I’ve been going back and forth with Josh Rosenau, at his blog and also now via email, and I think we’ve pinned down (for the moment) our basic disagreement – which is about what one writes or talks for. Josh says, perfectly reasonably, that we surely write or talk in order to get some result, however broadly we construe ‘result.’ I say…yes, if we construe ‘result’ really broadly…but I think that may be where the difference is: how broadly we construe it.

At any rate, my goal, if any, when writing is not really to get people to do something. It’s certainly not to avoid disturbing people in any way. My goal is to say what I’m trying to … Read the rest

I had a funny experience this afternoon. I was at the University bookstore, and I went to take a look at the atheist shelf, just to see if there was anything new – after I looked to see if Does God Hate Women? is still on its shelf (it is, next to Why Truth Matters), and noticing as I picked my way through the maze of shelves what a lot of shelves there were with ‘Spirituality’ as their label, especially compared to the one short shelf that holds the atheist books. So I got to the (tiny) atheist shelf and behold – there was another human being there. Aha, thought I; it is spreading! I snickered inwardly, and looked … Read the rest

I’ve had occasion to notice it before, and I daresay I will again – some people just seem to be unable to disagree with, or even mention, a woman without breaking out the Special Insulting language. That’s especially noticeable when there are men being disagreed with or mentioned too, and they don’t get the Special Insulting language.

Look at Science and Religion Today.

Jerry Coyne is disappointed. Michael Shermer responds. Josh Rosenau jumps in, and sides, and calls. But I – I don’t do anything as quiet and reasonable as that. Well naturally not: I don’t have the balls.

It’s not as if the tone of what I say, or the part of it quoted there, is wildly … Read the rest

Libby Purves suggests that the Catholic church’s response to its own recent history has been due to its own perspective that the reporting (she quotes a reporter for the Boston Globe) “is fuelled by anti-Catholicism and shyster lawyers hustling to tap the deep pockets of the church.” And maybe it is, she says. But.

But such an attitude is not a dignified response to clamorous hysteria. It is self-protective, paranoid arrogance; the canker that threatens all religions and ideologies. We recognise it all too well from history, and from modern fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam. Once you are convinced that you alone hold the truth — whether your god is Amun-Ra or Marx — you slough off self-doubt and self-examination.

A bit more on Shermer, in a very level humble non-fundamentalist tone, because it’s not that I want to enforce orthodoxy with a big heavy stick, it’s that…I disagree with him about some things. I’m not trying to expel him into the outer darkness, I just disagree with him about some things. I’ll say what they are, because I feel like it.

[I]t seems to me that believers who accept Newton’s theory of gravity as the means by which God creates stars, planets, solar systems, galaxies, and universes, can just as readily accept Darwin’s theory of evolution as the means by which God creates life.

I said yesterday in comments but will say again – nuh uh. Even after … Read the rest