Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project is annoyed at (wait for it) “New Atheists.” He says members of the project have been “relentlessly attacked by “New Atheists.”

The crux of these attacks seems to take two forms. In the first, clergy members are ridiculed simply for having religious faith. In the second, supposedly intelligent people pretend they are unable to distinguish these clergy members from the fundamentalists…

He doesn’t quote or name or link to any “New Atheists” doing this, so it’s hard to know if his description is accurate, but in any case…he seems to have the usual, and socially conventional, blind spot about “religious faith.” He seems, in other words, to be blind to the fact that … Read the rest

Yet another smug unthinking cliché-filled diatribe about zealous fundamentalist literalist evangelist atheism, this time from Reza Aslan. It’s as original as the other nine million.

The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies…

He says, in the very act of … Read the rest

Alan Cowell in the New York Times spots a connection between the Bishop of Bruges and Roman Polanski. They both fiddled with children and they have both escaped the long arm of the law.

That question seemed likely to be asked more searchingly this week after the Vatican issued new rules about the handling of priestly abuse, listing pedophilia in a catalog of other supposed grave crimes including “the attempted ordination of women.”

“What I did, supporting the ordination of women, they saw as a serious crime,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, an American priest excommunicated less than two months after he participated in a ceremony ordaining women. “But priests who were abusing children, they did not see as

This is nice: Ben Nelson has joined Talking Philosophy. He has a post on Realisms, the first of a series. It has only three comments, the first two just introductions and the last just rude. Go comment, get him started. I would, but I’m not allowed, because I’m so eeeeeeevil, so you do it.

Actually even if I could comment I wouldn’t have anything of interest to say, because I don’t know enough. Ben’s clever. Go sharpen your wits on him.… Read the rest