Jesus and Mo discuss the ‘personally offensive’ issue. I would love to think Bill Buckingham will see that – but perhaps if he did he wouldn’t realize that it was about people like him.

Richard Chappell also discusses it.

It’s so depressing how arbitrary subjective responses are presented in public discourse as though they were legitimate reasons…The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don’t realize that there’s a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You’re offended, therefore they’re in the wrong.

And all you have to do is say the magic words ‘I’m personally offended by _____’ and everyone is supposed to start clawing the air with eagerness to make you feel better and rescind whatever it was that made you personally offended. That’s clearly what Bill Buckingham was expecting from the world at large. ‘I’m personally offended by evolution’ – and? And someone very important should immediately issue a statement saying evolution has been withdrawn and we’re all very sorry and it will never happen again? Or what? What do people really think should be done about a great mountain of evidence dispersed among thousands of institutions and books and minds all over the world, that they find personally offensive? That it should all be, like, vaporized with one blow of the MagicVaporizerRing? Who knows.

Spinoza’s Lens has appeared in public.