church was overrun with people, I mean tens of thousands of people came, they had overspill locations. It became like the Crystal Cathedral that you see in Los Angeles today and the link is not actually an unreasonable one to make because out of the Pentecostalist church that began in essentially 1906 came all the great evangelical movements from Aimee Semple McPherson right through to Pat Robertson and Tammy Fay and Jim Bakker. One might argue--and I don't want to make too much of this--that the power of the Christian right and particularly the Pentecostal brand of Evangelicals has had a crucially important effect on contemporary American politics. That movement was triggered in large part by what was perceived as a sign from God on April 18, 1906. So, the downstream effects of the San Francisco earthquake, if you do say, it caused Pentecostalism, it gave us conservative Christianity, and it gave us certain political effects that are being felt around the world.

So a tectonic plate shift 100 years ago is responsible for the Bush administration. A reach but something on which to muse...