We have an idea – don’t we? – that discussion is always a good thing, that more of it will work things out, that if we discuss our differences long enough and throughly enough, sooner or later we’ll resolve them. But of course that’s not true, it can’t be true – not on this planet, with this species. Consider a thought experiment. The lamb and the lion can speak, and can speak the same language. They sit down to discuss their differences. Would that resolve them?

I once heard Amos Oz say much the same thing, chatting on a local radio station (then I went to the bookstore where he was appearing, and got a stack of books signed). Americans … Read the rest

Amardeep Singh has been busy lately. I had been checking his blog every day and then things got busy, and now look at the result – I have to catch up!

There is for instance this very interesting post on Gandhi, in which Amardeep partly agrees but partly takes issue with Meera Nanda. He is reviewing her book for a journal, which will be something to look forward to.

I’ve been reading Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing Backwards this week (and even last week — it’s been slow). It’s an excellent book, which I would recommend to anyone thinking about questions of the history of science, secularism (in India and elsewhere), or postmodernism. I’m planning to write a proper review

It’s been a busy day – and a good one. Arts and Letters Daily linked to that wonderful article by Edmund Standing on postmodernist views of gender, for a start. And I posted another terrific article, this one by Allen Esterson. And various other odds and ends – such as this takedown of Kent Hovind in Flashback. I particularly like the quoted extract from his dissertation (with proper names altered because Hovind doesn’t allow his dissertation to be quoted, which is not normal scholarly practice, but he clearly has his reasons) –

He was born in 1809 and died about 1880. He was very anti-Christian and tried to influence anyone he could not to believe in God. He was very

It’s all been quite instructive – in fact, now I think of it, it couldn’t have been better if I’d planned it that way. I didn’t, I hasten to add, but it would have been fiendishly clever if I had. I’d be another Milgram or Rosenhan, a designer of some sort of thought experiment: what happens when a rational, secular empirical form of inquiry attempts to combine with a non-rational religious ‘faith-based’ form of inquiry? Sparks fly, is one answer.

There is more than one problem with trying to mix religion into non-religious enterprises like history or science. The obvious, glaring problem of course is the fundamental difference between making up one’s findings and discovering them. But even beyond that, … Read the rest