Author: Ophelia Benson

Azam Kamguian on what the anti-secularist backlash has done to education.

How Intelligent Design Creationism Is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream

Don’t essentialize Indianness, but you’d better get the Real India right.

‘We are born of primordial slime, not at the hands of a benevolent and concerned supreme being who lovingly crafted us from clay.’

Deniers distort history in order to promote antisemitism and white supremacy.

‘The protection built into Theory…is composed of layer on layer of ignorance.’

‘To concede that no one ever believes something solely because it’s true is not to deny that anything is objectively true.’

Confusing religion and race is a clever trap the religious have laid for a worried government rightly anxious about race.

‘The Epistemological Situation of Astrology in Relation to the Ambivalent Fascination/Rejection of Postmodern Societies’

‘Among intellectuals and in the academic world, any attempt to blame Islam for women’s oppression is stamped as Orientalism.’

‘A superficially historicist, materialist case – our beliefs and assumptions are embedded in our practical forms of life – leads not only to a kind of epistemological idealism, but to the deeply convenient doctrine that our way of life cannot be criticised as a whole.’

Alternative to what? Testing and evidence?

TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

(1) Check out that tree. Isn’t it pretty?
(2) Therefore, God exists.

Why do people believe or disbelieve?

‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’ – yes, they always are, that’s the problem.

‘psychoanalysis, unlike a scientific theory but very much like certain religious or political movements, has essentially been immune from attacks leveled at it either from inside or outside the movement.’

‘the claims of psychoanalytic theory are not interpretations but determinate propositions about how the mind regularly works’

In fact Patriot University seems to have no standards.

‘John does know more mathematics, more physics and more engineering than the average biologist. But he also knows more biology than the average biologist.’

Women’s groups demand that murderers be treated according to laws of the land and not be allowed to find shelter behind the curtain of ‘culture’.