Austin Dacey, in The Secular Conscience.

“In the United States, secular and liberal have become dirty words…Best sellers allege that liberalism is a dogmatic faith, a critique popularized by evangelical leaders in the 1980s…When a rare few secularists push back against religious belief in print, they are branded – often by fellow seculars and liberal religionists – ‘dogmatic,’ ‘evangelical,’ ‘militant’ and ‘fundamentalist’ atheists. [examples in an endnote] Their scandalous premise is that religion is an urgent topic of conversation and therefore subject to the intellectual and moral standards of all serious conversation.” [p 11]

One thing that’s interesting about this is that Austin Dacey was one participant in something called ScienceDebate2008. Lawrence Krauss was another. Chris Mooney and Sheril … Read the rest

Thought for the day, from Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul (no, he doesn’t think there is such a thing as the soul).

“As for my ironist friends who think that science is no more objective than any other way of thinking, I have observed in most of them a fairly deep ignorance about science. Being around intellectuals who know almost nothing about science does not particularly bother me, except when they pronounce on the nature of science. My view is that if you are going to claim that all forms of discourse are equally subjective, you better have real familiarity with all the forms of discourse you aim to level.” p. 54… Read the rest

Now sometimes a cunning plan turns out to be not so cunning after all. Mooney’s cunning plan of banning me from commenting on his blog so that my unkind questions and objections would no longer appear there is going to turn out to be a mistake, because it means I will post them here instead. This is penny wise and pound foolish. A comment on his blog would just get lost in the clutter of kwokkery and other nonsense there, and would not be on the main page in any case. A post here is on the main page for a month. So you see…he should have just settled for letting me ask questions there. The morally bankrupt path Does … Read the rest