I just had a very weird experience, or maybe not all that weird in one way, but pretty damn weird in any other way. Not weird given that some people are bat-loony, but weird given that some people ought to know better. (Is it possible for people who are bat-loony to know better? Is that a ridiculous incoherent idea, on a level with belief in free will? Probably no and probably yes…but then the question becomes “exactly how bat-loony are we talking about here?”)

I was walking along a residential street a few blocks from where I live (so I don’t know anyone there, I don’t recognize faces), mind elsewhere (though nowhere in particular) as usual, and suddenly some grizzled … Read the rest

Let’s play “Let’s make up some statistics.”

An interlocutor told me about an hour ago that “most academics everywhere are atheists.” Eh what? I thought. In the UK and Sweden and fortunate places like that, no doubt, but in the US? Which is what we were talking about (via my post on that Catholofascist article in Crisis yesterday). Most academics in the US are atheists? Yeah I don’t think so. Given that most colleges and “universities” in the US are, shall we say, non-elite, and that most teaching is in vocational subjects (most degrees are in Business), I don’t think so.

Rilly? I said. Do you know that? Any stats?

She gave the stats for philosophers. Not going to … Read the rest

Patrick J. Reilly has written an article about the heterodoxy of ethics and law professors at several Jesuit universities. Who is he?

Patrick J. Reilly is founder and president of the Cardinal Newman Society, a national organization to advocate and support the renewal of genuine Catholic higher education.

Ah. So he’s someone with a clear agenda, and one that is a contradiction in terms. “Genuine Catholic higher education” clearly means orthodox Catholic “education” that adheres to established dogma, which means it is fundamentally opposed to genuine education. What he means by “education” should better be called information-stuffing, or just memorization.

Here’s his beef. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops – the one that subscribes to the bishop of Phoenix’s … Read the rest

Emily Manuel at Religion Dispatches talks to Adam Kotsko about his new book, which is about atonement. She mentions someone posting on his blog that “we haven’t really thought through a proper atheism yet.”

Right. I think that you can see this with the New Atheists. Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ and Dennett’s books are a kind of simplistic critique of religion that’s basically not going to change anyone’s mind. I think there has to be more to say about religion other than the fact that it makes no sense as an empirical claim. That’s just too obvious to be interesting. I think that we as a society deserve a better form of atheism.

The claim that the simplistic critique of religion … Read the rest