The yukkists
Man, it’s been a busy week for the gnu-hating crowd. There was Michael Ruse, then Jacques Berlinerblau, and now (it grieves me to say) Joseph Hoffmann. All three doing an extended yell of rage at “the new atheists” while seldom actually giving any specifics or quoting anyone or linking to anything, so that a reader could figure out exactly what they’re talking about. They do mention Dawkins and Harris, and Hoffmann quotes from a press release by the Center for Inquiry, but mostly there’s just a great deal of generalization.
Here’s Ruse:
I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party. It is not so much that their views are wrong—I am not going to fall into the trap of labeling those with whom I disagree immoral because of our disagreements—but because they won’t make any effort to think seriously about why they hold their positions about the conflict between science and religion…
Here’s Berlinerblau:
In fact, what is fascinating about the New Atheists is their almost complete lack of interest in the history and philosophical development of atheism. They seem not the least bit curious to venture beyond an understanding that reduces atheist thought to crude hyper-empiricism, hyper-materialism, and an undiscriminating anti-theism…
New Atheists, like Fundamentalists, only read “original texts” (kind of like the way Tea Party activists prattle on about the “original intent” of the Constitution). They don’t understand hermeneutics, or the interpretive process, and for this reason they are doomed to saying very silly things about their subject matter.
And now here’s Hoffmann:
…it is not clear that the EZs are listening, at least not directly, to their critics, because their royalty checks and speaking fees are talking too loud…
The mode of critique is lodged somewhere between “Stupid Pet Tricks”- and “Bushisms”-style humor, a generation-based funniness that thrives on ridicule as a worthy substitute for argument: Blasphemy contests, Hairdrier Unbaptisms, Blowgun-slogans (“Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings”), and my latest personal favorite, Zombie Jesus Jokes (“He died for your sins; now he’s back for your brains”)…
And so on and so on – lots of generality with very little specificity (although at least there is a link to Zombie Jesus Jokes, which is something). I don’t know who the new atheists in question are supposed to be, whether the four cowboys, or the four plus some more, or all new atheists (and how are they defined?). That means I don’t know how accurate the descriptions of them are, or how to check. That means I suspect that the whole enterprise is just bad temper as opposed to reasoned criticism. Yet a major pillar of the criticism or bad temper is how unreasoned the criticism by the new atheists is.
So the question is: what exactly is it, really, that they’re so pissed off about?
I don’t even know. You’d think I would, after all this time, but I don’t. They’re all over the place. They change their story every time they post. One minute it’s being political failures, the next minute it’s being too popular. I can’t possibly keep up.
The truth is I don’t think it’s really anything. I think they just don’t like us, in a dopy Leon Kass-ish “yuk” way, and that’s all there is to it. We really really get on their nerves, and they don’t know why themselves, but they don’t seem to have noticed that they don’t know why, so they keep self-importantly issuing noisy but incomprehensible jeremiads on the subject. This is good free publicity for the gnu atheists, so it all works out.
I also found it interesting Ophelia that when you directly asked Hoffman on FB to elaborate upon his ‘knee-jerk reaction of my colleagues’ comment (which he then compares to crucification … good grief!), he deftly veered the topic to that of Hirsi Ali and her current hobnobbing with the right.
This I found fascinating:
It sounds like a clear admission that we’ve won some kind of publicity war and all the context makes it clear that the victory is undeserved. I didn’t expect this from Hoffmann. Ruse is one from whom we’ve come to expect it and Berlinerblau was completely unknown to me till he suddenly appeared behind the biggest strawman I’ve ever seen. But Hoffmann is a disappointment. All the attention-grabbing PR tactics he mentions just after that quote; no, they’re not necessarily brilliant philosophical moves, but there has been a point to them. They have transformed a fringe phenomenon into headlines and blown the minds of a lot of closeted atheists with the knowledge not only that they’re not alone, but that the beast that oppresses them can be mocked. That’s not nothing. Nobody has to applaud the mockery, but anyone who gets vitriolic because of it has shown their hand, as everybody always has who has become vitriolic because of mockery.
They don’t like US? Who the hell is us? I criticised RJH about his piece, and he denied it was a condemnation of anyone. So what the hell is it all about? Hoffmann, I’m afraid, is by far the worst, because he just picks up the stick and throws it a bit futher. The others make some show of reason — not very substantial, but it’s there; but old Joe just picks up the stick and throws it helter-skelter at some undefined group he calls EZs. Well, I thought the guy had a bit of sense, but now (says he, using language that doesn’t come so easily) he just seems full of shit.
Siakat, yes, it was interesting, but also rather frustrating (of course). I really would like to know – but he really wouldn’t like to explain or expand, so I should get that through my head now.
Stewart, yup. Another interesting aspect of the bit about not listening because the royalties are so loud is that the real reason gnu atheists aren’t listening to the likes of Ruse and Berlinerblau is because they’re so damn silly about it. There’s no need to go looking for explanations like “they can’t hear over the din of the cash registers”; it’s simple; those articles are crap.
There was this guy on Letterman a few year ago; he trained his dog to say, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.” I thought it was a pretty good trick.
Eric – well I don’t know exactly who us is! But whoever it is, they hate it. Is that any help? No.
I know. I flicked back through the New Oxonian front page and it’s almost all gnu-bashing, of the same nebulous kind. Stick-throwing. Mystifying.
falls down laughing at Hamilton’s comment
Eric, I think the EZs are very well defined. First, there’s Ditchkins; then you have your Zach Coyne, too. What more do you want?
It’s disappointing that Hoffmann hasn’t addressed some of the egregious things written by Ruse and Berlinerblau and said whether he agrees with them; his thinking in this article and a later one, appear to be prompted by two factors: the reaction to these two tragically bad articles, and an impression he’s culled from some of his students who profess atheism – presumably a form of new atheism that renders them mockingly arrogant. First he says:
Please; on what basis? Rather than recognising the, frankly, flagitious sleights of Ruse and Berlinerblau, he concentrates on the justified frustration of people who object to their myth-reinforcement. And further:
Well, it’s hard to argue against this anecdotal evidence, since it’s necessarily his experience; but I’m surprised and would like some solid examples. Nonetheless, the fact that the higher echelons of academia are being inundated with news or gnus is clearly insufficient to warrant comparison with the Tea Party movement. It is simply risible that anyone would think these two movements are comparable.
Is it too much to ask our educational establishments to reinforce the genuine New Atheist message?Which could be put like this:
I’m sure all Dawkins’ Disciples will recognise that. For billions of people, with a life and living to be made outwith academia, studying centuries of free-thinking history is impractical, but this simple advice can arm those billions for a (good) life. For this, the New Atheists should be acclaimed, not vilified.
Yes.
I find the same bit interesting for a different reason from you, Stewart:
When public intellectuals earn money from the actual public for their contributions to an ongoing public conversation about the merits and social status of religion, that makes whatever they say ill-considered and highly suspect at best, in the most transparent well-poisoning ever not involving actual poison in an actual well. But where is Hoffmann’s criticism of the Templeton Foundation’s attempts to co-opt the prestige and respect of science to shore up religion’s fading glamor, using millions and millions of private funds supplied by a right-wing wannabe theocrat? It’s not that he’s obligated to mention Templeton by name in the midst of a logically incoherent rant against gnu atheists. However, even *mentioning* the modest economic benefits which have accrued to a tiny minority of gnus necessarily implies a double standard in a world where canny pseudo-intellectuals rake in millions by publicly advancing outrageously ill-supported arguments in the service of religious causes.
Also, @Hamilton: You win the internets for today!
Hamilton, I’d pay $100 for that dog.
Brian, unfortunately the dog did an interview on Fox News a few days later and they stoned him to death.
Gnu-bashers will probably like the dog story too, but with a twist. “Them thar New Atheists is jes like my ol houn dog Blue. He wuz always a-quotin Thomas Jefferson, but I reckon he never did get the hang of all the nuances.”
Hoffmann assumes that the criticism of atheists is the result of their own excess and that atheists are responding to it by playing the victim. In reality, the more fundamentalist religious people aren’t criticizing atheists for excess; they’re accusing us of being immoral by default because their holy books repeatedly associate not believing in the right God with immorality. Again and again and again, the Bible and Qur’an portray anyone who leaves the faith (or who is practicing it the wrong way) as immoral, and shows people who convert to the faith as changing from immoral to moral. It’s not just in a few passages, but is kind of the point of the entire books. As for the quote from 1 Corinthians 13 that he includes, he found a passage that doesn’t mention God in a book that is otherwise filled to the brim with references to God and the importance of worshiping him. (Plus, while love is described as more important than faith, faith is considered essential, too. Basically, it seems to be saying that you should have both faith and love, but it doesn’t say that it’s okay to have only love and not faith.)
Hoffmann can’t possibly have missed all this. If he hadn’t gone to divinity school, I would wonder if he’s read the Bible at all.
I really wouldn’t mind the request that more people study the history of religion, etc. if I thought it was a genuine attempt at increasing knowledge for both sides. I actually enjoy reading about religion and history. For some reason, though, it seems that this request is made of atheists while the bar for knowledge about religion is set abysmally low for the people who are actually followers of the faith.
As for whether they’re just not that into us, I don’t know. I understand his aversion to things like hairdresser debaptisms. I’m not particularly interested in them, either (though I think official certificates saying a person has left a Church can be helpful in showing the Church that it’s losing members). If a person wants to have some fun doing these events, though, I’m not particularly bothered by it. In any group, there are going to be people who make their points in different ways. Some might write books or articles, or tell jokes, or hold funny events.
I’m pretty clear on what pisses these folks off about new atheism. It’s the absence of scholasticism, from Richard Dawkins especially. The guy is supposed to be a scholar, Oxford for Christ’s sake. Where does he get off thinking that he can offer reasoned arguments without deference to authority? If you propose that people – and not even just academics – should think for themselves, well, then, you’re just letting everything go to hell.
To quote Denis Healey. “it’s like being savaged by a dead sheep.”
Hoffmann is not serious about his ‘critique’ but performing a bit of bandwagoning to raise his profile. He confuses criticism for burning at the stake, and regards Michael Ruse as ‘very smart’. Now he’s playing the victim card, obviously because some mean nasty gnus made him cry.
All I can say is, when these jokers are obviously not being serious, it’s time to pass them by and move on.
Ani: … this request is made of atheists while the bar for knowledge about religion is set abysmally low for the people who are actually followers of the faith.
Yeah, the implication being that believers can’t handle it, which is condescending, or that they are excused (can’t imagine why), which is hypocritical.
“…When I use the term EZ atheists, I mean those atheists who short-cut propositions and adopt positions based on a less than careful examination of the positions they hold…”.
Hoffman evidently resents the fact that Gnu Atheists, by holding the feet of religious apologists to the fire to provide evidence for their bedrock premises, and upon finding reply sorely wanting, are not particularly interested in pursuing the now disqualified contingent intricacies he so dearly enjoys as a bona fide intellectual.
Perhaps his resentment stems from the nauseating realization that he has booted the fundamentals all along, or perhaps it stems from sheer envy of Amazon sales, or maybe he really has a good reason that he has not yet shared.
My feeling is the same as Clive James – “I’m an atheist myself, but it’s not something that I would make a point of, because to me it seems perfectly obvious.” It’s as visceral and integrated as the knowledge of my sexuality. Now it is true that in my youth I read widely about the history and etiology of homosexuality, because I needed reassurance that it wasn’t ‘just me’; but I grew up, and I am glad to say society grew up too, so that a young gay person today usually doesn’t need that academic reassurance as I did. I don’t believe they will need any reassurance about denying the demands of religion either (well not in the UK anyway).
Isn’t their main complaint that to ridicule a person’s ridiculous belief is equivalent to ridiculing the person holding it?
Instead we should intone “Well sir, that is a fine and dandy belief you have there, may I see it? Hmmm. Lovely. But this nook over here, you see, doesn’t really go with that cranny over there. But all in all, a fine belief indeed. Well done.”
I was at lunch with a friend (former friend) not too long ago, when he mentioned angels in a context suggesting they were real. Without any premeditation, I reflexively laughed. He felt I was ridiculing him. I guess I was insofar as I saw his belief in angels to be ridiculous.
Just because one’s an atheist doesn’t mean one doesn’t harbor a ridiculous belief of some sort or another. Maybe Ruse and the boys are taking homeopathic remedies.
Nearly. They generally have no problem ridiculing certain religious beliefs (or beliefs in certain kinds of medical woo).
Other beliefs are off limits. The basis for choosing mockery or silence seems curiously correlated with the numbers of adherents of that belief within the population at large. It’s fine to mock Fred Phelps for saying that God hates gays while it’s beyond the pale to mock the pope or Rick Warren for saying pretty much the same thing.
No, not really. That’s one prominent complaint, but they have lots of others. They’re all over the place. “The New Atheists” [fill in the blank]. And they lecture us about over-generalizing!
Hoffman wrote:
Has Hoffman considered that this may be because all the arguments for theism were made and refuted quite some time ago? The “new” arguments made by theists today are little more than the same ones from yesterday, just with updated clothing to make them seem brand new. Sadly they can’t do anything about the stink of rot and failure. This leaves only ridicule. We can only point out that, as has been said before, the Emperor has no clothes and laugh until they run away.
If Hoffman has a real problem with ridicule* then it is up to him to make a valid case for refuting the same crap that has been refuted a thousand times already. In other words, he needs to explain why we should do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.
*I can agree that some of the methods of ridicule are pretty silly and uneffective, even if they are funny. However, Hoffman seems to not like ridicule period instead of simply having a beef with a few juvenile or ridiculous examples.
Yep, I’m doing it all for the moneys.
Or maybe Berlinerblau has delved too deeply into the Berlinerbrau. I don’t know what Hoffmann’s been huffing.
Brendan O’Neill has written a poorly thought out gnu-hating article in The Telegraph:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100081248/who-wants-to-go-through-life-defining-themselves-as-a-non-believer/
Although I notice he is editor of a pro-marxist rag called Spiked, which claims to be “an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms.” Which all sounds like propaganda mush to me.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but I see it as one thing only: finding and pushing hotbuttons. The Gnus have their own, and these jokers have found it. They have more external links into their articles right now than most other publications get, and that’s what makes the sponsors happy. They’ve simply taken newspaper “journalism” into the new format.
PZ Myers remarks on it all the time – he’s responsible for a significant number of hits to sites like Answers in genesis. I don’t even bother to click on anything like this myself anymore, unless I’m really sure it isn’t intended as “click-baiting.” Leave them alone, and they’ll resort to articles about Natalie Portman topless.
Yeah. Sometimes one needs to recall the wise old adage: ‘Don’t get into pissing contests with skunks.’
I’ve got an opinion about Dr. Hoffman. I do think he pushes atheist hot buttons. I think he actually wants the New Atheists to succeed. Is there anything bad about free publicity? And what’s easier than broadcasting New Atheist qualities in the form of a critique?
I don’t think he is a New Atheist or anything like that. But he’s asking questions that he might very well think lead us to solidifying our base and strengthening educated people’s support for the movement. It probably does seem disingenuous to a lot of people when someone like myself hates his upbringing’s faith and broadly declares all Gods as false. It does look emotional.
And it’s not like he’s disagreeing with the real points because he’s not. He’s not voting for a god. He’s not supporting Intelligent Design. And he’s not saying faith is better. He’s saying what made us New Atheists isn’t going to bring everybody to our position. We need more ways to describe ourselves. And we need to make it very obvious that we don’t mind critiquing our own because it’s what separates us from actual dogmatic positions.
It’s not any more his fault than ours that beliefs and anti-beliefs come with a lot of baggage. But we have more to gain from figuring out how to gain support rationally.
It is frustrating how what he says looks like things other anti-atheists might say but every now and then he makes it clear in a post that he thinks modern atheists have a lot going for them. And he’s got reasons for identifying as Humanist instead of atheist as well. Certainly, those differences are going to sound like condemnation to us.
Now I’ll check on those other guys and see what their fooking problems are. :)
Actually I find Spiked to be fairly awesome, and they generally do live up to their claim of not jumping on fashionable bandwagons.
Which is why their exception for the anti-new-atheism one is so disappointing.
@Sigmund.
Good point. So they’re basically conformists by nature and don’t like non-conformists? An evolutionarily favored trait I’ve read.
Correct me if I am wrong but I think somewhere or other Dawkins has advocated legal suppression of religious indoctrination of the young, and that this one point has made him the most radical and perhaps most hated of the better known New Atheists.
You know, I was recently reading about about fantasy books and how the new writers of fantasy are going to destroy the genre because they are bringing too much realism and violence into it. It struck me that this seems to be the same argument between old academics and gnu-atheists, not the content but the cause, the new fantasy writers are very popular even among generally non-fantasy readers. The new atheists are growing into areas atheists never touched before.
I think the problem is the “old guard” want things to never change and are terrified of the new. I would bet this applies to just about every profession. When the new people come in and start changing things the old ones get “very concerned” about the “damage” that is being done.
Seth Strong, you’re right, and this is part of what is so puzzling about the attacks on gnus. They’re so short-sighted, and the shallow arguments and over-broad generalizations concerning gnu malice lead nowhere. They’re saying things for effect, not because they believe them. But if it’s obvious to us gnus isn’t it also obvious to believers that their “protectors” are playing games? I think so, and for this reason the triangulators are not going to be remembered kindly by anyone. It will be interesting to watch how they fall out with each other as they scramble to recover their blown integrity.
There is no need for a layer of spin interposed between intelligent, curious believers and the new atheist luminaries. The books, lectures and interviews need no reinterpretation. They speak more honestly and effectively than anything the critics have so far produced.
You are wrong.
He has compared inflicting threats of eternal torture in hell upon young children to a form of mental abuse but as far as I know he has not advocated making it illegal and has even withdrawn his name from a petition he had signed about religious education when it was pointed out to him that that particular petition could be read as advocating making the teaching of religion illegal.
That doesn’t stop religious people from saying that Dawkins says teaching religion to children is child abuse and should be made illegal. I guess the ends justify the means for those standing up for Jeebus.
I advocate the suppression of indoctrination of children. It wasn’t a nice experience and I wouldn’t want anyone else getting such crap for an upbringing.
Now that I’ve said that, I’m totally willing to be an adult and find a way to live with the fact that other people are going to disagree. I’ll settle for teaching Creationism in a course taught Weird Things Some Folks Think.
Re: Eric #3, I wonder if “EZ” might have come to Hoffman’s mind because of his annoyance with taxes perhaps. Otherwise, I hope someone lower in the thread figures out where it came from. (And, dear Spam, I hope it isn’t “PZ? — EZ!”)
Oh, I know where it comes from, and it is a play on PZ. It was in a post about a week ago…
No, in a comment on a post a week ago.
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/imagining-unbelief/#comment-2015
@Sigmund (comment 22):
You make a good point. It always bothers me when people try to claim that views like the ones Fred Phelps expresses are in the small fringe. I agree that his tactics (protesting funerals) are definitely something most other religious groups would not do. However, his message is very similar. What exactly is the difference between saying “God Hates Fags” and accusing gays of being immoral sinners who are destroying society by going against the will of God?
@Ophelia Benson: Thanks for the link. I was wondering where the EZ thing came from. I expected they were making a reference to the word “easy”.
@GSG (comment 32):
No. He’s written what Sigmund said about teaching kids about Hell. Professor Dawkins has also pointed out that when someone refers to a child as a “Christian/Muslim/Jewish/Hindu/Atheist child”, people’s response should be that the child doesn’t really know enough to know what they believe about God yet. He’s also in favor of teaching comparative religion in schools, so that people know about religion, can understand references to the Bible in literature, etc. As far as I know, the only legal actions he’s been in favor of taking concerning religion in schools is stopping government funding for faith schools, which is not the same thing as banning faith schools. It’s just a separation of religion from government.
This is in The God Delusion, but he also mentioned it in speeches, for example, at the 2007 AAI conference.
Here’s the URL of the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Tu4JM1kk0
The part where he starts talking about education is at about 23:10.
The part where he talks about religion in schools and wanting to teach comparative religion in schools starts at about 30:10.
The part where he says there’s no such thing as a child of a particular religion or even an atheist child is at about 31:36.
The part where he explicitly says that he’s in favor of “consciousness raising” (and definitely not in favor of taking kids away from religious parents, as he’s been accused of) is at about 32:10.
I don’t want to sound like some kind of disciple of Dawkins or of anyone else. There are many times when I disagree with specific opinions of fellow atheists, just as religious people disagree with each other. I just don’t like it when people completely misrepresent the views of the other side. It’s inaccurate to say that an atheist who criticizes religion but supports secularism in government wants to ban religion/religious education, just as it’s inaccurate to say that a religious person who tries to convince others to follow their religion voluntarily but supports secularism in government wants to ban atheism.
*facepalm*
That really says it all then. Every so often on Pharyngula a banned troll pops up out of the dungeon with a handle like “EZ PZ” and “Sleezy PZ” etc. and leaves its droppings all over the thread for PZ to clean up later. Is this the level of discourse Bupp and friends wish to be associated with?
So, Hoffman is implying we can’t have humor because it’s not up to his standards of ‘serious, thoughtful humor?’ Or that religions are exempt? Or it’s another defect of the ‘gnu athiest…’
Of course, considering how he paints the gnu athiests with Shylock’s anti-semitism and alludes to our immorality with his Cambodian genocide pictures, I guess I don’t really fucking care what the asshole has to say.
If I ridicule something or someone and someone thinks I ought not to do it, an attack on me including blatant mischaracterisation is hardly going to do the trick. There’s only one thing that will: a rock-solid argument as to why the person/thing in question ought to be above ridicule.
Josh Rosenau has now proclaimed his undying love for the New Atheist = Tea Party meme.
Stewart –
Ah no, there’s a perfectly good explanation for that, you see.
See? Simple. We hates ’em because they’re so polemical; we hates ’em because they’re so polemical that it’s gone beyond the point where it is worth engaging rationally with them; so we write polemically.
That’s reasonable, don’t you think? Means you can do whatever you want to and still pat yourself on the back for having the moral high ground.
Rosenau – ha! He would.
I wonder how much he loves the “I agree with Polly-O!” meme.
So, Colgate twins is below the belt, but Sam Harris’s stubble isn’t (re: Rosenau).
It’s getting whackier all the time and the whackier it gets, the more the people who hate the group I identify with succeed in convincing me that it’s our success that’s rattling them to the point of incoherence. All this foaming at the mouth, why waste it on people who aren’t having much of an effect?
That post is hilarious.
An alternate theory to account for the whole phenomenon, whether or not it would pass the Occam’s Razor test, is that a group of people have simply agreed to have a competition to see who can go most OTT against the Gnu Atheists – and that is the sole criterion for winning.
What’s interesting about that is that there’s no way to tell that they haven’t. What they are doing is indistinguishable from what they would be doing in the scenario you suggest.
Ok, so that would mean first prize is really worth having (a Templeton, maybe?) and the grape vine is drawing new blood into the competition all the time. Now that we’ve been compared to Teabaggers, I’m waiting for the outright Nazi analogy.
Does that mean we can call it gnu-baiting instead of gnu-bashing from now on?
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/expensive/2011/03/25/an-open-letter-to-the-old-atheists/
Here is my response to the recent spate of BS we have been seeing – with comment No 8 hopefully making it clearer.
Yes, sorry, Marie-Therese; it was late at night when I wrote that. I am aware of the unmentionable connotation, though only because of the media fuss about it when the, er… Tea Party first got started.
Interesting take from Bruce there. So if all the atheist gnu-haters are so bothered that we lack understanding of the good sophisticated arguments against god(s) and religion, why don’t they simply become our erudite wing, underpinning our attitude with what we’re missing? Feels like snobbery would be the reason for that.
In any case, theists’ knowledge of biology and atheists’ knowledge of theology are not good parallels. One is a real field, whereas the other is made up. All of our knowledge about biology or any of the other sciences is the result of actual research; none of what is claimed to be known by any religion is.
Thanks for the explanation of EZ – being English I pronounce it differently in my head and was trying to work out what it stood for.
No interest in philosophy? My BA is in philosophy. I am also currently a law student. And I read Pharyngula daily. They should go cry their pathetic accomodationist tears elsewhere. I am not an anti-theist because I do not understand history or philosophy, quite the opposite. If you set up being willing to be an apologist as a pre-requistite, it is no wonder that those who refuse to play along will but heads with you.