Enough about me, what do you think of me?
So let’s just make it a solipsism triple, and get it out of the way, shall we?
Michael Ruse, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, talking at first about the pressures on people who teach at religious colleges, but then, as usual, veering back to the real subject, which is the evilness of gnu atheists and their especial evilness toward him and his debonair indifference to that evilness toward him.
I hope very much that this will blow over. I hope even more that if it does blow over it will not be with the understanding, implicit or explicit, that neither Schneider nor any other Calvin faculty member ever again try to reconcile science and religion. These days it is not easy for those of us who argue that science and religion can live in harmony. For my pains, I have been likened to Neville Chamberlain – the pusillanimous appeaser of Munich.
Aw. But don’t worry – he remains debonair.
Just last week, the editor of the British magazine the New Humanist, who argued for some modicum of accommodation, was called a quisling – after the Norwegian Nazi who supported the Germans in their Second World War occupation of his country. But really, what does this matter to us? I rather thrive on abuse.
Yeah yeah yeah, we know, but never mind you, this is about me.
No really, it is; I’m the perp! Amusing, don’t you think? Especially since that same editor of the New Humanist did not pause to boast of how he loves abuse, but instead simply asked me to write an article replying to his. Caspar is a good guy, and a lot less self-admiring than Michael Ruse (who no doubt loves to be told that he is self-admiring, and I’m always happy to oblige).
Does anyone take Michael Ruse seriously? When I first heard about him, it was in reference to the ID-creationism and Evolution conflict, yet when I first saw him on Nightline he seemed more like an apologist for ID rather than a defender of science. Nothing I have seen since then has changed my mind that he’s a rather useless hack.
Yes and no, I guess. He’s done good work, but these days he seems to be mostly playing enfant terrible.
But Karl Giberson in his tilting-at-windmills assault on Jerry Coyne called Ruse the world’s leading philosopher of biology.
I guess it must be hard to teach at a religious college because religious truth is so capricious.
Not everyone trying to reconcile science and religion is in the same business. John Schneider works to open a small crack in the religious wall to admit a little scientific light, and has his employment threatened as a consequence. And Michael Ruse thinks this is somehow comparable to his catching some flak for wanting to compromise science. Amazing.
Ruse would do better to insist that science and religion will only be reconciled when religion leaves behind supernaturalism. That will likely never happen, but at least then he would be in solidarity with Schneider.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Enough about me, what do you think of me? http://dlvr.it/76bZG […]
Hmm, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck…
I’m sorry, I don’t see why degree granting institutions should be permitted to impose rules of faith on their instructors. The whole article is skewed right from the get go, because Ruse can understand, as he says:
No, of course they need not be expected to accept someone like him, but not because he’s not a Calvinist. How do you reputably teach philosophy, or have a philosophy department which is, as Ruse says, “right up there with the very best in the nation,” if every philosopher on staff has to sign onto Calvinist articles of faith? The very thought is absurd.
But for Ruse to play his charming little ‘I thrive on abuse’ game, in a context where someone’s job is threatened for the petty reasons described, is beyond self-centred preening; it’s downright vulgar and callous. Not to have expressed outrage in The Chronicle of Higher Education is as much as to approve what threatens to be done, and it is not acceptable. This man is not an enfant terrible; he’s in his dotage. If he cannot see that this is a piece of religious idiocy, and should be condemned as such, he really has nothing left to say, does he? All he can think of is that it might have a chilling effect on Christians trying to reconcile religion and science! Beyond belief!
Sanctimonious drivel.
I love that he hopes it will “blow over.” Yeah, because it’s not until recently that people have perceived a conflict between science and religion. I guess he thinks it’s just the handiwork of a few rabblerousers (read: “gnu atheists”) who have invented this conflict. Ask Galileo how long this has been going on.
Jeezis…I didn’t read it properly. Most of it I didn’t read at all. I found it yesterday when I was looking for another piece by Ruse, and read part of it and spotted the reference to dear Self – but I stopped reading at the Calvin mark and missed most of the end. It’s sickening in several ways.
First, it veers abruptly and with lightning speed from the real problems of John Schneider to the sneery whining of Ruse himself – it was about Schneider and then all of a sudden for no reason it turns out to be about Ruse.
Second, it veers from Ruse’s sudden self-absorbed whining about “new” atheists being mean to him to my (very hedged and mostly ironic) use of “quisling” about the editor of the New Humanist – when the real subject is neither Ruse nor me but John Schneider. Schneider could lose his job; it’s ridiculous for Ruse to be harrumphing about either himself or me in that context.
Third, Ruse winds up the whole article with yet another malicious explosion of bile at “the New Atheists” – as if Calvin College and John Schneider had been just a pretext for him to pour out even more bile at people who dislike theism and think they have a right to say so.
That’s disgusting. It’s transparent hate-mongering and bullying – puking out random loathing of “the New Atheists” and separating them from “the rest of us.” That’s not like Chamberlain, it’s like fucking Goebbels. Hateful man.
It’s also stupid and incoherent. Those horrible New Atheists hate religion. The rest of us should realize how horrible religion can be even in the best places and should applaud people who resist its abuses.
Uh?
There should be (is?) a Neville Chamberlain corollary to Godwin’s law. And probably it should be viewed similarly.
Is the accommodation thing an American/Canadian thing? I mean, with exception of milquetoast and fellow marxists.
There is a huge difference between percentages of non-belief in the USA, and in Europe and Japan. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, Non-belief has increased from 31% in 1983 to 43% in 2008. In America, the swing is from 8.2% in 1990, to 14.1% in 2001, and to 15% in 2008.
According to Adherents, Japan has a whopping 80 million non-religious, making 64% of the population. So Japan is one of the best models for a non-religious society.
I’m thinking, maybe those yan…I mean Americans and Canadians don’t like the snooty British accents like Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Social_Attitudes_Survey
http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf
http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html
What do I think of you? You rock! Of course.
Ruse is a pain in the derriere. N’est-pas?
Ruse is a sharp pain. I just did a rude comment to that effect at the Huffington pissed. They’ll probably throw it out.
Anybody who thinks this is out of line should read the Huffington Post piece.
Aside from the incoherence of the second sentence (I agree that they’re telling the truth, but I don’t think they should), the third is truly disturbing, not least because it equates disagreement with hatred. Where I come from, great social and moral evil implies violence. Is Ruse suggesting that new atheists will inspire violence against believers? So what do you think happens when you spit in someone’s face, mock them openly, figuratively throw them to the ground and kick dirt in their face?
Yeah, I think he’s just openly and unashamedly trying to whip up hatred now. That language is just plain irresponsible (at best).
Yeah, the guy’s sick. What does this whole symdrome really say? When new atheism is bundled together even with something like this? There was no reason to introduce it here. It’s not doing any lifting, so what’s it for? I think it’s really self-centred Ruse. He’s written a book about it. Here’s a believer who has stuck his neck out (he thinks), therefore … what? Ruse is great? He’s a brave man too? He wrote a book decrying the gnu atheism and sticking up for religion? What self-serving nonsense! Isn’t Ruse the man who shared (whose? Dennett’s?) emails (without permission) with Dumbski et co? There’s something really sick about this guy!
When I first read Ruse’s piece, I thought the last bit about the NAs was a non sequitur – a chance to blast the NAs which had nothing to do with John Schneider. But, I now see that he really does think his disagreement with the NAs is equivalent. Is he really telling Dr. Schneider to just man up using Ruse as a role model? Also is he claiming he signed a (the) New Atheist Statement of Faith and now he is trying to reinterpret it? Does anyone have a copy of the NASoF? Can the NA cabal really excommunicate people? Is Ruse in danger of losing his job from the New Atheist University which employs him?
From his Huffington article:
Well, first of all the idea that we hate believers is a lie. I don’t think it even extends to hatred of religion but a realisation that religion is false and descends into immorality. We are not saying religious believers are evil, but their religion.
I like how he’s worded his article to ‘attitude’ rather than going directly for “New Atheists are evil” because that’s careful language, that looks suspiciously like he is really saying “New Atheists are evil”, but even this is much much further than how the New Atheists criticise believers. Frankly, this kind of language is bonkers. It looks very much like projection going on here, he is very much the hater.
And this is what I suspect from the language of Accommodationists so far. They’re haters, because they’re attacking individuals and atheists but not our philosophy or modus operandi.
Re Egbert: I think one should be very chary about accepting such statistics that 80 million Japanese are atheists. Japan is neither Western nor monotheistic, and the intertwining (I don’t want to say ‘relationship’ since that suggests at once the existence of two discrete entities) of religion and society is very different to what it is in the West. You can certainly find Japanese people who will proudly assert that they, as individuals, belong to Soka Gakkai or are Christian, but most of the time Japanese people will say that their family – and not themselves – is Shinto or Jodo Shinshu, and so when the time comes, say, for a funeral it will be in accordance with Shinto or Buddhist rites. Behind this is the more fundamental tradition of respecting ancestors and keeping them happy: so that most Japanese homes will have a family altar, with photographs of grandparents, parents and so on displayed. Also, one reason for the existence of so many festivals in Japan is the power of the neighbourhood associations who continue traditions whose ultimate sanction is religious (keeping the local gods happy, etc), and who also see no contradiction between the demands of the ‘spiritual’ and those of tourism. Having said that, it is true to say that in large cities at least, attendance at the Bon dances at the time of the summer festival of the dead has been falling off in recent years. But that 80 million figure can only have been arrived at, I think, by the insensitive and ignorant imposition of Western ideas about religion.
Ruse’s little screed is appalling.
Yes. (Funny, I was just talking about this with Dan Fincke at Facebook.) Yes, he instigated an email exchange by taunting Dennett, then when Dennett said “calm down” he went ballistic, and Dan said calm down again – then Ruse handed the exhange over to Dembski without permission. That’s not supposition, either, I asked both of them, and both confirmed. Ruse all but boasted of it.
Michael, sure, the NA cabal has occult powers. Any fule kno that.
Here is the letter to the Times that Dennett wrote at the time. The Times refused to publish it, so Dan kindly allowed me to do so.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/letter-to-the-i-new-york-times-i/
@ Tim Harris,
Unfortunately I mistook in my rush the figures for non-religious, when in fact, as you so point out, they were atheist/agnostic but not necessarily non-religious. In which case, the figures for ‘non-religious’ must of course be much lower.
Does that mean the supernatural exists? ; )
But I also think one needs to be careful about this ‘non-religious’ category of Japanese people. Unless you are Christian, there aren’t weekly Shinto or Buddhist services for ‘parishioners’, and people may or may not pay their respects to the god when they pass a Shinto shrine, but most Japanese people I know, whether ‘religious’ (though non-Christian) or ‘non-religious’, are perfectly happy to pay their respects at a shrine or temple on occasion; a people who are fundamentally polytheistic are simply more relaxed about religion and belief than non- or anti-syncretic monotheists. And I suspect that quite a few of those self-described ‘non-religious’ Japanese will have some sort of family altar. It is no doubt more of a matter of form and custom than of any fervency of belief, but there is still some vestige of religion at the base of it. I must say that one weakness of the ‘gnu atheists’ (with whom, as should be clear, I am mostly in agreement) is that – for obvious reasons – they do look at religion very much through a Western and monotheistic prism, and although, as Boyer, Whitehouse, Lawson and McCauley, Pyysaiainen et al have shown, religious beliefs can in the main be reduced to a few ultimately cognitive categories, there are often great differences in the mutual implication of religion and society.
Egbert: your own citations show a marked difference in extent of religious belief in the USA vis-a-vis Canada. Bear in mind your numbers are not about practicing religionists just those who, as in the UK, profess some religious affiliation. These latter are people like most of my family who go to church only for weddings, funerals and ‘christmas’ and then more for the tradition than anything else – just like most people in the UK in fact. I see a hell of a lot more churches and people going to them in the USA but then the USA was founded by god so you’d expect that to be the case.
Incidentally if you look at a map of north america you will find that Canada is actually a sovereign country separate from the United States. It is different in ways that may not be apparent to a casual observer overseas. Also canadians are not and have never been ‘yan….’ by which I presume you meant ‘yankees’ a term which in the US is reserved for people from the north-east and most specifically refers to people from the New England states.
Also please get over your paranoia; it isn’t the accent, it’s the presentation of fear-raising facts and rationality by certain prominent atheists that causes so much alarm and hatred. Americans, especially here in Virginia, quite like british accents – just ask my cousin from Oxford who was visiting here a few weeks ago.
For an example of accommodationism in the UK see:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/17/atheist-sermon-westminster-abbey
and the comments that go with it.
Oh the atheist sermon is Julian! I didn’t realize that. Julian giving a sermon in Westminster Abbey – that’s hilarious.
Until I read it, probably…
Yup. It’s pretty much about how awful the new atheists are.
He’s reasonable, and we’re not; we are part of the community of blind faith and dogmatism. Thanks, Julian.
I did a comment.
Honestly. We’re always being accused of anointing ourselves The Reasonable Ones, yet Julian does that explicitly here, in the process of calling us the unreasonable vicious theist-hating ones.
The rhetoric is escalating. We’ll be drinking the blood of babies soon.
It’s also interesting that Julian has come right out and called us his “enemies.” He declares himself of the reasonable party, and calls people he disagrees with “enemies.” Well perhaps we are, now, but that’s his doing.