Back to Fuller. Same thread at Michael’s place. Notice a certain tension in the main post. Third para:

In particular, I am a little disturbed by the ease with which humanists and social scientists justify deference to scientific expertise, almost in a ‘good fences make good neighbours’ vain [he means vein] (Stanley Fish comes to mind in criticism, but analytic philosophy and sociology of science have their own versions of this argument). In this respect, ‘our’ side pulled its punches in the Science Wars when it refused to come out and say that the scientific establishment may not be the final word on what science is, let alone what it ought to be. I guess we just never got

Quick thing. I just want to note it. I have noted a dislike for Joseph Epstein before. I’m going to do it again. I dislike a remark in this article in Commentary – which Arts and Letters Daily for some reason quoted in its teaser (which is why I saw it in the first place). Why flag up such a – well, here is the remark:

Wilson at his meanest shows up in Dabney’s account of his marriage to the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy—a marriage made in 1937 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five. “I was too young,” McCarthy would later claim, and “I was too old,” Wilson would counter. It would be closer to the truth

How funny – a harmonic convergence, or something. The very day that I noted the oddity of Steve Fuller’s comment on Meera Nanda’s book at Amazon, in view of his testimony at Dover – Michael Bérubé commented on exactly the same thing.

I’m working on something that I’ll explain more fully next week (when, I hope, it will be done), but in the course of my work on it I found that sociologist Steve Fuller blurbed Meera Nanda’s 2003 book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India by writing, “This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.” Right, well, it so happens

Now that the nonsense is out of the way – on to a very interesting article in the NY Times that starts from the murder (the ‘honour killing’) of Hatun Surucu and the trial of her brothers which began in September, and moves on to the large and familiar subject of women in Muslim immigrant enclaves in Germany.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu’s capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German…It’s still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a

And then there’s the Narnia thing.

Icky icky ick.

What Pullman particularly objects to about the Narnia series, as it comes to a climax in The Last Battle, is that the children are killed and go to heaven. ” ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ “

Yeah okay – sorry, I’m with Pullman here. I hate that medieval (literally medieval) ‘this world is crap boring shadowlands and “heaven” is all joy tralala’ idea. I hate the idea of a … Read the rest

The religious bad-argument-purveyors are out in force. Lloyd Eby at World Peace Herald for instance. He says an earlier article of his got a lot of ‘responses and comments from atheists who claim that this article misrepresents what atheism is and what atheists actually believe.’ Now there’s a surprise – religious people generally do such a good job of representing what atheism is and what atheists actually believe. No strawmen there! Hardly ever.

So Eby answers the answers.

If we accept the usual or most prevalent definition of religion, a definition in which religion is explicitly tied to belief in and/or service of a supernatural god or supreme being, then atheism could not be a religion because active atheism can