Michael Ruse is explaining about religion and morality now. It’s way deep.

Is there a place under the accommodationism canvas for the non-believer? I think there is for I aspire to be one such person. As…argued at length in my book Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, I believe that one can argue for all of modern science and yet agree that there are certain questions that science leaves unanswered: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate ground of morality?

I believe that although one need not turn to religion — I am simply a skeptic on these sorts of questions — it is legitimate for the believer to offer answers.

What does he mean “legitimate”? It’s not a crime; the believer has a legal right to offer answers; but that doesn’t mean the answers are any good, or interesting, or well reasoned, or worth paying attention to.

“Legitimate” isn’t the right word, because it’s beside the point. Legitimacy is not the issue. The issue is why should anyone care what “the believer,” qua believer, “offers” on questions like why is there something rather than nothing and what is the ultimate ground of morality? The answers that religion “offers” to those questions are dogmatic and stupid and wrong, and thus they are worthless, so why does Ruse bother with this elaborate minuet of deference to them when he doesn’t buy them himself?

Who knows, and who cares, except that I have a heightened awareness of Ruse’s malice toward unapologetic atheists at the moment, so I feel like pointing out what pointless deepities he’s giving us here.

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).

And while I’m in solipsistic vein, and besides I’m even later than usual, I will point out that B&W is another year older, and more. Last year I celebrated on the 16th of September, so I’m a whole entire calendar month late by that standard, and that standard was already late anyway, so I’m metaLate.

B&W is (more than) eight years old. That’s, like, 40 thousand years in butterfly time. B&W is older than the oldest Galápagos tortoise, older than the redwoods, older than the wingéd trilobites, older than bacteria, older than water, older than the sun.

But thanks to a healthy constitution, maintained by daily walks and a quart of wine every evening, and thanks to Josh Larios and Cam Larios, B&W survives and flourishes. Happy boitday.

Oh look, Radio Zamaneh has something about Does God Hate Women?

I’m not sure exactly what it has, because Google translate doesn’t seem to do Farsi very well, and I can’t make much of what it comes up with. But something is better than nothing, yeh?

Radio Zamaneh is based in Amsterdam and was (according to Wikipedia) set up by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs but operates independently. At any rate –

Radio Zamaneh was among a list of foreign organizations, including media outlets and human rights groups, which Iran’s Intelligence Ministry placed on a blacklist over their alleged role in fomenting the unrest that followed the disputed presidential election in June 2009.

Good on them.

In the introduction to God and the New Atheism, the theologian John Haught says [p x]

The belief system that Dennett and the other new atheists subscribe to is known as “scientific naturalism.” Its central dogma is that only nature, including humans and our creations, is real; that God does not exist; and that science alone can give us complete and reliable knowledge of reality.

That’s not how I would put it. I think naturalism means that all there is is all there is. There is what there is. The theists’ claim of God seems to include the idea that it has to be mysterian.

Why not just think of it as part of what there is, and then ask how to figure it out – how to find it or argue for it or show how it is explanatory or necessary (having first carefully defined it)? Why not give it a less tendentious and more descriptive name?

The idea that there is nature, and then there is something else, or more, or outside nature, or supernature, or metaphysic, is a religious idea. Without it, one just thinks there is whatever there is, and we certainly don’t know all there is to know about it.

To us it doesn’t make sense to say there is what there is, and then there is something above or “beyond” that. How could there be? There is what there is. Maybe it includes some cosmic intelligence or design-force – but if it does, it is part of what there is.

We don’t think of nature as some closed boundaried thing with special attributes that distinguish it from some other thing on the other side of it. We just think of it as what there is. Not what we know there is – not what we’ve discovered of what there is – just what there is. So if you think god is, god has to be part of that.

Two thirds of the Supreme Court is Catholic: six of the nine. And they’re not kidding. Joe Biden and five justices attended the “Red Mass” the day before the new term of the court.

The mass is a Catholic service, but power brokers of other faiths are asked to attend the invitation-only event. Critics have called the attendance of leading decision-makers, including members of the highest court in the land, inappropriate.

Oh, what’s the harm – it’s just a bit of incense and some pious mumbling.

A Vatican archbishop told the VP and 5 of the 9 justices

that laws are based upon certain principles: “the pursuit of the common good through respect for the natural law, the dignity of the human person, the inviolability of innocent life from conception to natural death, the sanctity of marriage, justice for the poor, protection of minors, and so on.”Di Noia later decried a trend toward “exclusive humanism” and said, “That innocent human life is now so broadly under threat has seemed to many of us one of the signs of this growing peril.”

So…….involuntary pregnancy, no divorce, no gay marriage, no rights for women……..

Well, at least Ginzburg can see what’s going on.

One member of the court who no longer attends is Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, like Breyer and Kagan, is Jewish. Ginsburg has said she grew tired of being lectured by Catholic officials.

“I went one year, and I will never go again, because this sermon was outrageously anti-abortion,” Ginsburg said in the book “Stars of David: Prominent Jews talk About Being Jewish” by author Abigail Pogrebin.

But Catholic officials go right ahead and lecture the other justices and the vice president, of what is supposed to be a secular country.

Bad.

Jason Rosenhouse has done the perfect, brilliant reply to Josh Rosenau’s latest on Hau too Hellp and on howtohelping in general. I would love to have written it myself, but I’m not clever enough.

Turns out people tend to mistrust information that comes from people they don’t like. Who knew?

Heh. Yes, we knew, and we also knew that’s not quite all there is to it. We know for instance that there are not just two participants in every conversation. We know that liking or not liking are not the only two possibilities. We know that information is not the only product of discussion.

Atheist spirituality, such as it is, has almost nothing in common with traditional religion. So far as I can tell, it refers simply to the notion that atheists, no less than theists, can look at nature and be impressed. To suggest that this represents a point of contact between the religious and the nonreligious, which was, after all, the point of Mooney’s original USA Today article and was the issue raised by Jerry in his post, trivializes religion to the point of making it vacuous. People with religious concerns about science are not worried that if they accept evolution they will no longer be able to feel things deeply.

Well some of them are, or pretend to be. Josh is one of them, in fact – he did a post awhile back saying that if religion were kept out of science then baseball and ice skating would disappear – or something like that. It was that random. Cathy Grossman pretended to think that Jerry Coyne, being an atheist, is incapable of appreciating a sunset – Jerry Coyne, who gave us a picture of a rabbit at dawn on the U of Chicago campus recently. But the larger point is right: no, religion is not just a matter of landscape-plus-emotion (Wordsworth notwithstanding).

Josh acts as though it is a problem of poor marketing that people think evolution and religion conflict. That, I believe, is a misapprehension of the issue. They see a conflict because they are thinking clearly. You can tell them they are not, and you can point out the folks who manage to reconcile the two, but in the end all of the slick marketing in the world cannot change the basic facts.

Exactly. What I would have said if only I had thought of it.

I am far more interested in changing the religious values themselves.
The big problem that needs fixing is not so much that people reject evolution. It is that people’s religious values are teaching them to be mistrustful of atheists…if you want to mainstream atheism you have to make it visible. You have to make it ubiquitous, so that gradually it loses all of its mystique and scariness and becomes entirely ho hum and commonplace. It is not so much about making an argument that will cause conservative religious folks to slap their foreheads and abandon their faith, as though that were possible. It is about working around them, by making atheism part of the zeitgeist. It is a long-term strategy, one starting deep within its own endzone thanks to years of more effete strategies. Will it work? I don’t know. But I am confident that nothing else will.

Yes.

In defense of the New Atheist strategy of creating tension and making atheism visible we have a body of research on advertising that shows that repetition and ubiquity are essential for mainstreaming an idea. We have the historical examples of social movements that changed the zeitgeist by ignoring the people urging caution, and by working around the people whose value systems put them in opposition to their goals…

Against this Josh has a few papers breathlessly reporting that people don’t like it when you offend them. It is on this basis that he gives smug lectures about communications strategies.

I am underwhelmed.

A bit of good news for once – the US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by the Association of Christian Schools International against the University of California for refusing to grant college-prep credit for courses with religious viewpoints. UC says the schools use textbooks that replace science with the Bible.

So…there’s a problem with that? But science and religion are supposed to be in harmony, aren’t they? So why is it a problem if schools use textbooks that replace science with the Bible?

Oh don’t be silly, the religion&science people snap; you know perfectly well we don’t mean, when we say religion&science go together like ham&eggs, that the Bible should be used as a biology textbook. We mean the right kind of religion, not the wrong kind.

Yes, we snap back, but our claim is that that distinction is neither so clear nor so easy to maintain as you like to claim. Our claim is that the distinction that matters in this context is the one between science on the one hand and religion on the other, not the one between biblical religion on the one hand and liberal religion ‘n’ science on the other.

The association’s 800 high schools in California teach “standard course content” and “add a religious viewpoint in each subject … as an integral part of their reason for existence,” the group’s lawyers said in their Supreme Court appeal.

But a federal judge said experts testifying for the university refuted those claims in reviewing textbooks.

Biology texts, one professor concluded, teach students to reject any scientific evidence that contradicted the Bible. A history text declared the Bible to be the “unerring source for analysis” of past events, in the view of another expert…

See? That’s where the conflict is, and there is no reliable, consistent way to stipulate a brand of religion that never does that – that never rejects scientific evidence that contradicts a particular religious belief – in such a way that religion and science can be made to seem inherently and entirely not-in-conflict.

A few more telling items from Science and Religion (Ferngren ed). Chapter 10, “Causation,” p 136 [“occasionalism” is the idea that god intervenes to keep the universe going from minute to minute as opposed to starting it and then leaving it alone]:

The fullest system of occasionalism was developed by Nicholas de Malebranche (1638-1715), who was driven by his own religious commitments to push Cartesianism in a theocentric direction.

Er…right. This is what we mean. This is the kind of thing. This is why there is an epistemic conflict. Those commitments that drive people to push things in a particular direction? That’s a problem.

A similar item on the next page. Al the great and Aquinas

undertook to interpret the whole of Aristotelian philosophy, correcting it where necessary, supplementing it from other sources where possible, and, in the process, attempting to define the proper relationship between the new learning and Christian theology.

Um…there it is again. That “proper relationship” thing – that’s one of those items that can drive people to push things here rather than there, for reasons that are extraneous to trying to figure out the truth.

In chapter 5, “Medieval Science and Religion,” there’s a real admission [p 57]:

The warfare thesis has retained a following throughout the twentieth century, at both a scholarly and a popular level, but it has also elicited strong opposition from scholars (some with a religious agenda)…

Aha! Just as I thought – helpful of David C Lindberg to spell it out.

I’m offended. I’m offended by the sheer stupidity, the voluntary stupidity – the non-thought, the hostility to thought, the chosen crudity. It’s from a reporter called Cathy Lynn Grossman, who is responsible for the “Faith and Reason” blog at USA Today. She is also a Templeton Fellow 2010, which makes her a classmate of Chris Mooney’s. was also a Templeton fellow in 2005 – the inaugural class.

She was of course reacting to Jerry Coyne’s piece declaring that science and religion are not friends. “Reacting” is all she did.

Move over Richard Dawkins. Yet another scientist is weighing in on science vs. religion and wheeling out his most outrageous language for his point

She tells Dawkins to move over then says “yet another” scientist is joining in – is more than one really “yet another”? Is two such a vast number that a reporter gets to roll her eyes at the exhausting flood? She probably had more than one in mind, but then it was stupid to tell Dawkins to move over as if he had been in solitary possession, wasn’t it. It’s just lazy cliché-mongering without actually thinking about the meaning.

And then what is so outrageous about a scientist “weighing in” on science v religion? It’s a subject that scientists have a stake in, surely, so why shouldn’t they write about it? No reason – Grossman just wants to convey an impression of impertinent intrusion without the bother of actually arguing for it. And then how does one “wheel out” langugage? And what is so “outrageous” about Coyne’s language, anyway?

Well it’s that unlike Chris Mooney (whom Grossman praises without mentioning the shared Templetonian history), Coyne “sees no reconciliation.” I suppose that could be because he doesn’t particularly want to share his lab with the theology department.

Coyne, whose latest book is Why Evolution is True, takes the Monday USA TODAY op-ed Forum spot to blast faith as an enemy of truth, an oppressive social force and the impetus of all evil rather than evil’s nemesis.

Notice all the veiled accusations of aggression – Coyne “takes” the op-ed spot, as if he had seized it by force. (How? Did he recruit his grad students to storm the building and tie up the editors?) And then there’s that favorite verb of Mooney’s to describe what enemies are doing – Coyne “blasts” faith. That’s faith-speak for “criticize.” And as for “evil’s nemesis” – tell that to generations of children raped by priests, tell it to the women whipped for showing a bit of hair or stoned to death for talking to a man, tell it to the women and children tortured to death as “witches.”

Coyne argues we must clear vision from the fog of belief and religious structures that nourish communities of faith. No common awe for the dazzling sunrise here.

Oh really – no awe for the glaciers on Denali? No awe for the Galapagos, for the Mojave, for the sunrise over Lake Michigan?

She’s a good example of the harm faith can do to the mind.

I’m listening to the PZ-Mooney Point of Inquiry. I expect to be highly irritated, since everyone says Jennifer Michael Hecht forgot to be the interviewer and instead acted as a third party to the debate, and took Mooney’s side.

Update: Uh, yeah. Ten minutes in and she just starts arguing away as if she’s a participant and not the interviwer. A few minutes later she just plain interrupts PZ to say what she wants to say – the interviewer! She reminds me of Alex Tsakiris.

From Science and Religion: a historical introduction Gary B Fergren ed.

Chapter 1, “The Conflict of Science and Religion” by Colin Russell, which is an overview of the “conflict thesis” and how it has been displaced by the “complexity thesis.” Page 8:

…the conflict thesis ignores the many documented examples of science and religion operating in close alliance…[He lists examples from 17th century.] Since then, a continuous history of noted individuals making strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion has testified to the poverty of a conflict model.

Wait. The mask slipped a bit there.

If it took strenuous efforts to integrate their science and religion, then it wasn’t easy, right? It wasn’t just a natural combination. So maybe it’s not quite right to say that such strenuous efforts are evidence of the poverty of a conflict model.

“Strenuous efforts” sounds like the kind of thing Karl Giberson engages in now, and his efforts are not all that convincing. That’s not to say that complexity is not a much better way to describe the relations between science and religion in the past than conflict pure and simple, but it is to say that the more strenuous the efforts are, the more they indicate a difficulty. If the “integration” of science and religion is difficult and strenuous, then maybe there are reasons for that, real reasons, to do with methodology as well as ontology.

He’s Helping by having a frankly and unapologetically atheist article in the mainstreamyest of mainstream newspapers in the US, USA Today. He’s Helping by writing a lively, interesting, readable piece. He’s Helping by writing a piece that is one of the five most popular on the site today – an atheist piece! He’s Helping by getting a lot of favorable comments there.

One of the more irritating aspects of the “but how is this Helping?” brigade is their assumption that As things are now, So shall they ever be. Here’s a newsflash about the world and people and stuff: change happens. Change happens a lot, and it often happens quite fast. Sure, it’s naïve to think that Progress is Inevitable, but it’s equally naïve to think Progress is Impossible. Stuff happens. Things move back and forth. People change their minds, for good or ill.

It’s happening now. You’d better start swimmin’ if you can’t lend a hand.

The more you look at this science-and-religion thing, the more Templeton you find. In fact, I wonder if there is any science-and-religion that has nothing to do with Templeton. So consider that a challenge: if you know of any, or find any, let me know.

Mark Jones did a really good post on the subject a few days ago, and he turned up lots of intersections of s-and-r and Templeton. He skipped one though.

 Dixon’s also contributed to Science and Religion, New Historical Perspectives, with fellow ISSR members Geoffrey Cantor and Stephen Pumfrey, which has this blurb:

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991).

He forgot to check John Hedley Brooke, so I did it. Well what do you know. He’s the current president of the ISSR, and he

held the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science & Religion and Directorship of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2006…With Margaret Osler and Jitse Van der Meer, he edited Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions.

The (Templetonian) Ian Ramsey Centre tells us

He has lectured at many universities in America, Europe, Australia and the Far East. He has also lectured at Templeton workshops in Adelaide, Berkeley, Manchester, and Toronto. In 1998 he joined the Templeton Oxford Seminars Steering Committee…

The guy is Templetonian up to his eyeballs. There seems to be no one in this “field” who is not.

Thomas Dixon replied again yesterday, which was generous and helpful of him. I think, though, that his work is more theologically-inflected than he wants to say here. Or maybe theologically-inflected isn’t the right way to put it, but it does seem to be part of this overall agenda to make a case that religion and science are “in harmony” and not in conflict – not in conflict in any way. I think they are in epistemic conflict, and Dr Dixon so far has not addressed that aspect of the issue.

It appears to be the case that all the people who are arguing this are from faculties of theology and/or Templeton-funded centres and institutes and the like, and are arguing for a particular conclusion, which is that religion and science are in harmony. I think that conclusion would be convenient for theology and religion, and not at all convenient for science. I think this agenda, if it is an agenda, should be open and public.

Eric MacDonald quoted us a bit from Dr Dixon’s Science and Religion: a Very Short Introduction.

I find it hard not to see it as a piece of religious apologetic, to be quite frank, although its author is an agnostic. I didn’t find the kind of detachment from the religious point of view that I would have expected, and I found it almost pervasive. So, when the Galileo issue was being discussed, there is a lot about realism and anti-realism, and about religion, like science, also wanting to provide knowledge about realities that lie behind the appearances of things. Take this quote, for instance:

In the religious case, what intervenes between the light hitting your retina and your thoughts about the glory of God is the lengthy history of a particular sacred text, and its reading and interpretation within a succession of human communities. …. Religious teachers, as much as scientific ones, try to show their pupils that there is an unseen world behind the observed one. (Locations 325-31)

There is a similar claim in Dr Dixon’s BBC article:

Science and religion have had the kind of close and troubled relationship you would expect between siblings or even spouses. They share not only wonder at the majesty of the world we can see, but also a desire to find out what’s behind it that we can’t.

Like Eric, I think that sounds like religious apologetics. It doesn’t sound like straightforward secular history. It’s flattering to religion. Religion does not have the same kind of desire to find out what’s behind the world we can see that science has. Religion doesn’t find things out; it transmits doctrine, and the doctrine itself is not a product of finding out, but of something more like legislation mixed with mythology.

I think Templeton and the ISSR and the other outfits are working very hard to inject this idea into the broader culture in the US and the UK (and no doubt elsewhere too, but we have names and places for some of the anglophone ones), and I think we should try to shine a strong light on this project.

I’m left with one question in particular about Chris Mooney’s position at the Secular Humanism bash yesterday. He kept saying various versions of “you’re not helping!” That’s not helping; I still wonder how that’s helping; I can’t see how that’s helping.

Here’s my question.

Helping what? What are we supposed to be helping with? What is this giant X that Mooney is so familiar with but I am not, that we are all supposed to join hands and help with?

Sometimes it seems to be science education in the US; sometimes it seems to be some kind of peace treaty with science; sometimes it seems to have to do with climate change…but most of the time it’s not even as definite as that, it’s just Unity For Its Own Sake.

But why?

Why are we supposed to be totally united at all times? Why are we under such relentless pressure not to have opinions that the majority does not share? Why are we assumed to have some vast overarching Project that requires unity and will Not Be Helped if we refuse to be drafted into that unity?

I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know why Mooney’s reaction, when PZ calls Francis Collins a clown, is to cry out in agitation that that is Not Helping. Not Helping what? What is it that PZ is supposed to want to do that will be Not Helped if (say) Francis Collins becomes annoyed with PZ? Or is the idea that PZ’s calling Collins a clown will Not Help some larger project that we all want to Help because Collins will abandon or sabotage that project out of annoyance at PZ? If so, 1) what is that project? and 2) if it’s that large, why would Collins abandon or sabotage it out of annoyance at PZ?

Really – Mooney seems to have this very easily-triggered terror that a critical comment from one person about one other person will cause some terrible, general, societal harm. But is the structure really that fragile? Are cascades that easy to set off? PZ calls Collins a clown and, whammo, children flee biology class, and Congress passes laws making fuel economy a felony, and the glaciers melt and everybody dies.

I just don’t get what the mechanism is supposed to be, and I don’t get what One Thing we are all supposed to be doing or working for or supporting that will be in jeopardy if too many gnu atheists say boisterous things about people who see the trinity in a waterfall.

I’m not doing One Thing. (Yes I know it looks that way a lot of the time, but even there, it’s really a lot of things, and besides, it only looks that way.) I have a lot of projects. We all do. We can get together with people for one project and then separate for some other project. We don’t have to all agree about everything in order to work together for some particular project. We don’t want to know. We don’t issue criteria for working on Project Q; we just work on it.

So what exactly is it that we’re Not Helping?

Thomas Dixon commented on one of the recent posts on this issue, and I thought it only fair to make his comment more visible, since that post is now oldish, and I also hope he will comment further.

Dixon’s comment:

I’ve been dismayed by some of the misinformation going around in the wake of the recent BBC Four programme I presented and a related online article I wrote for the BBC News magazine. Just for the record, I am a historian, not a theologian (although my first degree was indeed in Theology and Religious Studies), and membership of ISSR is open to anyone who has made a scholarly study of relations between science and religion, as I have. As I explain in the Preface to my ‘Very Short Introduction’, my aim is to use the history and philosophy of science to shed light on this topic, and not to try to persuade anyone to become either religious or atheistic. My own approach is entirely agnostic.

I hope I didn’t give any misinformation; I don’t think I did. I quoted the OUP page that said Dixon is a Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, which I assumed would imply that he’s a historian, not a theologian. I further quoted that page that said he is a member of ISSR, and I then went on to give further information about what ISSR is. I think ISSR is a bit of a stealth organization in the usual Templeton fashion, but that doesn’t mean that its members are necessarily tainted or to blame or anything like that – that’s part of the point of the stealth: people don’t always know what agendas may be in play. People may also be aware of the agenda and simply think it’s harmless, and/or an ordinary academic agenda like any other.

In case Thomas Dixon would like to comment again, here’s the question I would like to ask. I never thought the goal was to persuade anyone to become either religious or atheistic; I think Templeton’s goal is to persuade more or less everyone that there is no conflict between religion and science. Is your approach to that entirely agnostic?

It’s kind of the friendly people at the “Battle of Ideas” (some of whom are also the people at the Institute of Ideas, some of whom are also the people at Spiked, some of whom are also the people who used to be Living Marxism and the Revolutionary Communist Party) to offer up a neat example of the backlash against gnu atheism just when the New Humanist posts online the article I wrote for the next issue, on that very subject. Caspar Melville invited me to write it in reply to his article on the new atheism at Comment is Free. Honorable!

As for David Bowden of the Battle of Ideas…well, he’s all too typical of that backlash.

Claims of heresy, iconoclasm and blasphemy in days gone by have now given way to the language of offence, with both sides equally guilty. Everything from cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed to ice cream adverts depicting pregnant nuns get censored, often pre-emptively, for fear of offending religious groups; yet militant secularists call for the Pope to be refused entry to the country on the grounds he offends victims of child abuse, sexism and homophobia.

Bullshit. Secularists and others call for the pope not to be invited on a state visit on the grounds that he is a criminal for being one of the Vatican officials who protected child-raping priests from the police. Secularists and others strongly criticize the pope for his illiberal anti-egalitarian views and pronouncements on women and gays as well as for his lethal pronouncements on condom use and his church’s ruthlessly lethal policy on abortion (better a woman should die than that a fetus should be aborted). That goes way beyond being “offended,” and Bowden probably knows it. This “both sides equally guilty” crap is just formulaic and lazy.

In their perceived role as guardians of European secular liberalism against the growth of Muslim communities across Europe, it seems that many New Atheists are now compromising the very principles of religious tolerance fundamental [to] this tradition. Secularism should be about allowing individuals and communities to live by their own values without official interference.

Bullshit, again. Secularism should not be about “allowing individuals and communities to live by their own values” without any qualifications at all. If the “values” in question include child marriage, or no education for girls, or no medical treatment for illness or injury, or mass suicide, for example, communities should not be allowed to live by them, and adult individuals should not be allowed to impose them on their children.

However what we are now seeing is the bizarre rise of illiberal liberals, where so-called “liberals” assert their right to micro-manage every aspect of individuals’ lives, from the clothes and symbols people wear, to the talks they choose to attend.

No we’re not. We are now seeing lots of people, of different views and allegiances, confronting some of the difficulties of simply “allowing individuals and communities to live by their own values without official interference.” We see few if any liberals asserting their right to micro-manage every aspect of individuals’ lives. That’s a canard, and as such, it’s satisfyingly typical of the backlash.

A guy called Erich Vieth did a useful interview with Paul Kurtz the other day. There are some odd things in it, which could shed some oblique light on the PK-CFI quarrel.

PK says he left voluntarily but under great duress, which is useful to know. I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Then they talk about why no explanation of his resignation appeared in Free Inquiry, and he said it was because it was censored. Vieth said isn’t that at odds with free inquiry?

PK: It is similar to thought police. Alas! They refused to publish three of my editorials, and they refused to publish my statement regarding my resignation. What a contradiction. Even though I am the founder of the organizations, their position essentially was that I had no right to publicly express my concerns about the direction of the organization or the new management practices adopted under the current leadership — both of which I have grave reservations about. I consider this as similar to a Board of Bishops seeking to control its Founder.

Look closely at that last sentence. Look at the capital F on Founder. He’s saying it’s like bishops trying to control Jesus, and he’s Jesus.

PK: I have been censored and members of the staff have been instructed not to reveal any information about CFI to me. Barry Karr said that since I resigned, I have no right to be made aware of internal matters within the organization. I asked, “What about my moral authority? I said, “This is similar to what happened to Galileo when placed under house arrest.”

Except for the part about being placed under house arrest, and the part about Galileo.

PK: I never intended for the organization to mock religion…

EV: Are you suggesting that it is improper for anyone to ridicule religion?

PK: No, others in society can and should do so, but not Free Inquiry and CFI. As I just pointed out, I have always considered these organizations to be important philosophic and scientific forums requiring appropriate decorum.

But Free Inquiry published the Motoons – it was the only magazine in the US that did. Jesus Galileo seems to be moving the goalposts here.