It has come to my attention that this business of ‘Mother’ Teresa’s being a horrible nightmare instead of the tiny little saint she’s cracked up to be is not common knowledge. Well I knew that, but it’s not common knowledge even among the kind of warped, twisted people who read B&W; that I didn’t know. I should have realized though. It’s meme stuff. The phrase ‘Mother Teresa’ is a kind of pop culture synonym for self-sacrificing altruism, and the corrections of that illusion get drowned out as a result. So let’s get to work and spread the counter-meme, shall we? She was a horror.

Christopher Hitchens wrote the book on the subject in 1995. He gives some highlights in this … Read the rest

The Archive

The Interrogations Archive… Read the rest

A reader alerted me to this article taking issue with Swinburne.

…serious arguments are what the religious believer needs to come up with, rather than evasive appeals to ‘faith’. If belief in God is a matter of ‘faith’ in contrast to reason, there’s nothing to distinguish it from mere wishful thinking.

Just so. And yet ‘faith’ is routinely used as a valor word, a virtue word, a self-righteous word, a self-flattering word. The nimbus around it almost always indicates ‘I have “faith” therefore I am better.’ That’s bad. Wishful thinking should not have an aura of superior virtue or depth. But it does. That’s bad.

Swinburne now offers two new versions of the argument from design, which shift the argument

Because the question is, what good is sympathy and alleviating suffering if there is no suffering? What is the point of them? There is no point. They’re not needed. They’re not even virtues. The notion is absurd. Suppose a friend bounces up to you, full of bliss and happiness, to tell you some good news. Is it a good thing to clutch her hand damply and say how sorry you are? Is it a good thing to push her down and force morphine down her throat? No. Your sympathy and alleviation aren’t needed or wanted. (Sympathy in the sense of fellow-feeling is probably welcome, but that’s not what Swinburne means here.) And if your friend is never suffering and in … Read the rest

Rhetoric in play in this review of Breaking the Spell.

Thus we read: “If theists would be so kind as to make a short list of all the concepts of God they renounce as balderdash before proceeding further, we atheists would know just which topics were still on the table, but, out of a mixture of caution, loyalty, and unwillingness to offend anyone ‘on their side,’ theists typically decline to do this.” Perhaps so, but then is Dennett prepared to perform a comparable triage for the favorite topics of his fellow atheists? Where do “we atheists” stand, for example, with regard to fellow atheist Howard Stern? We theists would like to know, if Dennett would be so kind, though

Richard Swinburne is interesting. I’ve said so before. So has Mark Fournier at Tachyphrenia. And now it’s time to say it some more. Because the things Swinburne says here are truly revolting, and yet they are, of course, what you get if you try to reconcile the omnipotent omnibenevolent God with the existence and abundance of suffering in the world – just what Darwin couldn’t manage to reconcile himself to. There’s an irony of sorts in the fact that it’s Swinburne’s view that is considered by many – by surprisingly many – to be the ‘devout’ and ‘holy’ and therefore (why? why therefore?) ‘good’ one, and Darwin’s that is considered the impious and wicked one. The approval of … Read the rest