Chaplains and Evangelists
So, we’re agreed then. Comfort and safety and enjoyment are not what’s needed, not unless one is ill or injured or a refugee from a war zone. We need our gadflies and lecturers and correctors and reformers, our troublers of the peace. We need our evangelists.
The Guardian has a review of Richard Dawkins’ new book, A Devil’s Chaplain, today. The reviewer (who, a correspondent tells me, used to be the bishop of Edinburgh) makes an interesting distinction between Darwin’s ‘classically Anglican’ atheism and the classically Evangelical variety Dawkins goes in for.
A friend of mine once remarked that he liked Anglicanism, because it didn’t interfere with your religion or politics, whereas Evangelicalism couldn’t leave anyone alone and meddled endlessly in people’s lives. If Darwin was a non-interventionist atheist, Dawkins is a great believer in the pre-emptive strike.
Well what else are teachers for? That’s their job, isn’t it, that’s what they do and what they’re supposed to do. Isn’t it? Not leaving people alone and meddling endlessly in the contents of their heads? Surely if one actually cares about politics and religion, ‘interfering with them’, i.e. arguing that there are better versions, is the logical thing to do. But then I’m an Evangelistic type myself, so I would think that.
Don’t knock the Bishop. With Dawkins, all you’re left with to believe in are the Jurassic faeries at the bottom of Darwin’s garden. Darwin’s theories have posed as many questions as they might have answered. However, he did rattle the cages of science and theology. Which has rather left poor Dawkins out in the cold; frustrated, and throwing memes at stained glass windows. What a shame. Oxford must be in a shambles. Perhaps he should wait a few more decades for Darwin’s reputation to suffer the same fate as that of Newton’s – and all the other illustrious scientific theories which time eventually exposes as flawed becuase of insufficient information and understanding.
What nonsense is this Andre?
There appear to be no logical connections between your sentences!
Dawkins out in the cold because Darwin rattled the cages of science and theology?
Oxford must be a shambles because Dawkins has been left out in the cold?
Scientific theories are necessarily doomed to failure because they always have been?
I think your logic chip has failed! Seek help now!
Besides which, Andre, what is it that you think has happened to Newton’s reputation? Surely…oh no…you didn’t take his entry in the Fashionable Dictionary literally did you?