Respect and religion, remember? Grayling on respect and religion, Blackburn on respect and religion, and now Dawkins on respect and religion. He got a good reception at McGill.

I am under no illusions that I deserve these enthusiastic receptions personally, or that they reflect the quality of my own performance as a speaker. On the contrary, I am convinced that they represent an overflowing of bottled-up frustration, from masses of decent people pushed to breaking point and heartily sick of the sycophantic ‘respect’ that our society, even secular society, routinely and thoughtlessly accords religious faith. Time after time, people in the signing queues thank me for doing no more than say in public what they have,

Hey, Why Truth Matters has a tiny review in the TLS ‘In Brief’ section (October 20 issue). It’s not online. If anybody has an ol’ copy lying around and just longs to send it to me, don’t be shy. (Kind Nick sent one when the Dictionary was there.)… Read the rest

This is great stuff. One quotable line after another.

[T]here is clearly no guarantee that a state arbiter won’t cede to the most unreasonable and extreme demands of religious groups, expressed with adequate fervour and implied threats, especially as we have declared in advance that their ‘sensibilities’, however irrational, are somehow worth regarding. Thus, by abandoning a consistent first principles approach to freedom of expression in favour of some kind of dialectic between reasonable (us) and unreasonable (them) people, we may well find ourselves conceding tactical defeat ad nauseam, to the point where those who do accept the ‘fallibility of human knowledge’ must chafe under the de-facto rule of those who don’t.

Allow me to take stock of

An interesting (at least in places) discussion at Pharyngula of Eagleton on Dawkins. One of the interesting bits is the one where Andrew Brown drops by to comment. He notes that he reviewed The God Delusion for Prospect with a follow-up at Comment is Free (I put both in News here, and I think commented on one or both; they’re not new). He draws a rather irrelevant analogy.

The shortest form of all these objections is this analogy: Suppose that I, knowing nothing about economics, write a book saying that the world would be better off without money: that money has led people to terrible crimes, and may even be thre root of all evil — “and besides, when