Jerry has a post on most-hated verbal infelicities. Solecisms, he elegantly says, but I’m going to be cagy, in order to avoid the obligatory lecture about How Language Works. There are no Mistakes; whatever most people do is Right; language is constantly evolving; lots of putative rules are just made up; language is arbitrary; what you think is a new Mistake actually goes back to Knut. Right. Got all that. Not talking about Mistakes. Talking about things I don’t like.

Because I thought I would mention a few things I don’t like.

• May instead of might. “If things had been different Hitler may have won the war.” No; he might have, but it is not the case that

Mark Jones pointed this out in a comment. If this is accommodationism even I can live with it.

Today’s science-oriented atheists call us into right relationship with our time, and that means using all of our best information and cross-cultural experience.

Ours is a time of space telescopes, electron microscopes, supercomputers, and the worldwide web. It is also a time of smart bombs, collapsing economies, and exploding oil platforms. This is not a time for parsing the lessons given to a few goatherds, tentmakers, and camel drivers.

So let today’s collective intelligence revitalize our faith traditions! Let us rejoice in the discovery that the atoms of our bodies were forged inside supernovas, and let us celebrate this natural process

So, as I mentioned, a late reply to Mooney’s post about me on July 12.

We stopped allowing Benson to comment here back in mid 2009, for very good reasons–among other things, she was sending us emails demanding to have other posters’ comments deleted. We had a better solution.

You can read the thread where they made this reasonable decision. My comments are numbers 35, 37, 90 and 92. They’re not flamey. Then at 104 we get TB:

When Ophelia Benson claims through her “questions” that Chris and Sheril have no evidence she is not telling the truth. It’s one thing for people who haven’t read the book to assert this – she has the book.
So let

Mooney has done another “What Tom Johnson has taught Me” post. It repairs some previous omissions, so it is a small improvement, but it is flawed.

I regret that I gave this story undue prominence, and I want to apologize to all who were affected by that action.

No he doesn’t, not really. As usual, he omits some people, so he doesn’t want to apologize to all who were affected by that action. He doesn’t want to apologize to me, for instance. I was affected by that action. He shouldn’t give himself the moral credit for a blanket apology when he’s not in fact making one.

Mooney goes on to insinuate that gnu atheists did something to make Tom … Read the rest