Jerry Coyne quoted Tom Clark the other day; I want to quote another passage from the same article, ‘Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First’.

Of course, many non-empirically based convictions are relatively harmless as guides to behavior so long as they’re confined to our private lives. Beliefs in god, astrology, psychic powers, cosmic consciousness and so forth can be the epistemic equivalent of victimless crimes. But the presumption of such beliefs – that there are reliable alternatives to empiricism – isn’t so benign when carried into the public arena…To imagine that one’s worldview, whether religious or secular, is beyond disconfirmation helps to license an absolutism which brooks no dissent and countenances the demonization of those with different ideas…A

Meanwhile, there is this book we wrote. Bunting purports to be criticizing it, but in fact what she is doing is yanking out particular sentences that caught her attention and flailing at them in isolation, as opposed to understanding them in context. This is stupid, and uninformative, and misleading. That’s why I call her reckless. It’s so easy to point out how thoroughly she misrepresents the book. (How does she square that with her Catholic conscience, one wonders?)

But the kind of strident atheism which Benson epitomises intrigues me. It’s driven by a curious intensity which is really peculiar. How about this from the conclusion to her book: “religion is like the total body irradiation that destroys an immune

Well, the discussion was winding down (or I thought it was), and I was going to leave Bunting in peace…but then she finally posted a comment (and the discussion didn’t wind down after all), so the peace idea was premature. What did she say? Did she admit that she had quote-mined? Did she explain why she is so furious at my (our) putative stridency instead of being furious at the men who murdered a raped teenager while saying ”We will do what Allah has instructed us’? Did she explain what has happened to her since she was so shocked by the Ryan report? Did she apologize for calling me strident, preposterous, crude, lacking in insight, profoundly intellectually dishonest, hysterical, and … Read the rest