Quotation

"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education."
Sir Walter Scott

A tepid but welcome admission

Todd Green's Religion Now post "Are Religion Courses Harmful to Faith?" is certainly a welcome though indirect admission that religious literacy is actually a threat to religious beliefs. He hedges in a number of ways. He is very careful to couch his assertion that religious courses can be problematic to faith in specific yet bland terms. Green tends to imply that it is generally bad for more "orthodox" approaches to religion thereby leaving himself plenty of wiggle room to insulate more liberal forms of religious beliefs. Anyone who adheres to a consistent and intellectually honest approach to critically reviewing all forms of religion should see that, though its immediate impact is felt strongest among the conservative brands, religious literacy is equally damning to all versions of religious belief.

Simply oozing

How is it that a certain set of theist consistently outclass each other in the amount of utter crap they can cram into a single piece of writing? It would seem that at some point a limit has to be found. Tim Stanley would appear to hold the current record with his Telegraph blog post "Militant atheists should thank God that they live in a Christian country." With only six paragraph it is so packed full of bullshit it makes you wonder if miracles are real. The title alone is so bad I feel the need to repeat it just to come to terms that a "writer" could be that fucking inept.

Militant atheists should thank God that they live in a Christian country

It is stunning. So much stupidity, bias, and willful ignorance in a single line. Applying "militant" to vocal atheists has been taken apart so many times I find it hard to believe that someone with an IQ over 60 and an attention span slightly better than a goldfish could have missed it. Stanley does mention Dawkins by name so there is a solid example that can be completely refuted. There is no weasel room to claim he meant a different person or type of atheist. Dawkins, like the rest of the "New Atheists", has not only never advocated the use of violence but has on numerous occasions corrected the mischaracterization of his works for such deceitful smears.

Mr. Stanley also seems to have drank rather deeply from the same batch of Kool-Aid that the "Christian Nation" assholes here in the US have been swilling for years. No, England is no more a "Christian country" than is the US. It is this self-important factually challenged mentality that oozes from the title and drizzles through the paragraphs that follow it. There is no real thought involved. He simply parrots from others all sorts of faux-history and apologetics. Sadly, he can't even be consistent or coherent while layering on this type of shit. In the fifth paragraph, while going on about what we all owe to religion he gleefully quotes that it is "...from teachings and presumptions that are specifically Christian." Yet the very next paragraph starts, "This is not unique to Christianity."

Huh? If you insist the guy you are quoting is dead-on wouldn't making a statement that says the exact opposite just a sentence later be noticeable as a blatant contradiction? It is, however, a pretty good summary of the piece. It doesn't manage to make a single valid point. It just repeats tired myths and does it in a very weak incoherent manner. It is somewhat amusing how he manages to reference, if vaguely, politics, philosophy, and theology all without the slightest understanding in any of it. If it weren't for his clearly malicious intent it might be comparable to how a toddler first starts exploring his/her own house. Too bad this  piece of shit came from an adult with access to the mainstream media.

Oh, and I'm also not sure how or why someone would thank an entity that is completely fictional. Wouldn't that be a bit like my thanking Papa Smurf for helping me read and respond to Stanley's worthless blog post?

Quotation

"Improving on what I wrote in Logics of Delusion, I would now say that the delusional subject believes in the immediate truth of what is compulsively revealed to him. In general, he has no suspicion that it may be false or illusory. This is also because he has remained intimately attached to the logic of desire, which cancels any contradiction between the possible and the impossible, the attainable and the unattainable, and because he has experienced this archaic logic as true even when the reality principle was imposed on his unwilling consciousness. In other words, he has not entirely made the transition from the logic of desire to that of the acceptance of bonds, to the logic of a relatively well-consolidated rationality."

“Afterword”
Logics of Delusion, 2nd Edition
Remo Bodei 

A title as bad as the content

Unlike so many other pieces I've come across, Jonathan Merritt's "4 surprising places to encounter God" is pretty well titled for what follows. It's unfortunate that what follows is rather pathetic. I admit that over the years I've been rather critical of Merritt but this one is rather sad even for him. Even setting aside that he specifically writes opinion pieces for the Religious News Service.

The only thing this blog post seems to accomplish is to reveal how muddled some theists views are of God. Merritt uses "Jesus" and "God" interchangeably which works or doesn't depending on which flavor of Christianity you prefer. Usually, he seems more aware of such a discrepancy. I have also noticed over time that he mixes different versions of the God concept (scriptural vs. abstract) fairly regularly. However, within a given piece he tends to be more consistent than in this one. In either version, finding God in "surprising places" is telling. The scriptural God is prone to whimsical and temperamental behavior. Why be surprised by the actions of a character who consistently acts rashly? If you switch over to the more abstract version of God it makes even less sense. As the perfect all-powerful creator, God would not only have to be the source of everything but also be everything. Where could you possibly go where God doesn't exist?

Merritt's main premise/title is just silly. It only makes any sense if you've never thought seriously about what the various versions of the God concept entail.