USUPhilosophy

A student, more savvy than I with computers, somehow cooked this up: Click here.  Like all radicals (and if you want to be a social radical these days, you should be a devout Catholic), I will take my refuge in the safety of the academy.

Most neo-atheists that I know tend to want to distance themselves from Hitchens – his blood runs a bit too hot.  They usually put forth Dennett and Dawkins as much more responsible spokesman for the ‘movement’.  

But in an article today on new atheism ads on London buses, Dawkins is quoted as saying, ‘This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think – and thinking is anathema to religion.’

I know I am being reactionary here, but people that say stupid shit like that just don’t deserve to be taken seriously.  What a tired, clearly false, and frankly adolescent attitude.  Grow up, get over your juvenile soundbites about religion, and read something (Aquinas, Augustine, Kierkegaard, even Pope Benedict).  This attitude that atheists have a monopoly on ‘real thinking’ is just so ridiculous, so inane, and so obviously false that I have a hard time understanding how intelligent people like Dawkins can utter such things.  Guess what, not all Christians are anti-intellectual biblical literalists.  How stupid to think they are!  What I find so incredibly frustrating is the hordes of ‘free thinking’ atheists who lap up this sour milk from their prophets as if it were obvious truth.  

I’ll stop now.  In fact, I should probably sit the next couple plays out.

For all of you ‘young earth creationists’ out there – October 23 is Creation Day.  James Ussher, an Anglican bishop who published in 1654 a brilliant study that tried to sort this out (false or not, it is an ingenious bit of biblical scholarship).  He claimed that the world was created on October 23, 4004 BC.  While there are other accounts, Ussher’s chronology was the most widely accepted.

Such attempts were not all that uncommon in his time.  I know of several theologians who tried to date the universe and other events in this way (I know Newton at least dabbled in this, and made a concerted effort to determine the exact date of the crucifixion).

Perhaps this is only funny to fathers (past and present) of toddlers.

 

Here is a review of Raymond Geuss’s latest book, Philosophy and Real Politics. Geuss is a very smart philosopher; the book is surely worth a look. The review makes him out to be along the lines of a modern-day Thrasymachus. (I wonder if the students in the Republic class think that sounds fair, at least given what’s said in the book review.)