Karen Armstrong’s breezy way with facts and references can sometimes produce declarations that are really funny. On the first page of chapter 10, ‘Atheism,’ for instance, she starts with a preacher launching ‘a crusdade’ against Deism in 1790 and goes on with the rise of Evangelicalism into the 1830s. No references of course. The next paragraph starts ‘On the frontiers, nearly 40 percent of Americans felt slighted by the aristocratic republican government…’

!!! Really?! How the hell does she know that? She doesn’t even say at what particular moment in time that bizarrely exact claim was (according to her) true, and she certainly doesn’t say how she knows or how anyone else knows either. That’s not surprising, because no one … Read the rest

Sholto Byrnes says aha – but his aha depends on a confusion of terms, a lumping together of different words with different meanings as if they all meant the same thing. That kind of aha is not a good kind, because people can just say, sharply or compassionately depending on temperament, ‘oh dear, you’ve made a muddle there.’

Let’s be clear: they could now be afforded rights under law specifically formulated to protect religion and belief. And those are two words that many scientists, rationalists and atheists don’t like to be associated with at all.

Nonsense. We have no problem ‘being associated with’ belief; we don’t claim to have no beliefs or to want no beliefs or to object to … Read the rest

More of Armstrong playing at Grown Up Scholarship. On page 279 she lays down the law about Wittgenstein for almost the whole page.

In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion. Turning his back on the early modern ambition to establish a single method of arrivingat truth, Wittgenstein now maintained that there were an infinite number of social discourses. So it was a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence”

And there we have our first reference: it is to “Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations … Read the rest