It’s the training

It never ends. Drip drip drip; whine whine whine. Those mean fashionable intellectual mean people at their fashionable parties aren’t Christians and aren’t impressed by Christianity. It’s so unfair.I would never admit to any left-liberal social gathering that I sometimes go to church…Christians are likely to be depicted in my paper’s pages as zealots or people who inexplicably haven’t caught up with the modern world.

That could be because Christians believe implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons. It’s not self-evident that there is no problem with believing implausible things for epistemically questionable reasons.

To the average funky young columnist, Christians are as relevant as Cliff Richard, but where does that columnist think the philosophical roots of his own opinions lie?

A number of places, probably, most or all of them secular. Christianity doesn’t provide philosophical roots, it provides theological or theistic ones. Jesus is quoted as saying quite a few good things, and some bad ones, but aphorisms don’t provide much in the way of philosophical roots; for those people must and do go elsewhere. Christianity doesn’t deserve much credit for those roots.

Then there’s some wool about consumerism, then some wool about how claustrophobic Dawkins makes him feel. There’s no argument or even clarity, just some disconnected musing. That’s one reason some of us are not fond of religion: it doesn’t generally teach or encourage people to think clearly; all too often it teaches or encourages them to do the opposite – witness that discussion between Rick Warren and Sam Harris in which Warren says one confused or inaccurate thing after another and Harris does better than that. It is very difficult to avoid drawing the conclusion that Warren simply can’t think properly at all, and to blame his training for that.

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