Look, if you’re going to talk about bullshit, you should at least be thorough about it, am I right?

In a paper published a few years ago, “Deeper Into Bullshit,” G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading

Let’s everybody say this kind of thing more and more often, okay? More and more and more and more. Because there’s so much of the other kind of thing. And the more there is of the other kind of thing, and the less there is of this kind of thing, the more the other kind thinks it’s right, it’s the mainstream, it’s common knowledge, it’s conventional wisdom, it’s obvious, it’s the default position. The only way to resist is by resisting.

It’s time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that religion is at bottom nonsense…[W]hat I think we should acknowledge is that religion contains a massive falsehood, namely that there is a God who determines our actions and