Twenty Years

Twenty years ago on the 22nd of July – so twenty years this Tuesday coming up – I migrated from ranting on MySpace, to blogging on Blogger. If you don’t count the Blogger blog I think I remember starting, forgetting, and losing the login information to in around 2001, the 22nd of July, 2005 entailed my formal induction into blogging. I made the leap to WordPress-dot-com in March of 2007, and have remained with that host under a succession of blogs – all mothballed, bar this one.

The writing was on the wall well over a decade ago though; the blogosphere is dying. Not that I listened. Social media was spitting out posts for shorter and shorter attention spans, WordPress was becoming an e-commerce platform, and increases in internet access speeds were making vlogging and short video content more viable.

Text blogging? That was for nerds who hung out in Borders. Which closed, appropriately. People want to consume content about the top 10 substitutes for anal bleaching, not participate in a glorified online book club.

***

I left things turned on around here all the same. I’ve renewed the domain name every time it’s been due since starting at this address just over 9 years ago. Now there’s a thing. It feels like forever, but I haven’t even been at this address for half my time blogging. That first half went quick.

I have to admit, though, that the output has been low in the second half. Very low. As in, I-don’t-do-the-algorithmic-churn low. One or two posts a year for the last a few years. I even skipped 2022. “Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience? Aren’t you just shouting at clouds?”

Nonsense. Anything involved with The Cloud gets more traffic than I do.

I managed a few words by email with Mikey of Harrangueman fame last year. Have also kept in touch with Mr Ponsford of 2-bit noir – an old stalwart of a number of comments sections, and a metaller from way back.

More broadly, and more prominently…

Calling Ophelia Benson of Butterflies and Wheels a “blogger” would seem a little too reductive – she’s more than that – a fully fledged author and editor at least, as well – while also being more of a cornerstone of the blogosphere than any of us, and for longer.

We chat. And I still chat with a number of the commenters on her blog, elsewhere. But I haven’t commented over at B&W in a few months, so I should probably go back for a visit some time soon.

ScienceBlogs died long ago when it was sold. FreeThoughtBlogs had a few good bloggers to begin with, but probably wasn’t conceived on all fronts by people who held to the mission statement in good faith.

Ed Brayton of Dispatches From The Culture Wars has been gone for almost five years now. It feels more like two. I’ll admit that five years prior to that, I’d stopped taking him seriously when he exited Dispatches from the FTB network, while pulling the “both sides” card when Ophelia Benson was being dog-piled in a very one-sided, obviously coordinated campaign by a number of Brayton’s fellow travelers. Or former fellow travelers. He really did both the sides he left behind.

So off to Patheos he went. I’d always found the atheists at Patheos conspicuously self-interested, and even cynical on some occasions. It’s not that I think atheists and the religious can’t work together, it’s just that there was always this ick factor from the godless there; a little too much ease with the self-promotion, a little too heavy on the use of polarized jargon the user clearly didn’t fully understand, and a little too many inconsistencies in self-positioning over time. I’m sure the religious readers felt something was a little off, too.

Pharyngula is still going. But the less said there…

If AV from Five Public Opinions had never linked to Dispatches and Pharyngula as much as he did, I’d have probably not have read them nearly as much. I’m not happy Ed is dead, not in any sense, but I do wish I’d clarified my views on his writing, earlier. And, as often is the case, I wish I’d trusted my gut more.

(Gawd, AV. Missing from the blogosphere for over sixteen years now – some of us still miss ya, fella!)

I do recall before blogging myself, that some of the more inquisitive Australian bloggers read and linked to Butterflies and Wheels, while not doing the same with Pharyngula‘s early presence – possibly due to the reception of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense in Australia. I know which I prefer.

I also remember the Usenet atheism days, at least around the 1998-2001 mark. I have very vague recollections of a mass-transition of atheists from newsgroups to blogs in 2004, but in 2004 I was tinkering with various flavours of Linux, and communing with LUGs and open source communities. And arguing with creationists in LUGs and open source communities – which was about as pleasant and not-at-all-embarrassing as you’d expect.

So I missed that transition from Usenet to early Atheosphere, re-emerging in a part of the blogosphere largely separate from what was going on in the US, with a perspective ground in Australian politics (I’d done a lefty political-internship not long before). Of course, evolution was a part of my studies at Uni then, so of course I was going to go there.

Australian political blogs got more of a look-in from me at least until around 2010. Anonymous Lefty, Grodscorp, The Happy Revolutionary, Larvatus Prodeo, The Road To Surfdom, Legal Eagle and others featured.

(And who could forget Iain Hall and Graeme Bird? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Who can remember Iain and Graeme and is still hanging around?)

***

Coming to blogging in 2005, before The God Delusion was published, and with a local political blogosphere that seemed like it was up for open discussion, was welcoming. I’d been to my first protest years before, had joined the Labor party and was already largely disillusioned by it, and had been arguing with creationists online since the ’90s, on and off. (I wasn’t going to join the Greens though, on account of the dogmatism, cultish harassment problem and history of pseudoscience).

2005. The Kansas Evolution hearings had kicked off, and The Flying Spaghetti Monster was unleashed. The End of Faith was starting to getting people interested in discussing religion, but not so much in Australia. Sam Harris was still being roped into atheist circles back then. People forget his first book wasn’t born of “The Atheist Movement” – it was conceived for better or worse, quite independently. And in 2005, it wasn’t really a news item in Australia. Not like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great were, later on.

Online atheism was, and still is, a dis-aggregated population of godless people, with godless interests and an array of persuasions, political and otherwise. It still tends towards social liberalism, with flair-ups of hot-headed, misogynist, libertarian, cry-baby gronks here and there. It still has its clutches of former religiously minded people, overcompensating for their past, while still not quite getting the materialism they rhetorically lean toward. It’s got all that and more – not all of it good, obviously. People are people.

I tell you what though. The tendencies of the Australian political Blogosphere, and the Atheosphere, really started to pull in opposite directions quite strongly. And in bad ways. If the Blogosphere hadn’t imploded, if things kept on going the way they were and blog participation kept up, straddling the two would have gotten pretty unpleasant.

The Oz political blogosphere owed a lot to being arts-adjacent. A number of more prominent bloggers here had intended career trajectories that could be, fairly or unfairly, negatively effected if certain prejudices weren’t catered to, or at least, not aggravated. Depending on what parts of the arts you don’t want to antagonize, you may not want to be seen as too sympathetic to Salman Rushdie – even this late in the piece. Pointing out that “sampling around the dependent variable” in statistics is a methodological flaw, could have you painted a supporter of the Iraq War, and made an outsider in other sections.

Deflate a beloved legal fiction and… you get the picture. Needless to say, denouncing The Wrong Kind of Atheists, irrespective of what those atheists may actually believe or do, was very popular back in the day in arts circles. And still is. What was allowed and what was verboten for atheists to inquire into was not being decided by people who actually knew what those atheists thought or did – or where they were actually going with things. Arguing against eugenics in a technically literate manner could get you accused of supporting eugenics by people with all the understanding of eugenics you’d expect of those raised on a media diet entirely made up of Sunday Arts.

(People who overly pride themselves on being cerebral often don’t like it when people use language they don’t understand – and technical language can become a repeat offender at setting this off).

If it was otherwise, maybe left-leaning religion journalists and the like would have made a bigger deal about specific instances of sexism documented within atheist communities, a lot earlier? In retrospect, it’s really odd that the critics of “New Atheism” mostly just left this alone, when it had the most evidence to support it relative to other complaints.

But why investigate sexism when you can accuse people, without a shred of evidence, and without being able to articulate why it’s even a problem, of attempting to resurrect a long-dead movement in philosophy? Because some of the people in arts circles you want to impress say it’s on the naughty list, that’s why.

The left side of the Australian political blogosphere catered to this kind of sensibility, to varying extents.

***

Meanwhile, in atheist land… We had the backdrop of an influential, but quite feudal arrangement of US secular organizations steeped in the American Civil Religion. The influence of Paul Kurtz in motivating US Humanism is large and well known, but his influence in making things so tribal? Not as much.

It’s been published what a control freak Kurtz could be, but there’s not so much analysis of the feudalism, at least not that I’ve come across. Needless to say, the details of his feuding with Richard Dawkins and intemperate or tone-deaf atheists seemed contrived – Dawkins hasn’t said half the stupid shit he’s been accused of, and of the actual stupid shit he’s said, Kurtz has had fellow travelers who’ve said worse, all without complaint from Kurtz. Hell, Kurtz had been falsely accused of some of the same going back decades, so he knew the tricks.

So when Kurtz joined in with the chorus decrying the “New Atheism” in the 2000s – a epithet he himself had used against him in the 1980s! – when Kurtz joined in in decrying Dawkins’ tone, amongst other things, Kurtz seemed mostly just to be railing against Dawkins’ influence relative to his own.

There was a struggle, from Kurtz, to direct organizations away from supporting Dawkins’ style (if not Dawkins himself). The way Kurtz exited CFI under a cloud after losing this struggle, just reinforced the impression.

It’s not that I want to smear Kurtz, though. But he had a part in making Playing The Game normal behaviour in movement spaces that are supposed to be geared to, in some sense, serve the truth. That’s not okay.

(It’s not that I imagine that Dawkins wouldn’t have done the same if he were able – he’s just not a natural at it is all, so you don’t really see it from him. At least, not directly. His proxies on the other hand…)

Meanwhile, American Humanism… yeesh. Much like a lot of their Unitarian brethren from the Harvard Divinity School, a lot of formally affiliated American Humanists seen to suffer from a strain of Smartest Person In The Room disease. Albeit a American liberal variety. For decades – DECADES – I’ve been seeing them waltz into conversation, not really understanding what other people are saying, and just assuming something deplorable is being said before launching into a condescending, corrective lecture. Never mind that their interlocutor may have been saying the opposite, and saying it better.

Add to this level of conceit, a dash of overcompensation for shameful memories of previous religious or bigoted misdeeds, an internalized redemption arc fantasy (ala American Civil Religion), and lashings of the kind of ambition-driven anxieties you get from The Cult of LinkedIn, and you’ve got the average American Humanist Association apparatchik I seem to keep coming across. You should see the Humanist chaplains!

Across the pond in the UK, Humanism doesn’t seem to have as much of the American Civil Religion aspects (obviously, but it does seem to be importing some of the tropes), or as much of the overcompensating, cult-hopper nonsense. But self-serving, media-aware professionals, again of the LinkedIn disposition? Yikes!

Australian Humanoatheoskepticism? Not really worth a mention. It’s got most of the usual symptoms, but a lot less of the statistical significance and all of the lack of influence to boot. Again, all of the Humanist chaplains I’ve come across in Australia are the same condescending, Smartest Guy In The Room, modeled-on-American-liberalism types, who seem to be conspicuously lacking in the actually-knowing-shit department for people so confident.

Layered across this, online, you have a small number of secular folks genuinely interested in open, honest inquiry in spite of how the algorithms try to shape their discussion (there were more, but the algorithm, online harassment and loss of interest have each taken their toll). You have a lot of profilitic identities trying to be the next trending thing in quote-unquote “progressive” thought. And you have a load of manosphere-adjacent chuds, similarly profilitic, but who are also the volatile, rage-baiting, less-humorous troll-successors of 2000s 4Chan, Something Awful, the crass end of Internet Infidels and so on.

Too many of the arts-adjacent seem apt to lump all, or much of this into the false taxon “New Atheist”, for various, often self-serving reasons. Maybe they want to appeal to their liberal-arts friends while also being sciencey, but they engaged in some misogynistic online abuse back in the day; they can claim they were “radicalized” by “New Atheism”, thereby externalizing blame.

Never mind that some of those radical “New Atheists” were women on the receiving end of said misogyny. Women who made great efforts in standing up to it. You can’t let facts like that stop you from lumping them in with their harassers and blaming them for your past actions.

Or maybe somebody doesn’t want to be accused of being a “New Atheist”, so they single somebody else out who is (but nobody is – it’s a bogus taxon). Maybe they can’t get tenure at Australian Catholic University, and need to keep being seen to be behaving, so need to differentiate themselves from people – anyone – seen as pesky in received wisdom. Or maybe it’s more base.

“Oh hey babe. Yeah, I’m not like those New Atheist guys. Yeah, nah, I’m not religious but I respect a broad who studies theology. I’m totally a feminist.”

You think people haven’t witnessed behaviour online that’s reducible to parody like this? That this doesn’t happen in liberal, “progressive”, arts-friendly circles? That it hasn’t always happened for as long as there have been progressives?

***

But yeah… if you were a blogger straddled across an arts-adjacent, center-left political scene, and a candid, secular movement committed to inquiry, you’d basically be spread across two antagonistic cultures at once. I’m certainly not the only one I’ve seen straddled across it.

I guess that’s a silver lining to the end of the blogosphere – that particular rift is gone.

I’ve grown away from several people from “both sides” over the years. Some I wish I’d cottoned on to earlier, other I had issues with but tolerated out of deference to the judgement of mutual friends, and with others, we’ve just changed. A handful of folks I’ve befriended via the blogsophere have sadly turned out to just have been somewhat awful all along – but we all knew to expect that about the Internet once upon a time, so I can’t complain at length.

Having Oz politics bloggers and secular bloggers go at it full-tilt, at the same time, at length, would have certainly made this process of parting a lot more explosive. Maybe painfully. Maybe destructively. And the polarization did increase, even if the readership didn’t.

Someone who kept writing, and yet somehow managed to rise above this kind of division in-general, gracefully, and all while not self-censoring (while religious), was the late Neil Whitfield, who died just prior to Christmas last year. I’m coming around to thinking that Neil was the definitive elder-statesman of the Australian blogosphere. I can’t think of anyone more deserving.

The real question is probably whether or not the Australian blogosphere deserves to be associated with him.

Even before his death, more than once I’ve thought “what would Neil say?” The idea of OzBlogging without him around is still hard to process.

So. Back to that question. Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience?

***

I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to keep this blog going. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be going.

I’m mortal. When I started this I was in my early thirties and throwing around some heavy weight at the gym, despite not being at peak health even then. I’m in my fifties now, feeling it, and no longer at the gym since the early pandemic. My health isn’t great.

I’d like to leave something – and yeah, I’m thinking of the leaving part – but I’m not entirely sure of the worth of the project. Especially without genuine engagement (no, not the social media statistical definition – I mean the human kind!)

I’ve stopped listing and have changed my email addresses, and I’m considering closing the comments section, given nobody uses it. Due to legal changes in Australia, blog hosts are now more liable for comments made than they used to be, and it’s otherwise a time-sink, if not a particularly frenetic one.

How would people engage with this “content” after that? Not outside of social media linking to it, I guess. Which is kind of worrisome. Handing over power, even a small residual amount after holding out seems bleak. Not in a practical sense, but in that it’s finally confirming the final nail in the coffin of proper, open discussion. The death of The Dream of The Internet.

This may be goodbye, my friends. Eventually. Soonish.

The only thing stopping me is a kind of Camus-style, existential rebellion against the Universe. The continuation of this blog for so long in spite of everything has certainly been absurd.

What to hope for? I’d like people to be able to talk again like they did in the 2000s. Maybe without the casual bigotry, but also without the self-censorship. How do you balance that? Well, not with an algorithm, and not with BlueSky or Twitter admins.

Maybe, if some of the few people remaining can band together and see past their differences, they can… We had a slow cooking movement, maybe we can have a slow reading… What if Zoomers took on 2000s-style blogging like it was retro…

No. There are challenges, and likely solutions, but they won’t involve denying that the blogosphere is dead.

I’ll keep the lights on around here for a while yet, just to rail against an absurd world in an absurd universe. And maybe I’ll even get a chance to debunk a few falsehoods about movement and subculture history. But I’m not going to kid myself.

If you’ve read this far, then thanks. It’s absurd that you’re here. But appreciated.

~ Bruce

Neil is gone

Towards the end of last year, and after a few concerning announcements, Neil Whitfield, retired teacher, author of the Floating Life series of blogs, and Neil’s Commonplace Book, passed away. I found out last week via a few searches online after not being able to contact him through the blog comments.

I first met Neil who then posted as “Ninglun” online – I’m going to say – back in 2006, or maybe even late 2005, in the comments on AV’s Five Public Opinions blog while it was still hosted on Blogspot. Comments at Five Public Opinions could get…. lively. With hindsight, Neil seemed to have an infinite reserve of patience, because boy wasn’t I an irritable, prickly customer back then? One among a number I guess, not that that ever stopped Neil from showing grace.

That period, from around early 2006 to April of 2009 was kind of a golden era for Australian blogging, back before Twitter, Facebook and streaming video content started cutting into the scene. (Australian atheist blogging also had a culture distinct from its US counterpart – not that Neil was an atheist at the time, he did partake in the discussions and was a valued contributor).

AV bowed out of blogging towards the end of that period, and neither Neil nor myself heard from him again, although on a few occasions Neil and I reminisced and wished that we could. A part of me hopes that AV gets this news somehow, although my old blogging haunts are now gone and the usual channels fell away over a decade ago.

(This is the point in the conversation where someone would make a joke about intercessory prayer).

Neil chugged on, continuing blogging while so many of the old stalwarts closed up shop, the Australian blogosphere practically falling away around him. If I recall correctly, the New South Wales State Library has archived some of his past blogging, so I’m going to have to look into that.

I started making plans to visit Neil in Wollongong back in 2019. The plan was, I’d book into a hostel in The ‘Gong, catch Iron Maiden’s planned 2020 tour while it passed through Sydney, and finally meet Neil in person. That and maybe grab a meal at Diggers.

Suffice to say, the COVID pandemic saw to the end of that plan, and I’ve been pretty much bound to Adelaide ever since. I’m sad I’ll never get to meet Neil in person, but I am still grateful for the writing he’s left us all with, and for the lessons I’ve learned from him.

A kind rebuke from the Five Public Opinions era about my Humpty Dumptyish philosophy of language will be something I hold on to for some time yet, and I expect to come across things from time to time and wonder “what would Neil make of this?”

As a conversationalist, and as an educator, he had that effect on people.

Vale Neil Whitfield (1943-2024).

~ Bruce

A few thoughts on Jesus

So. First things first; apologies for not posting in a while. I’ve been contemplating a number of things while in absentia, and I haven’t felt a compulsion to force out a post.

That kind of grind is creatively and intellectually corrosive; you don’t reflect on life according to schedule. But still, I could have kept touch.

What have I been up to?

Recently I went back and had another watching of/listening to Xasthur’s Walker of Dissonant Worlds. There’s a placard in the film clip that’s held by a homeless man in a wheelchair that reads “Christ’s Wounds are NOTHING compared to MINE!!!” It got me thinking.

Comparatively speaking, the alleged son of God didn’t really go through the worst of horrors. Anyone who’s worked with refugees at length, or had to prosecute war crimes, is going to be able to conjure up images of far worse. Hell, Steven King can and has; on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is hangnail, 5 is the experience of Paul Sheldon in Misery, and 10 is unspeakable, Jay-Cee’s time at Calvary earns maybe a 4.

Not a great holiday experience, but quite incapable of encapsulating the full breadth of human suffering. Sexed-up as it has been, it’s a bit of an insult to anyone who’s been through worse and survived.

And of course, Jay-Cee did survive. After a long-weekend cooldown, he just auto-self-resurrected and went on his merry.

Another song comes to mind. Pulp’s Common People.

If he called his Dad, He could stop it all. And eventually He did, although not before the younger divinity had a bit of a moan.

I don’t expect the story of Jesus to be some kind of lurid, sadistic tale of pain and ultimate humiliation. It is a story after all, and if it were told that way it’d be a bad one. But if Jesus’s experience is going to fall short of what can and has been experienced by too many humans, what was needed was for the story to not mock human misery. Sadly, that it did. All it had to do was not caterwaul or pretend the maximal of human suffering, nor the apex of sacrifice, but alas.

What we got was Jesus the Cosmic Class Tourist.

It doesn’t really say much to me about Jesus though, this story. It reads more like a tale of how ordinary people should frame their drudgery and pain as written by people somewhat fortuitous enough to be insulated from much of that experience – it says more about the authors. If Jesus was a man, I don’t think think he was divine, and I don’t trust scripture to describe him.

Maybe he was a class act. His biographers haven’t painted him that way is all.

Some immortal dude in the sky with power and privilege beyond anything we lowly humans could imagine, deigns to transubstantiate as one of us, then tell us how it is as if we hadn’t the experience? It couldn’t have been worse if he’d transubstantiated to the hood to use karate lessons to reach troubled youth.

And yet some will complain that they don’t understand why others don’t find this appealing.

~ Bruce

More of the same

It seems the hand-wringing over “New Atheists” hasn’t abated in respectable circles, and is still as depressing as ever. Take this latest effort by Tim Robertson over at Eureka Street.

Like it’s 2006 all over again, we kick off with a retread of the “New Atheists do it too” retort concerning creation myths; an old standard still carries the tacit admission that there’s something to be embarrassed about in believing in creation myths. I guess I’d be more disappointed if I was religious.

Getting closer to the meat of things, Robertson portrays a “New Atheism” that views itself as being in line with a Humean kind the Enlightenment. This strikes me as more than a little odd, because ever since Harris’s The Moral Landscape, misunderstanding of and dismissiveness towards Hume could be portrayed as a fashionable trope of the “New Atheism”; from cod-moral realism, to dyspeptic rationalists* giving anti-Humean lectures at the pub, to train-wrecks involving the is-ought distinction like those described here.

If you’ve been around skepto-atheist circles during the past ten years, and you haven’t come across this anti-philosophical, anti-Humean schtick yet, you’ve either not been paying attention or have been incredibly lucky. “New Atheism” sees itself as anything approximating Humean? Phooey.

(And if the “New Atheism” did actually exist, you’d also think it’d be more Millian than Lockean, too, what with all the utilitarianism and the motivation to avoid all the peskiness involved in natural law.)

As for the matter of Dawkins and his eugenics tweet, and how this moves the “New Atheism” away from the Humean, I’m pretty sure Robertson is just being salacious here. Mentions of Dawkins and eugenics in close proximity may excite the usual audiences, but Robertson doesn’t really go anywhere with it so much as riff over the matter with a cheap jab and glib allusion to critical theory by way of Wikipedia. It’s all over a bit quickly.

An essay detailing why we should consider the referenced Dialectic of Enlightenment as a sound analysis, and how it applies specifically in cases like Dawkins’ might be interesting (and probably a good deal more interesting again if involving a case with a publisher other than Twitter). We don’t get that though. Is something like this expecting too much, or are we all supposed to be clever, to be “in” enough to just know where Robertson is going with this and give each other knowing nods?

(If you have the time, patience and curiosity, there’s a discussion on much the same topic that has the merit of being somewhat less conjectural or opaque than discussion centered on theory. Keith Stanovich’s concept of cognitive decoupling presents as highly applicable to Dawkins’ tweets and similar displays of reasoning. Points for dipping your toes in that are as good as any other can be found here and here.**)

The matter of eugenics and the Dialectic of Enlightenment pushed to one side, Robertson moves back to bromides, performing a bit of splitting to present Dawkins The Biologist and Dawkins The Atheist as if they were somehow distinct. It’s a artifice of course, so that Robertson can present one as having failed to do the work of the other – in this case Dawkins The Atheist being a mean uninspiring sod, incapable of the “wonder and splendor” achieved by Dawkins The Biologist. A neat little trick of Manichean negation if your brain can manage it, I guess.

Of course religion is positioned as a purveyor of “wonder and splendor” itself, which Dawkins himself could have remained more like if only he’d stayed in his lane.

(This splitting does raise a question, though. How do you dissociate Dawkins’ tweet on eugenics from Dawkins The Biologist in the first place? Because we are trying to hang shit on the “New Atheism”, right? This is Dawkins The Atheist leading us towards scientific racism, not Dawkins The Biologist yeah?)

I can’t help thinking that deep down, this hope-trope is tied to another piece of apologetics: “The New Atheists have failed to contend with the hope brought by sophisticated, progressive religion! They talk about us like we’re creationists!”

The “New Atheists” – whoever they are on any given day – among others, treat religious moderates/liberals/progressives as if they are statistically or socially marginal, which in many, many contexts they are. In practice this often means just overlooking them. Does being ignored like that hurt so much that apologists still need to trot out the denials? “No, no. They’re talking about us!”

Maybe people need to get over themselves, yeah?

Getting back to hope; what’s to contend with anyway? I don’t just mean background levels of hope, or hope that the credulous can get behind. Why is religion portrayed as especially inducing of high-grade hope, more so than say worker’s clubs, group knitting or mosh-pits?

We’re challenged by Robertson to consider why the “New Atheist” bogeyman fails to inspire hope like religion or like Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn? It’s truly odd that Corbyn is presented by Robertson as an alternative given that this piece was published well after the bloodbath that was the 2019 UK general election.

The Corbyn rapture didn’t happen. And it’s less than hope-inspiring to have to listen to all the rationalizations for why prophecy failed to materialize. Yes, the Russians got involved. Yes, the Tories lied, even more so than usual. But no, none of this clinched it. It’ll all be just as much fun when the Bernie Sanders rapture fails to materialize and his more fervent followers – the hopeful ones – try to re-invent history so as not to look like followers of Harold Camping each time they pass a mirror***.

Robertson compares religion to this cascading disappointment and still finds the nerve to criticize “New Atheists” for slagging off religion?

This phenomena of Australian writers of a radical bend, or of progressive theological sympathies, crying into their beers and pissing and moaning about perceived slights from now over a decade ago, doesn’t inspire much hope either. I can understand religious people not liking The God Delusion. What’s not to understand? I can understand them not finding it inspirational either because outside of a particular subset of the ex-religious, who does?

I can understand people finding Dawkins’ tone-deaf tweeting annoying or uninformative. My suggestion is simply that if you don’t like the guy’s tweets, you treat him like someone who’s transitioned well outside their talents into a retirement full of awkward, eminently ignorable beat poetry. It’s not like you’ll ever have to worry that some nation will turn one of his tweets into policy.

What I do have difficulty understanding is why any curious, emotionally functioning, religious adult would feel the need to get Dawkins so long after the original narcissitic injury. Defensive, thin-skinned, grudge-holding types on the other hand – that’s easy to grasp. As is the idea of authors willing to pander to these sentiments to get published.

I’m not sure how sulky axe-grinding, or peddling ego-balms is a good fit for publishers of serious literature, though. Don’t ordinary religious people find these grudge pieces utterly depressing? Maybe they do and maybe more literary journals and should reflect that.

At any rate, you don’t have to be religious to find a failure of Jesuit culture depressing; we’re all humans after all. Unless you’re a sadist, the failure of other humans is something that we should feel on some level.

Similarly, if you have any care for Australian literature, the indulgence of pettiness has got to be pretty disappointing as well. I don’t think people are remotely as inured to this as some pretend.

~ Bruce

* Term borrowed from here, which is a good read in its own right. Apparently Sam Harris first coined the term, so I guess it’s nice to have something decent to attribute to him.

** I won’t endorse all the points made, obviously, but the discussion overall seems fruitful enough, and leads off into other conversations people may want to chase up.

*** Even if Sanders becomes president, his purported appeal won’t be enough for his supporters dream to survive Congress.

Imagined History of a Never-Was: “New Atheism”

Jacob Hamburger writes over at The Point, asking what the New Atheism even was. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself ever since Gary Wolf resurrected the term at Wired in 2006 in his oft-cited essay. Asking and mostly getting the same answer, over and over.

There’s really only one position in relation to “New Atheism” that I’ve ever been completely comfortable with: that it doesn’t exist, that it never existed, and that the term was a snarl word that only functioned rhetorically. The phrase “Gnu Atheism”, an altogether un-serious mutation of the term born a few years later out of a scam that snared journalist and vocal critic Chris Mooney, always seemed a far better candidate to be taken seriously, despite its obvious satirical bend.

People using the term almost only ever define themselves in relation to the “New Atheism”, rather than in the affirmative. Who called themselves a “New Atheist”? A notable exception would be the late Victor Stenger, who seemed quite innocently unable to realize how odd he was in doing so. Mostly the meaning of the term shifted and slid according to the short term requirements of authors and pundits.

One day Daniel Dennett could have been a “New Atheist”, and the next a bulwark against it. The critique was folly. “New Atheism” was a shadow puppet.

***

Supposedly coined in 2006 by Gary Wolf at Wired, the term was used much earlier in 1986 by Robert Morey in his “New Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom”, and possibly earlier than that again. Tacking a “new” onto the start of any “ism” being an old formula that’s sadly never gone stale.

Wolf’s article is more restrained than either Morey’s thesis, or any number of the jeremiads using the term that would follow. He focused on three authors, none who called themselves “New Atheists”; Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris. This was shortly before Christopher Hitchens had entered the fray.

It’s weird, even humorous that Wolf invoked the late Paul Kurtz in contrast to the “New Atheists”, then of the Centre For Inquiry. In the 1980s, the afore mentioned Morey was lambasting Kurtz himself as one of the “New Atheists”. It was an old game and one Kurtz would have been aware of, especially on account of the matter of stridency; the man was a supporter and friend of the not-exactly-timid Madalyn Murray O’Hair who also came in for a smearing in Morey’s tome.

Criticisms of Dawkins, typical of the time, came down to him being “strident”, and being incapable of alliances with liberal-minded Christians (despite his cooperation with then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on the matter of creationism in schools). When you strip away the objections based on fiction, you were basically left with tone, which doesn’t have very much meat to it as far as purported ideological demarcations go. Anything that foreshadowed “Dear Muslima” was thin on the ground.

Wolf seemed even less capable of presenting a meaningful difference between Dennett and the likes of Kurtz.

***

Lashings of embellishments from a variety of authors in the following years didn’t flesh things out any further.

“They’re logical positivists!” (No “they” weren’t).

“They want to destroy Christian culture!” (Basically a re-branded War on Christmas fiction for people who imagined they were above Fox News).

“They support the Iraq War!” (Mostly “they” didn’t).

“Scientism!” (Having a poor conception of the boundaries of science does not a scientismist make, and at any rate, Harris’ philosophical silliness wasn’t widely adopted by purported “New Atheists” anyway – not unless you tweaked your definitions to perform an act of circular logic, at least.)

The worst part of these takes on the “New Atheism” though, wasn’t that they were untrue (although frequently they were). The worst part was that so little, if any of it, could be used as demarcation criteria. And when it was a suitable for demarcation, you’d find “New Atheism” being split off into other categories.

***

Even in the early days there was a whiff of sexism about the scene you couldn’t easily deny; Dawkins’ lilting waffle about the gentler sex; Harris’ bias for male pronouns; more overtly, Hitchens calling the Dixie Chicks “fucking fat slags”. Aside from how conspicuous it is that people wanting to bury the “New Atheism” at the time buried the lede on this one, this is still insufficient to demonstrate that there is (or was) a “New Atheism”. How would this sexism set the “New” apart from the “Old Atheism” – the old guard Wolf mentions?

Wolf wrote favorably about Asimov as an example of the old, but that guy was a complete shit to women; a serial groper, a condescending patriarch and completely unable to render women believably in fiction to boot. A demarcation criterion needs to be able to make a distinction, but “fucking fat slags” is a sentiment you could imagine ass-grabber Asimov getting behind, so sexism’s probably not going to do the job.

Maybe vanity and thin skin? No. I mean, Harris and Dawkins, and maybe Dennett could be accused of thin-skin, much like a number of other less known “New” atheists. But nice-guy Sagan’s “Butt-Head Astronomer” legal battle with Apple arguably tops any fit-of-pique the purported “New Atheism” could lay claim to.

Kurtz’s labelling of Ron Lindsay’s management style as Stalinist seems grounded in vanity as well. And the criticism of offensive cartoons – something he himself presided over but overlooked in a way suggestive of preening – brings us neatly back to the issue of confected difference.

The function of the “New Atheist” trope, at least from the secular progressive side, isn’t primarily to critique atheists. It’s a tool by which authors write about themselves in negative relief, a direct approach to extolling their own virtues being far too obvious. “Look at the New Atheism! [I’m not like that! Allow me to list the qualities I don’t have!]”

***

Back to Hamburger: So what came of “it”?

Hitchens is dead, for one. I think he would have objected to Hamburger’s attribution of the idea of liberalism ideally being grounded in pure reason alone. It’s almost as if Hamburger missed the discussion of “rationalist naiveté” – and Hitchens proximity to that discussion. Only Hamburger’s focus on that period is quite extensive.

And why the weird narrative tales? Non-belief and scientific rationality only becoming political causes after Hitchens joined with Dawkins et. al.? Harris “founding” the “New Atheist” genre, as if the other books by Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens weren’t authored independently? That’s not how it happened.

I don’t think Hamburger is being mendacious. I don’t even think he’s writing his essay in an attempt to position himself with readers in the way that PZ Myers’ recent testimony-cum-denouncement so obviously labours to do. In a way, I suspect he’s naively fallen into the same trap Victor Stenger did, albeit from the opposite end of the pit.

It is possible to be unwittingly maneuvered into writing this kind of thing even if you’ve only passively adopted just a few questionable assumptions in good faith.

***

There are meaningful trends in the detritus of the readerships of the Usually Mentioned Atheists. You can find misogynists pretty easily. There’s a particular school of handwaving concerning the boundaries of science that’s been masquerading as clear and forthright ever since The Moral Landscape.

There’s been pride expressed over political ignorance and a related if often inverse dismissiveness regarding philosophical literacy. “You used a word that philosophers use! You’re one of those Politically Correct Ismists that are saying things! Now I know I can ignore you! Bwaha! You should leave the pub and leave me to stroke my most intelligent of beards!”

Depending on how the net has been cast, there are also more-or-less decent, more-or-less intelligent, and more-or-less anodyne sorts in there with more than salvageable ideas. But again, none of this is “New” and none of it is uniform across the purported “New Atheism”.

What can be done to collate meaning in all of this mess? Rather than giving the vague snarl word of “New Atheism” any serious coinage (or excessive dismissal in cases where no malice is evident), I think someone’s going to have to work out a taxonomy based on actual positions held, that actually matter taxonomically; something akin to John Nerst’s notion of the Pomo-oid Cluster, albeit for atheist authors post-2004. Or rather, someone should have tried this a long time ago.

Going beyond just the concept of a cluster and actually making a map of the territory would be immensely useful too, even if it wouldn’t take off in every-day conversation. At the very least people arguing in good faith could more easily avoid talking past each other, and a kind of convention for recognizing disingenuous railing against “New Atheists” could be more easily practiced.

As it stands, it’s too easy for woke-acting columnists to rail against “New Atheists” (The Guardian and Salon have offered up several examples over the years), just as it’s too easy for genuine criticism of atheist authors to be dismissed as disingenuous or hostile (which you can see for yourself if you crawl down this rabbit hole).

Forget how the various tribes of authors feel about this for a moment, and ask yourself “in a civil democracy, how does this particular form of ambiguity – this confected grouping – serve the public interest?”

~ Bruce

Look out, Melbourne…

Animal-product-free luggage… check.

Gold convention, and Gala Dinner Tickets… check.

Train tickets for the scenic route… check.

Accommodation… check.

Ironing and packing clothes… okay… Innaminute.

That’s it Melbourne – I’m on my way down to sneer at your cafes, point at your soggy chips, and mock your dreary weather.

The Global Atheist Convention is my main objective, that and a few of the fringe events, but I do hope to find a good book exchange or two, and soak in a bit of this and that. I’ll be writing a few journal/essays on the convention (and fringe events), probably on a daily basis, for Ophelia Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels, and I’ll post links as they’re published.

I’m not overly-inclined to live-tweet a live event I’m taking notes on, but I should have my Twitter client turned on at various points to make comment. You can track my feed over here if you’re so inclined.

Possibly, if I can find the time to draft suitable questions, I’ll be able find someone of academic or community standing, amenable to a beer and twenty questions.

I wouldn’t mind catching up with some of the Melburnian wonks I’ve pestered on the blogosphere over the past seven years, if they’re up for it, and if we can find the time. I’m already lucky enough to be meeting and eating with one of their families at the gala dinner, so I won’t get sooky if I don’t get more than that.

The fringe event I’ve committed to is Secular Australia: A 10 Point Plan, featuring Russell Blackford, Meredith Doig and Graham Oppy. It’s on Thursday night at 6:30pm at Embiggen Books. It’s worth mentioning, and I’ve had Russell Blackford emphatically confirm this – this isn’t an atheist-only gig*. Secular theists are more than welcome – they’re wanted.

Don’t worry about my bluster, Melburnians. I come bearing hugs.

~ Bruce

Apparently my droogies ain’t hardcore, no more…

A couple of years ago, I wished Archbishop Dr Jensen, amongst others, a Happy Easter, for what was in my view, a gift – in particular, his over-privileged, petulant whining about atheists who wouldn’t submit to the will of ~~Archbishops~~ God. It was political gold.

But I’d like to thank another Jensen from the Sydney Anglicans for yet more wild speculation about people they’re in-touch with. I wish him a Happy Easter as well.

This time it’s not atheists being discussed, at least not directly (I mean, you can refuse The Lord’s message, and go for a bit of the biff), but brawlers.

“All cities are violent, even though cities were ostensibly founded to protect us from violence. But among Australian cities, Sydney is famous for its love of a good ding-dong, a donnybrook, a barney. Cultured Melbourne is far too genteel for that kind of behaviour; sweet Adelaide even more so. – Emphasis added.”

(Michael Jensen, 2012)

Jensen waxes nostalgic about biff-clichés, but I’d like to think I can be a bit nostalgic about that kind of ‘sin’ as well. Let me tell you a little about my experience of Adelaide, South Australia, and its surroundings.

If cities are violent, such as being worthy of note, you’d expect country towns to be comparatively peaceful. In Port Lincoln, South Australia, I got into plenty of stupid fights as a kid; I got into my first knife fight at age eleven or twelve. (An interesting side note to all of the knife fights, then and since; the other guy always had the knife).

In 1991, amidst other adventures, I took a number of thumpings (under pillow, or Yellow Pages), and enjoyed a brief encounter between my scrotum and a hot lamp bulb, to see if I could be trusted to keep a secret. Fun stuff.

In 1992, after escaping Port Lincoln, one of my former acquaintances blew the brains out of one of my Father’s weed-smoking buddies, and brain-damaged another poor fellow, in Lincoln National Park. Glad I missed it, even as ‘genteel’ as it must have been.

A number of the people who managed to escape, have similar tales to tell, although I guess technically, if I’m to adhere to Jensen’s wisdom, I’d have to confess that a former mate, who I’ve been informed was killed a few years back by a screwdriver through the neck, met his end in Perth. You are probably well aware, this is nowhere near Adelaide.

Then there’s the sweet tales I could tell of my sweet stay in Elizabeth Vale; a suburb in Adelaide’s north, where I lived within walking distance of one of the homes of the Snowtown Killers (at around the time they were actively bumping people off for their Centrelink payments).

Two murders (not including any of the Snowtown murders) within the first two months of living in the area. Knife-fights between neighbours; knife-on-bare-fist; knife-on-knife; knife-on-garden-rake; knife-on-shard-of-glass…

…don’t get me started on the car-on-bedsit, or the syringe-based violence.

Sweet, genteel, Adelaide!

This is anecdote, of course. Not statistics. I’m sure throngs of people from Sydney could tell similar tales.

And what anecdote may Mr Jensen have by way of example? I’m sure those having experienced violence, those in need of respite and pastoral care could take, if not solace, then a sense of solidarity, or even awe, from Mr Jensen’s tales.

“The churches of this town have not always been above a bit of brawling themselves. You have to be tough to survive as a god-botherer in a town that despises wowsers so much. The Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang was himself a famously strident and uncompromising debater in his time.”

(Michael Jensen, 2012)

Cool story. I’d almost mistaken Jensen’s article for a middle class, toss-fest.

Happy Easter, folks.

~ Bruce

(HT: Neil).

March of the wankers…

It’s a couple of days march, at least, until Richard Dawkins and George Pell go head to head on ABC’s QANDA. Of course, I’m not referring to them when I talk about ‘wankers’.

The ‘March’, is the predictable plodding of anxious and pretentious sods and sodettes, who lament the discussion in advance, down the bridge of their noses.

Continue reading “March of the wankers…” →

Is Barnaby Joyce the avante garde of the Christian literary tradition?

Ho ho ho, with a hat-tip to Russell Blackford. Barnaby Joyce is putting lead into the pencil of Christian literature, or at least, there’s probably lead in the crayons he ate from the Fairfax stationary.

Perhaps I’m being unkind…

‘My war is always against that religion called atheist extremism, that sneaky sect.’

(Barnaby Joyce, 2011).

Oh come on… It’s not so bad.

‘Yes, this sect’s followers make their way on to your veranda then hold a righteous court of sneering indignation about the crib in the park. You can hear yourself muttering under your breath, ”I wish you would go drown yourself, you pseudo-intellectual Gucci flea.” They write letters to complain about the incorrectness of carols at the school and picket the Christmas tree. To not insult their religion, you must no longer follow yours. They yearn for the fallacy of a vacuum and they demand that you join them in that philosophical void.’

(Barnaby Joyce, 2011)

Now I know what you’re thinking – incitement to violence, and in a Fairfax paper of all places!

But if you’ve learned anything about lit-crit, and religious texts, it’s that you can take these things to literally. He’s not suggesting that atheist should actually kill themselves, no, no, no.

You start out as a Gucci flea (whatever that is, I’m not sure of the Biblical reference – I’m not a Biblical scholar), then you submerge yourself in a baptism until you flatline. You are then born again, brain-dead, able to operate on, and in sympathy with, Joyce’s intellectual plane. Which apparently isn’t a void. Sort of a Cartesian dualism deal, or something – the brain is dead, but the soul goes on, un-vacuumed.

It’s hard to interpret such cutting edge stuff fairly. I may not be a Biblical scholar, but I know when new intertextualities arise, in more novel configurations, those familiar with the traditional – conservatives and laymen – are left scratching their heads.

Where he got the idea that atheism was a religion, much less a sect, I don’t know. There are too many new sources. Once upon a time, people knew that atheists were precisely not religious, which is why sometimes, they were killed. Not drowned so much as dismembered, hung, set on fire, or whatever.

No, Barnaby is obviously going with something post-modern, in response to the liberal secularism of early 20th century anglophone nations. The confabulation about Christian exclusion from schools, or the anxiety about freedom from religion being the freedom to take religion away. Not my tradition of choice, actually – bullshit actually – but that seems to be where Joyce, our latest national treasure, is coming from; late 20th, early 21st century, Christian self-pity.

But ignore the ressentiment, for a moment, because it’s only one facet of the human condition that Barnaby Joyce fleshes out. Joyce is nothing, if not a pluralist…

‘Anyway, Christmas is here and I hope we borrow a little from the person who kicked it off. The timing at the end of December has more to do with the celebration of the pagan festival of Saturnalia rather than when Christ was actually born. Those politically incorrect early Christians had the good sense to roll with the customs rather than to rage against them.’

(Barnaby Joyce, 2011)

I take it that this includes the concept of ‘December liberty’, where people could say what they wanted of their leaders, and others, without fear of reprisal. This is perhaps why Barnaby is so liberal with his own choice of words.

Allow me to reciprocate in the same spirit.

You Barnaby, are a complete and utter moron. I hope you asphyxiate on a dingleberry. (Not literally, of course.)

Oh, and it’s a few seconds from midnight… Happy Unholy Anti-Christmas! Here’s a jingle.

~ Bruce

The virtue of paying attention (to theological ethicists)…

Sometimes us Gnu Atheists, secular fundamentalists, and religious fifth columnists can be dismissive, even totalitarian when the need arises.

Not that we’ve come to power quite yet, or that we’re necessarily restricted to anti-theistic dictatorship when we do (the dwindling Christian minority can still spout its nonsense in public, and we can allow this to continue), it’s possibly time for a change in the mode of engagement. The Enemy is beaten.

Before the First Atheist International secures its first English-speaking nation at the Global Atheist Convention in 2012, it’d probably be worth considering the baby we risk throwing out with the bath water. It’s time – the first time – for us to truly consider what sophisticated theologians have been saying, without our snickering, and without ridicule.

It’s time, now that we have the time, and that victory is already assured, that we consider these things in a scholarly manner.

Consider gay marriage. We’ve been shutting down that particular discussion for decades now, by calling opponents ‘homophobes’ without any consideration of their actual position. Terrible for sure, but necessary for the revolution, at least up until now.

We’ve won the debate. Public sympathy is now irreversibly against the church in this matter. It’s now safe for us to consider the more sophisticated ethical arguments against gay marriage without fear of a loss of hegemony.

“It is significant that everywhere the issue has been debated it begins on the issue of fairness and justice and with majority support but that soon changes when people realise that there are deeper issues involved. After their legislature experimented with same-sex marriage, the people of California voted against the revisionist concept of marriage.” – Emphasis added.

(Rod Benson et. al., 2011)

There are deeper issues involved, and the revisionist concept of marriage, our revisionist concept of marriage, doesn’t account for them. You don’t have to be religious to note that if we assume power, and follow through by riding roughshod over these deeper issues, it could mean disaster! It could turn out to be just another facet, in possibly yet another failed secular revolution! We don’t want that.

“Changing the law so that marriage includes same-sex unions would be a change to what marriage means. Currently marriage involves a comprehensive union between a man and a woman, and norms of permanence and exclusivity. Marriage has a place in the law because a relationship between a man and a woman is the kind of relationship that may produce children. Marriage is linked to children, for the sake of children, protecting their identity and their nurture by a mother and a father.”

(Rod Benson et. al., 2011)

Think of the children! You’d never had heard of it, or come across the idea during the past two decades of discussions of revisionist marriage, if you hadn’t bothered to take down your blinkers – to pay attention to what sophisticated, scholarly, religious ethicists had been telling you all along.

Think of the children! You’d never had heard of it!

Clearly revising the definition of marriage opens up all sorts of terrible possibilities. First we’d let the gays marry – couples who can’t produce their own offspring naturally – and then we’d have to grant the right of marriage to barren heterosexuals as well. Why it’s a slippery slope!

And you just know that secular fundamentalist ethicists have never considered the ramifications of giving IVF and adoption in combination with marriage, to straight couples. I really feel like we’ve dodged a bullet here. We really weren’t prepared for this!

“If children happen to be in a same-sex household they will always have come from outside that relationship, either through an earlier relationship or through the use of some other biological parent and technology.”

(Rod Benson et. al., 2011)

You see, it is just the same as with all of the heterosexual couples with reproductive problems the state has conscientiously been barring from marriage all along!

“If the law were to be changed so that marriage included same-sex relationships [or heterosexual couples with reproductive problems], then marriage would no longer be about children. It would be about adults only.”

(Rod Benson et. al., 2011)

The state wouldn’t be thinking about the children anymore! Fellow ultra-secularists, I implore you to reconsider, whichever future your goodwill for gays and the infertile may lead you to, do you want it to be one where the state isn’t looking out for our precious, vulnerable younglings?

“Given the marital relationship’s natural orientation to children, it is not surprising that, according to the best available sociological evidence, children fare best on virtually every indicator of wellbeing when reared by their wedded biological parents. “

(Rod Benson et. al., 2011)

Never mind that the first study Benson et. al. cite in support of this, is a largely interpretative meta-analysis by the ‘independent’ Witherspoon Institute, isn’t peer-reviewed, is funded by the Templeton Foundation, and when statistical, is purely correlatory; worrying about such matters would be both prejudicial and reductionist. How often in the past have we secular fundamentalists stonewalled discussion by being prejudicial and reductionist, in addition to our use of ridicule and ad hominem? As necessary as it was then, it’s no longer a useful strategy. We need to change.

Never mind that the second study cited by Benson et. al., in as far as it addresses the issue of non-biological parents, concerns non-biological parents married to, or in defacto relationships with, biological parents, not at all considering married adoptive parents, or the use of IVF; such nitpicking would be missing the spirit of the concern. Sampling the population be damned, it takes only a little imagination to see these concerns as applying to gay (and infertile) couples as well. Don’t let statistical scientism prejudice your imagination!

Again, we’ve already won. Religion is an endangered species in Australian politics. We can finally afford to listen, and listen we should; we were all heading for disaster!

“In a liberal democracy, others can form other types of relationships; but ‘marriage’ is a term reserved for a particular kind of relationship that brings with it obligations to others beyond the two parties. Marriage is shared obligation for children.”

(Rod Benson et. al., 2011)

In other words, dear gay marriage advocates; think of the children because gay and reproductively challenged parents won’t, and nor will the state if we change the definition of marriage!

Finally, it all seems so… clear!

Honestly, I’m glad I took the time to delve through the cited material and the expressed argument, because in twenty odd years of watching this discussion unfurl, I’ve never seen anyone present a case quite like this. Think of the children! It never sprung to mind!

Never again will I write off an instance of theological ethics as unscholarly from such a piddling detail as the drawing of conclusions not supported by the cited research – this prejudices imagination! Why those pesky, unimaginative sceptics often marginalise alternative medicine in precisely the same way!

Never again will I dismiss the accumulated wisdom of tradition, like the long-established practice of barring non-reproductive heterosexual couples from the institution of marriage. There are rational reasons why traditions become entrenched, and change doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

The major difficulty I have in all of this, is how in light of my own secular totalitarianism, and that of my peers in the movement, I’m going to justify all of this while we send the theological ethicists off to the ~~gulag~~ political margins. I guess it’ll have to be a carefully crafted plagiarism that hides the original source, and the hypocrisy of using it.

We just can’t get by without this wisdom!

~ Bruce