A long review-article on books on atheism by Ronald Aronson. It starts with Alister McGrath’s Twilight of Atheism.

Just like the postmodernist claim that modernity is over, the retrospective stance implied by terms like twilight is the book’s main idea and does double duty as a weapon in the battle against atheism. The “rise and fall” metaphors are tools of a brilliantly clever religious writer against the movement he seeks to undermine…But for the most part he argues broadly that the rational argument between religion and atheism can never be resolved, comments on the rise of interest in spirituality and the growth of Pentecostalism, and brings out as uncontested fact the postmodern verdict on modernity, grafting it onto his

Lists are always strange. Lists of 100 best novels in English that include some of the worst novels ever written – that kind of thing. They’re always strange. That list of UK public intellectuals that was then augmented by a female version, both of them including some very odd ‘intellectuals’ – movie stars, advertisers, publicists. Strange. So of course this list is strange. But all the same, I have to bleat at a couple of inclusions. Why so many clerics? The pope, al-Qaradawi, al-Sistani? Those are intellectuals? And then there’s Paglia, and Thomas Friedman. But these lists are always strange, so whatever.

So whodja vote for? I’ll tell you mine. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Sen. I’d already chosen … Read the rest

I was a little amused to see a letter on the letters page rebuking B&W (actually, me) for ‘perpetuating the fashionable nonsense of minimum-wage laws.’ No. Minimum wage laws may be nonsense, but they’re hardly fashionable. They’re too old for that, for one thing, at least in the US. And they’re not fashionable anyway, any more than unions are. Are you kidding? Unions? The minimum wage? Yeah, right, they’re about as fashionable as poodle skirts, or peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches on Wonder bread, or Maxwell House coffee made in a percolator, or zootsuits. No. The word class is fashionable, provided it’s accompanied – chaperoned, as it were – by the words ‘race’ and ‘gender’ – but that’s it. … Read the rest

Iqbal Sacranie in the Guardian yesterday:

Across the globe there is a widespread view that we in the west practise double standards and devalue the lives of non-westerners. The former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad, earlier this month, said of our actions in Iraq: “There is no tally of Iraqi deaths, but every single death of a US soldier is reported to the world. These are soldiers who must expect to be killed. But the Iraqis who die … are innocent civilians who under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein would still be alive.”

Hmm. Does Sacranie talk much about the tally of Iranian deaths during the Iran-Iraq war? Or other tallies of Muslims killed by other Muslims? Does he … Read the rest