Source: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2004/time-time-time/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 22:21:56+00:00

Document:
One side effect of all this blathering I do at B&W is that I get a lot of correspondence, and get tangled up in protracted email discussions and debates. In fact, having said that, I’m reminded that Jerry S told me that would happen, a couple of years ago, after he’d thought of B&W and invited me to participate but long before he’d created it. There was an interval of a few months when B&W was an Idea but not yet a Reality – and sometime during that interval he had an amusing exchange with some indignant reader of TPM Online (someone in Prague, it seems to me, but that could be wrong – my memory isn’t up to much). He told me about it and then added something like ‘Just think, soon you’ll be having amusing exchanges like this too!’ And he was right.
Some are more amusing than others though. Some just get tedious, like trying to escape from underneath a duvet the size of Delaware. That’s especially true, obviously enough, when they’re entirely futile – which is one reason I avoid discussions with religious zealots. Because they tend to be futile, and time and energy are so very finite, and I have so very many other things to do. And yet – strange to say, I still have correspondents who try to convince me that such discussions are not futile. That discussion, any discussion, is always and invariably healthy and useful and productive, and the source, ultimately, of truth. I don’t believe a word of it.
The reason I don’t believe a word of it is that not everyone knows how to argue and discuss, and that trying to discuss things with people who don’t know how and refuse to learn does not produce truth, it only distorts. PZ Myers talked about this problem at Pharyngula last week, in a post on a debate between Michael Shermer and Kent Hovind.
I heard from someone who attended…that the recent debate between the skeptic Michael Shermer and the creationist fraud Kent Hovind was a debacle, and that Hovind walked all over Shermer…Shermer is right that if the debate were judged on technical merit and accuracy and logic, all the sorts of things scientists are good at, he was a winner. There is no logical, accurate creationist science. If you read any account of any of Hovind’s talks, you have to conclude that the man is freaking insane and dishonest, but—and this is the scary part—that doesn’t matter.
The problem is that this is not an intellectual exercise, it is an emotional drama. For scientists, the dramatis personae are evolutionists v. creationists, the former of whom have an impregnable fortress of evidence that converges to an unmistakable conclusion; for creationists, however, the evidence is irrelevant. This is a spiritual war, whose combatants are theists v. atheists, spiritualists v. secularists, Christians v. Satanists, godfearing capitalists v. godless communists, good v. evil…Thus, I now believe it is a mistake for scientists to participate in such debates and I will not do another.
So at least I’m not the only one who thinks the whole thing is at best futile and at worst a train-wreck. Because the two parties do not play by the same rules. To put it bluntly, one side feels some obligation to the truth and the other feels none, but just yells out any old thing that pops into its head, no matter how dishonest. Then it wonders what on earth you mean when you talk about asymmetry. That’s when it’s time to remember how finite time is and how many other things there are to do.
I remember that. It was Prague. It was the guy who hated the fact that I seemingly kept selecting anti-religioun quotes for the TPM Online quotations service.
And he kept saying – “but you shouldn’t be biased”. And I kept saying, what do you mean, of course I’m going to be biased, this is about propaganda, and it’s going out to 10,000 people.
The irony was that I wasn’t selecting the quotes at all; the program was written to select quotes randomly. But because the randomisation algorithm wasn’t particularly good, it kept selecting from the bit of the database where I had the anti-religion quotes.
This is something I know Michael Shermer has struggled with for years – the issue of whether or not to publically debate creationists. About 4 or 5 years ago, a similar situation happened, and he was close to giving up the debates then. I can’t say I blame him for finally making this decision.
It really is frustrating to argue with people who don’t know how, especially in forums where logic and empiricism barely count for anything. In fact, the whole enterprise of trying to teach people things they don’t want to learn anytime, in any forum, is frustrating. Sure, you occasionally get through to someone, but that’s cold comfort when your efforts usually meet with nothing but the most excruciating futility. I’m always ambivalent about this. On one hand, I feel the effort must be made, but on the other, I often don’t think it will accomplish much at all. It’s an open question whether the potential benefits outway the certain frsutrations.
Ah, you remember it – must be using right head then.
Anti-religious bias – oh dear – it shows, then?
Phil, no, I don’t blame him a bit. Richard Dawkins has a similar policy I think, and so did Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins thinks debating creationists merely gives them oxygen plus a spurious sort of validation. And it’s not a matter of abdication, it’s merely one of choosing the format, the location, the people. Debates are more about rhetoric than truth-seeking anyway.
And if people simply will not argue by legitimate means, if they will insist on resorting to translation and misrepresentation, I just don’t see any point in engaging them when one could be doing something more useful.
Well, I may have to disagree here. You cannot at the same time lament the growing stronghold creationists and other religious nuts have on public debates and, ultimately, policies (specially in education) and refuse to engage them on their own ground. Yes, you cannot win an argument with these people, which means you cannot change their mind (they are dishonest!) but you can always hope to convince those who are listening to the debate.
Butterfly and Wheels is a cool place, don’t read me wrong, my point is: I cannot help but think it only preaches to the people already of the same opinion.
Yeah, wmr, I thought that suggestion was interesting too – although somewhat confining.
No, I’m not refusing or advocating refusing to engage them. But I don’t think one has to do it in any and every possible arena, medium, circumstance, etc. I don’t for instance think I need to engage in endless email debate with one person at a time – that’s just not efficient. I’m happy to do that if the discussion is interesting and civil (and I have had discussions like that even with believers), but if it’s uncivil and not a real argument, then I’m not going to waste my time. And as for debates – if they don’t work because the other side uses rhetoric and emotion rather than argument (which is the nature of debates, really) then I don’t see the use of that either. Isn’t the time better spent writing or teaching rather than doing a kind of theater?
Though PZ Myers might agree with you. He thinks scientists should get more fierce and noisy and just fight back.
Yes, but the problem is that the ID movement explicitly sells itself as being scientific.
This means that it isn’t enough to show simply that it is bad theology, but it is also necessary to show how what they’re up to isn’t science. And this isn’t easy unless you’re prepared to debate with them about things like irreducible complexity and complex specified information.
How is creationism “bad theology”? Do you mean that in the sense of “natural theology”? By taking the Bible literally and as an inerrant source- and I don’t think it was written with a figurative or metaphorical intent, (except for a few attempts at poetry in a collection of writings that mostly pretends to be a historical record)- it is easy to realize why these people conclude creationism is a valid way of doing theology. They are just arriving to the conclusions that follow from the exercise of their faith. Granted, these conclusions are grotesque and factually ridiculous, but at least they are not half-assed attempts to smooth over the absurdities of their faith with philosophical sleights of hand.
In any case what would make “good theology”? To me, that sounds like an oxymoron, no different from calling something “good astrology” or “good feng shui”. It doesn’t seem to be applicable, mainly because theology’s fundamental concern has never been the facts, or has it?
One thing I’ve been wondering about a lot recently is how much of the theism vs. atheism, evolution vs. creation debate is actually about, well, what the argument is about on the surface. I’m still trying to work through this but a few observations.
First, strong religious beliefs seem – at least in the U.S. – often to come with particular political and social agendas. For example, very many American evangelicals take it as given that the U.S. of A. is somehow especially blessed by God. Presenting this idea to Christians from other countries can be entertaining.
Second, the phrase “do you really want to live in a world without God” comes up a lot in these sorts of debates, and seems to me key, a hint that theism works in the service of a larger worldview, not the other way around.
But I’m still trying to figure out how this all works together. In the meantime I generally avoid debates with theists. In a single lifetime I can tolerate only so many ad hominem circumstantial attacks thrown in my face.
Yeah – and of course it’s so very obviously back to front. One might as well say ‘do you really want to live in a world without free hot and cold running chocolate in every room?’ What we want is beside the point in deciding what is there, so the argument is just utterly fatuous, but one certainly does hear it and variations of it all the time.
That’s not right. It is also a deeply worrying political phenomenon. And if scientists aren’t prepared to debate with the ID crowd, then it’s going to become even more worrying.
I agree with Jerry on this. The real point of ID is to get evolution out of school textbooks. If they can accomplish that, they won’t care about research or scholarly opinion–they will have saved the defenseless little children from atheistic Darwinism.
And of course in many places ID or creationism has succeeded in getting evolution out of school textbooks (in the US). Not in replacing it with creationism or ID, but in minimizing it or skirting around it, yes.
I’ve always maintained that religious fundamentalism is primarily a political problem, rather than a problem with religion per se. Its desire to impose a totalized, reactionary religious worldview on the public sphere is best countered by analyzing and unmasking its sources, functions, and alliances.
As for ID, it is a movement largely staffed by lawyers, who are trained to operate politically and to think that they can build a case for anything, no matter how sophistical. Only a tiny handful of those with scientific training and that in the obscurer, non-Darwinian branches of biology or in unrelated fields, would lend it any credence or support. The claim about “irreducible complexity” is simply a sophistical equivocation. In fact, given the autocatalytic closure of cellular metabolism with its phased intricacy of chemical reactions and hierarchies of genetic regulation, there is irreducible complexity, in the sense that something less complex wouldn’t do, at the relevant level. The fallacy is to claim that such complexity must be a product of top-down regulation rather than emergent organization; in fact, it’s virtually impossible to see how top-down regulation could actually do the work. Darwinian population thinking is, in fact, a version of stochastic thinking. Such stochastic thinking and explanation has developed a good deal more since Darwin and become quite central to scientific thinking. (In fact, statistical mechanics itself was developed in the decades just after Darwin.) Simply explicitating and delimiting the nature of the project of scientific inquiry and explanation, with its methods and sources and canons of evidence, suffices to dispose of the claims of ID. Again, if anything good can be said about such “challenges”, it is that it enforces the realization that science should be presented and taught not just as a collection of facts, but as basis for validating theories and their relevant facts.
Well yeah except that it doesn’t (dispose of them), because of the political problem that you mention, and because of the nature of the audience for debates on the subject that PZ Myers talks about. They’re not there to learn or question but to testify.
But the marvellous thing about faith is that evidence doesn’t matter. Creo quia absurda (or something like that): “I believe because it is absurd” said one of the early fathers of the church.
Yup. Tertullian. Credo quia absurdum. The founding statement of fideism, and of the idea that faith is a virtue – that the more unlikely a belief is to be true the more merit there is in believing it. Very thpiritual, no doubt, but it plays hell with people’s reasoning ability.
Ah, but doesn’t the recognition of absurdity already imply rational ability? And wasn’t the point that faith was precisely not a matter of knowledge? (Hebrews 11:1). It’s hard to assess what the stakes were in the 5th century A.D., but I’m guessing Tertullian wasn’t a slouch and bore little resemblance, mutatis mutandis, to modern-day Bible-thumpers.
john, I thought your point was that “religious fundamentalism is primarily a political problem, rather than a problem with religion per se.” Tertullian may not resemble the christian-in-the-street but I think he would fit right in with the lawyers and politicians who are trying to change what kids learn in school.
If only that were true, but it isn’t (in the sense, that it precisely is a political issue, and they’re not going stop any time soon).
Christianity is an very old and various tradition. I wouldn’t remotely claim to speak for it as a whole, as it’s not one I would claim any direct allegiance to. But you’re courting anachronism here. The point is that a Christian who admits of absurdity is operating on a different level than one who claims to be possessed of the authoritatively literal truth- (and there were intimations of absurdity from the beginning, which ought to be a clue as to the level at which religion takes place). Kierkegaard and Rev. Falwell are simply not on the same level and are not to be answered and criticized in the same way. And as for Tertullian’s “sacrifice” of the intellect, what is the model of rationality it would be counterposed to? Late Stoicism? Neo-Platonism? The objections of ID to Darwinism are precisely to the notions of contingency and emergent novelty ingredient in it, as “absurd”, not deriving from “rational” necessity. That’s less a matter of religious faith than of regressive metaphysics.
I don’t think here we are disagreeing substantively. It is only a matter of tactics and strategy. But I am far more disturbed by Bush administration environmental policy than by the alleged threat of ID. Obviously, there are connections between the two on the level of ideological organizing. But in the alliance between the hard right and corporate interests, I don’t think it is the corporate interests that are being duped. On the other hand, I think it worthwhile, both on moral/intellectual grounds and politically, to reflect upon human needs and motives and how they feed into religious beliefs, so as to discriminate the various strains, configurations and cases. It simply won’t do to declare them untrue- (on what level and in what sense?)-, since they will persist and are all too often insanely confident of doing so. The relevant question is under what conditions can the virulent strains be obviated and such aspirations be brought into contact with humane conceptions of human and natural needs. The idea, however, that science could be eliminated by religious dogmatism is itself exorbitant and badly misses the deeply embedded functionality of science, which itself gives rise to legitimate questions.
Yes, you’re right, we’re not really disagreeing substantively. Also, I agree with what you say about the need to understand what motivates religious beliefs, etc.
I’m not so certain this is right. I think it is probably right, but I’m not convinced that we couldn’t enter another “dark ages”, so to speak.
Science in the Islamic world, for example, is pretty much stagnant, yet, as you know, that wasn’t always the case. It doesn’t seem to me beyond the realms of possibility that the same kind of thing could happen to Western science (particularly, for example, if some kind of technological disaster was to occur).
I didn’t say he did, and that’s not the point. (Odd the way people keep saying things like that. Like when I disagreed with Stephen Carter – I was told that he was no fool. Disagreeing with Someone is not necessarily the same thing as saying Someone is a fool!) The point is the equation of faith with virtue, and my argument that that should not be considered a virtue. At least that’s my point.
Jerry S may not have substantive disagreements with you, but I’m not sure I don’t.
There’s a little ambiguity there – what does the ‘them’ in the second sentence refer to? Needs and motives, or beliefs? If the former, of course it won’t do to declare them untrue, but if the latter, yes it will. (Depending on what you mean by ‘it won’t do’ of course.) And since truth, what is true and what is untrue and how we distinguish, is the basic subject of B&W, there’s nothing very surprising in the fact that we are interested in the epistemic status of the truth claims and beliefs (most of which are also truth claims) of religion. I’m interested in the needs and motives too, as I’ve already said, but that doesn’t preclude considering the truth question. You seem to have a mission to rule that question out of court – to keep trying to persuade me that it’s a stupid waste of time. But you have yet to make a convincing argument to that effect. Just for one thing – why would a consideration of needs and motives rule out a consideration of the truth of the beliefs? You seem (always depending on what that ‘them’ refers to) to be arguing that we should do the one and not the other – but I fail to see why we should.
I’m not sure whether I have any substantive disagreements with you or not because I don’t understand what relation your response has to my comment.
I know. And my comment was directed at your comment. I simply disagree with what seems to be your implication that therefore I ought not to bother.
Yes, or that there is an omnipotent benevolent deity taking care of us. I think there are some compelling reasons for thinking that claim is nonsense. I think your implied definition of the sort of claim it is okie dokie to criticize is far too narrow.
1) I know you’ve pointed it out before; I said that. That’s just it: you keep repeating your comments rather than really making an argument. 2) I don’t know what that means. 3) I’m not making any claim to authority. 4) I don’t know if you’re saying I am making such a claim, or just making a random observation.
At the risk of getting an 800 word blast for myself, I’ll bite.
Anachronism, to the best of my knowledge, implies that something from the present has been projected into the past, not that something from the past would be consistent with the present. Therefore, I’m curious about the anachronism you say I’m courting.
My point about the ID movement pertained to their political agenda, not their intellectual objections to Darwinism, so I don’t understand why you addressed the last two sentences to me.
“Anachronism” cuts both ways; it means “temporally misplaced”. IIRC, the anachronism was comparing Tertullian to ID political operators. What the former was up to in his world figures to have been much differently situated than what the latter are up to, and, though I don’t know the particulars of his life, the extent to which he was a political operator and what he was operating on wouldn’t seem to offer any ready comparison. Further, he explicitly said that religious belief was “absurd”, (“Folly to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews”, etc.), i.e. in excess of rational, worldly beliefs. The ID shysters, by contrast, are attempting to make their particular conception of religious belief seem rational and “scientific”. That is a political agenda disguised as an intellectual one, so I’m sorry if I missed the distinction.
I do think there is a difference between a religious believer who proclaims his belief “absurd”, as a belief in a possibility beyond possibility, and one who makes absurd claims about literal truths. The former shows evidence of thinking, even of a kind of rational thinking. The latter shows a blindness to what his proclaimed beliefs could possibly mean and a lack of accountability or responsibility for his conduct, in terms of what they would enjoin on him. I am not arguing for religious belief; why would I? I am arguing that religious beliefs and believers are not necessarily wholely irrational, nor stupid. Some are; some are not. Nor do they necessarily derive from some abject denial of the facts, such that religion can only be regarded as a permanent scandal and affront to the truth. The dogmatism and authoritarianism of organized religion are productive of scandals. But since religious belief amounts to a choice about how one views life in the world, it is not impossible that some such believers may have some insight to impart, even if one does not share their overall framework. 700 words short.
You are very picky about definitions, considering that in an earlier post you replaced OB’s “reasoning ability” with “rational ability”. Along that line, my Latin dictionary defines ‘absurdus’ as “Lit. that which offends the ear, unmelodious, harsh; (metaphorically) foolish, unreasonable, out of place”. Perhaps in relying too much on simply equating it to “absurd”, not to mention dragging in Kierkegaard, you are courting anachronism yourself?
Regarding ID, I agree that it is “political agenda disguised as an intellectual one” but I do not agree that its proponents are “attempting to make their particular conception of religious belief seem rational and “scientific”.” What they are attempting to do is remove Darwin from the science curriculum. They may be doing it for religious reasons but they have found that previous efforts which relied too heavily on religious language were turned aside by pesky judges who insisted on upholding the First Amendment of the Constitution.
This ignores the crux of the issue: what is the basis for choosing what is an insight? THIS is the point in dispute. If revelation trumps reason, there is no justification for rejecting anything. If reason trumps revelation, religious thinkers must come up with something more than “it’s God’s will”.
that I didn’t and don’t understand.
1) That’s just an assertion. 2) It’s not particularly relevant. 3) It’s not true. 4) It’s not what I’m talking about here. I’ve said many times what I am talking about.
But you didn’t argue. You never do. You just assert things, as if your assertions can do the work of argument – but they can’t.
Again, that’s just an assertion, and it’s not true. Religious believers do make truth claims, factual claims about real entities in the real world, all the time. I’ve quoted a good many of them right here, and linked to a good many others. I have also said many times that if religion is defined simply as an attitude or an emotion, then I have no quarrel with it, but that that is not, repeat not, repeat not, not, not the common public understanding of the word. It is the common public understanding of the word that I am addressing here, as I have said some four thousand times now. I am not addressing your idiosyncratic version of it, I’m dealing with the common or garden version. You’re wasting your typing energy trying to persuade me to talk about this other version.
Just so. It is, frankly, evasive to pretend that that crux doesn’t matter.
I don’t think ID is a huge threat to science and education, so perhaps I don’t take it as seriously as you might think I should. But insofar as this is a political issue, my basic argument is that it is not effective to turn the matter into one of science vs. religion as a whole. Rather it is a matter of beating back the reactionary obscurantist sorts of religious ignoramuses, without conflating them with more reasonable religious people, who are often just as repulsed by the former, if for somewhat different reasons, as you are. On a good many issues, many such religiously-inclined people are, in fact, allies of secularly-minded people, even if on some other matters there may be disagreements. That’s the nature of politics and there’s nothing shameful about that, at least that wouldn’t be still more shameful were such politics abjured.
I think it’s a vulgar notion that religious believers are all authoritarian dogmatists, whereas the secularly-minded are thereby free-thinkers. There are many religiously-inclined free-thinkers and they may well have insights, derived from the perspective they choose to adopt and nourished by their spiritual traditions, to impart across the gulf of unbelief. For example, about the pain of forgiveness, the unavoidability of loss, or the limits of egotism.
I don’t think that Kierkegaard is exactly an anachronism to modern thought. He originated as a thematic concept the notion of existence, which I take to have lasting value for madern thinking. Unfortunately, he immediately turned the notion in the direction of “absolute inwardness”, in accordance with both Lutheran orthodoxy and idealist philosophy.
I’m sorry if I can’t make plain to you what I’m trying to say. The point about the imperative is simply a plain fact about language and thus pervasive. I meant to get across to things: 1) that no truth, in the strict cognitive sense, no matter how true, thereby carries with it an imperative force, and 2)that there is no ground for authority means that all conceptions of authority are effectively equally open, or otherwise put, imaginary, so that, in such a case, the disposition of matters may well depend on inter-human acknowledgement, which may well be itself an arational condition, certainly so, if rationality is defined in terms of means-end calculability and self-interested behavior. I have been trying to get across to you what I see as a category mistake in your apparent thinking: the effort to apply and enforce “natural” truths in an unmediated fashion in the inter-human realm, which is not (entirely) a natural realm. The fact of the matter is that human beings do not physically exist; human identity, the “who?” of the human being, is a normative-symbolic construct, for all that it is inseperable from and causally dependent on bodily existence and for all that material needs are definitely not to be despised. And such a being can be wiped out in an instant, not just by death, but by the conditions of its existence negating the very claims upon which it hangs. Hence I would define religion, in a logically neutral sense, i.e. one that applies to all human beings regardless of their beliefs, religious or otherwise, as the justification of existence: because of the close intrication of agency and human identity and because human existence inn the world is fundamentally exposed to otherness, human beings feel a compulsion to justify themselves in some wise. (Often, because conditions are so clearly indefensible and claims are so ludicrous, this is occasion for black comedy.) At some point, I just don’t agree with your “religion”. The rational grounds would be that what I see as the mistake of entirely naturalizing the inter-human world leads to misreferring the relevance of some matters and that you seem to wish to dictate what the truth should be. I’m not so secure about the truth.
Religion is a large and several topic. Your claim that religion is what you say it is is flim-flam.
Claiming that something is just an assertion, not an argument, is just a piece of obstructive rhetoric. In what do arguments consist, if not assertions? And how does one support an assertion without another assertion? I might be frequently unclear, unfocused, and verbose, but the real question is whether any point has been made and understood.
Either you don’t read Panda’s Thumb, or you are simply an unusually optimistic person.
Well…, maybe it wasn’t clear from context that I was referring to your injecting K. into the discussion of Tertullian’s “Absurdum”. Was anyone else out there confused?
[sigh] You do a really terrible job of reading, you know that? You insist on misreading what I say, translating what I say into something else, and then flailing at what I didn’t say. That’s a ridiculous, time-wasting thing to do! And it’s irritating.
I don’t know how I can say that any more clearly. Yes, I realize religion is a large and several topic. But I have chosen to talk about one (large, public) version of it. That is what I am talking about here. I’m not saying that that is all religion is, I’m saying it is what I’m talking about. If you want to define religion as an attitude, fine, go ahead, but that is not the subject of this discussion. You don’t get to decide what this particular discussion is about, I do, so if you want to talk about something else, you’ll have to do it somewhere else.
Yes I understand that but I still don’t see why you keep going on about authority. Once again, that is not what I’m talking about.
Yes, I know that, but as I’ve said, you keep seeing what is not there.
Again – go right ahead, but that doesn’t alter the fact that I’m talking about different things here. I have nothing whatever to say about that version of religion. I wouldn’t myself call it religion, and I think it merely confuses discussions to decide on one’s own whimsical definitions of things – but if you want to call it that, fine. But I have zero interest in discussing it.
Um…sorry, I don’t have time to teach you the basics.
Why is that the real question? Why do you expect people to waste time and attention on excess verbosity, unclarity and lack of focus? Why isn’t that the real question?
Well, speaking of vulgar notions, that one certainly is an entrenched bit of mainstream wisdom – of political correctness, one might say. At least, in the sense that deviations from it tend to provoke exclamations about intolerance, scientism, narrowness, authority, etc. It’s also extraordinarily evasive. It evades for instance the fact that religious believers as commonly understood make truth claims about the world that are not supported by good evidence. [try not to translate that sentence into one about authority, if you can manage that] One doesn’t have to call that ‘authoritarian dogmatism’ to think that there are some problems with it. That truth claims that lack evidence are shakier than truth claims that have evidence. It’s pure wool to try to cover that fact up with pejoratives about vulgar notions.
Lots of wool there. What’s a free-thinker, for a start, and especially what’s a religiously-inclined free-thinker? What’s an ‘insight’? What does ‘spiritual’ mean?
So – are you claiming that ‘religiously-inclined free-thinkers’ by definition have better insights into such things than secularists? If so, why? And how do you know? And why should we believe you? What if we claim that such insights are just part of the human condition, that some people are better at them than others, and that no one system of thought has a monopoly on them?
That last paragraph is exactly right. The point is 1) that religiously-minded people are no more disabled from coming up with such insights, derived from there own sources of thought and experience that are entirely secular, “rational” people and 2) that we secular people derive some potion of our own thinking, wittingly or not, from a cultural inheritance of religious traditions that are for us effectively defunct, such that there may be more commonality across the divide between belief and unbelief, in significant cases, than you seem to allow for.
As for PC, the fault of PC is that it legitimates the very positions it ostensibly opposes by leaving itself wide open to denunciations of PC, (as if, since one can not effectively change the reality, changing the labelling suffices.) Its only value is in bringing out the tell-tale signs in denunciations of PC. I’m not in the PC business. But I also think that religion per se is not as strong a force, nor as big a threat in the modern, (i.e. Western ), world than you seem to make it out to be. In fact, it is its very weakness that inclines me to speak on its behalf. Fundamentalist ideology is another matter. That is shameless idiocy. If you want to criticize the likes of Rev. Tim LaHaye, as far as I’m concerned, go on right ahead. But why bother? Satiric ridicule would be much more fun!
A few years after his retirement from Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead was asked to introduce Bertrand Russell, who had blown into town to give one of those prestige lecture series. So he went up to the podium and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is my good friend Lord Bertrand Russell. Bertie thinks I’m muddle-headed. But then, I think he’s simple-minded.” I think you’re simple-minded.
And boy do I ever think you’re simple-minded. Plus an over-simplifier (the two don’t have to be identical).
I don’t need a whole new lecture on PC, I didn’t intend to start that hare. But I do think there’s some commonality in the impulse to paper over differences, to be hyper-polite about Other People’s Beliefs no matter how delusional they may be.
Well, yet again, that’s just an assertion. You could replace “religiously-minded people” with “grapefruits” and it would be just as convincing. And in any case, I’m not talking about insight. I’m talking about rational, critical thought. To be blunt, you don’t seem to be very good at that yourself – or if you are, you abstain from showing it – so perhaps you don’t see why that might be a bad thing. But I think it is; I think rational critical thought is useful, and indeed necessary for democracy to work adequately. I don’t want “insights” into candidates, I want rational attention to their words and deeds.
Maybe so; I don’t know; that just sounds like a banal formula to me; but in any case I don’t see the relevance. Would that mean that religion ought to be beyond criticism? I don’t see why.
Why? Alchemy is fairly weak now, too, do you feel inclined to speak on its behalf? If so, why?
But (yet again) I haven’t really been talking about threats. I’ve been talking about religion as a problem, not a threat. I think it’s a cognitive problem and an educational problem, among other things. I don’t have to think it’s gonna come n git me n drag me off to a religious dungeon to think it needs criticizing.
Er – I don’t need your permission, actually. And I emphatically don’t want to criticize only fundamentalism – that’s my whole point. But as for satiric ridicule, don’t worry, we have plans for that too.
Grapefruits? Really! Isn’t that just the opposite of the “pathetic” fallacy: call it the “depersonalization” fallacy. And there I was so gracious as to be admitting of muddle-headedness!
How careless; of course I meant to say muddle-headed, not simple minded.
Grapefruits just because any arbitrary substantive would do, in such an arbitrary sentence. The point was to say that your assertion is so assertive as to be meaningless.
Of course, you haven’t answered the point. I’ve noticed that you never do answer objections or questions – or rather that you always do leave most or all of them unanswered. You sometimes answer one or two, but you never answer all, you just make new assertions. If your goal is to defend irrationalism by enacting it, you’re doing a good job of the enacting at any rate, if not of the defending.
Exactly what point am I remiss in not answering? The one about alchemy? A magic/mystical practice from ancient India that somehow migrated to Medieval Europe and no doubt was interpreted somehow differently? Is that your conception of the scope of the contents of religious tradition? Have you never heard of the Talmud? Your point was silly and, further, I’ve said more than enough elsewhere for you to infer a reasonable answer. Hence, I did not feel obliged to answer it. Do you really require a paint-by-numbers approach to argument?
Many points, in several posts. Points about for instance your persistent habit of translating what I say and then addressing your inaccurate version of what I’ve said rather than what I have said. Questions about the implications of what you say, or rather assert – about what exactly you mean by your assertions, about what follows from them. That sort of thing. Sorry, I guess that is asking a lot.

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