“Nicky”?
I think I’m going to start being more thorough about observing the antics of George Pitcher. I find him really remarkable, and all the more so because he’s an Anglican vicar. He’s such a bizarre ambassador for his institution.
Yesterday he extruded a little heap of sneers at Nick Clegg and atheism and Nick Clegg’s atheism.
One aspect of this new Con-Dem Government that hasn’t got an airing yet is that David Cameron is a devout Christian and his new deputy-dawg Nick Clegg is an atheist…I’ve had a right ear-bashing from Nicky’s press office in the past for describing his atheism as “numbskull”. I’m sorry, I’m sure he’s up there with AC Grayling and Dr Simon Heffer.
Really. This is a grown man, with a job that is considered respectable in some circles. His job in fact basically consists of being wise and telling everyone else how to be wise – and this is how he goes about it. Do admit.
It’s truly astonishing to read this sort of thing in a national newspaper, however conservative. What is the matter with the Telegraph? If Pitcher can’t manage to strive for something a bit more thoughtful, surely the newspaper should revisit his contract. As for his being a poor ambassador for the Church of England, he seems to me surprisingly typical of the things that I have read lately that have been uttered publicly by bishops and C of E clergy. Consider the vicar who reasserted New Testament teaching about the role of women, and then went on to reaffirm it, the entirely idiotic things that the ABC regularly says about individual human rights, or what he said about sharia, the Bishop of Carlisle, who blamed floods in England on greed and immorality, especially pro-gay legislation, or what NT Wright has said about the murky moral world of those who support assisted dying. It’s an incredible litany of the small, the scornful and the sneering. George Pitcher would not, I suspect, look terribly out of place in this company.
Quite aside from this George Pitcher is simply wrong about the role of the Deputy Prime Minister in British polity. Perhaps he is under the misapprehension that he is living in the United States. The Deputy Prime Minister is not like the Vice President of the US. He does not succeed the Prime Minister in the event of the PM’s sickness of death. The position is granted entirely at the PM’s discretion, and is largely honorific in nature. The office has no specific constitional fuction, so far as I know.
One thing I’ve noticed about The Pitch is his habit of claiming that athiests have no sense of humour. They may have all that reason and logic and evidence on their side, but — they just don’t get the joke. It’s an odd little rhetorical manoeuvre. I’ve noticed that the po-faced practitioners of po-mo do a similar thing when they accuse themselves of playfulness in their discourse. I’ll have to check in the Bad Moves archives to see if this one is listed.
Damn, typo. That should be atheist
Only thing worse than hitting submit before noticing the typo, is to then send a desperate follow-up post — because it’s vitally important that people know that you really can spell simple words.
Hahahaha – well it is! Especially that one, which is so pervasive.
The Fashionable Dictionary is a more likely place for something about playfulness. I can’t remember if there is anything though. Will look…
Nope; damn; missed that one. There is one for jouissance though.
Jouissance
French for lots of fun.
You know, Eric…I’m tempted to urge you to post on Pitcher’s blog, telling him exactly who you are. Serious people are posting on that thread, trying to explain to him about why assisted suicide is not evil, and he’s just blowing them off. You’re probably the best suited person in the world to tell him what’s what.
Not so much a straw man argument from Pitcher, more a wicker man…
The implication being of course that Nick’s atheism is like that of most ordinary atheists, ie shallow and ignorant; only those who are professors of philosophy or similar can really challenge theism and the rest know not of what they speak and are embarrassing and should be quiet. Not the case with theism of course – anyone can profess an attraction for Christianity, say, and be fully embraced as a Christian without really knowing much about their Church’s teachings or indeed the Bible’s: George’s snide comment is really his oblivious way of admitting that religion ensnares primarily through emotion alone, whereas the more you know and think, the less you are likely to believe.
Now that’s spooky, I was thinking about exactly that, earlier this morning – the claim (made vehemently by Pigliucci and Mooney among others) that argued atheism is philosophy, which implies and sometimes outright says that only philosophers are allowed to do argued atheism, which entails that all the rest of us are allowed to be passive atheists only – we can be atheists but we can’t say why we are atheists; we can’t say why atheism makes more sense than theism does.
This claim is completely ridiculous – it amounts to saying that non-philosophers can only be atheists, they can’t think about it – yet it’s remarkably popular.