Benjamin Myers writes for ABC Religion and Ethics about Reflected glory: Imitation, biography and moral formation in early Christianity.
Kenan Malik writes about What do Believers Believe? (not what you might expect).
Matthew Reisz has interviewed Sarah Coakley for Times Higher Education: What’s God got to do with evolution?
Rob Williams writes in The Independent that Religious people are less intelligent than atheists, according to analysis of scores of scientific studies stretching back over decades.
Frank Furedi responds with Atheists are more intelligent than religious people? That’s ‘sciencism’ at its worst.
James Fodor writes for Bible Society Australia: An atheist’s point of view: why Christians aren’t being heard.
There’s a misunderstanding of ‘selfish’ in the Selfish Gene of Dawkins – it’s more an amoral focus of the future rather than some sort of limitation. Therefore collective altruism is part of the advance of the selfish gene. This is a basic part of Dawkins’s view and if it is misunderstood then it undermines the rest of the argument. I’m always curious to know what Sarah Coakley means by ‘the Trinity’ and I suspect it is a lot looser than it used to mean. In any case evolution is local and specific, and cannot therefore be part of some overall… Read more »
Thank you, Mr. Furedi! I doubt St. Francis of Assisi (Christianity) or Rashi (Judaism), or similar folks in Islam, Buddhism, etc. were stupid idiots. I refuse to believe that, as a class, most people who sit in the pews, or equivalent, are dumb. For centuries, religious folks persecuted atheists, harassed them, or acted smug and condescending towards them. While replying in kind may be understandable from the standpoint of human behavior, to me, it only makes atheists who do so just as bad as the bad-apple religious folks. “We’re better than you, don’cha know?” is a pathetic attitude, period, no… Read more »
Thanks so much for the article on Sarah Coakley. Its a compelling and fascinating read.
I was very interested in Sarah Coakley’s story: she had some important insights about women in male-dominated institutions.
But I admit I {cringed} when I read “the contemplative on her knees well knows the messy entanglement of sexual desire and the desire for God”. I appreciate putting a universal (?) claim in the feminine, but “on her knees” in this context really isn’t a mental picture we need to imagine!
Every time I see a “report” on one group or another’s relative intelligence, employability, beauty, etc., I’m reminded that 90% of all statistics are a lie.
My problem with Dawkins isn’t so much his theory, but that he takes it off into directions based upon his own bias and nothing else, then claims it to be “scientific.” I frankly don’t find him all that brilliant.
Furedi is an odd bird – a former member of the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) which was an infamous assortment of Trots in the 1970s – who edited Living Marxism magazine during the 80s and early 90s. In that period, he transformed himself into a libertarian capitalist with various contrarian views. What got him in trouble was his support for the Serbians during the Nato war. He even went so far as to claim that the concentration camps were faked in a Channel Four documentary. CH4 was no pleased and sued him for libel, winning a substantial verdict and bankrupting… Read more »
Actually, Kenan Malik, the results of your surveys are very much as one might expect. All the indications are that most belivers are more ‘liberal’ on most topics than either one might expect or what the self appointed ‘spokespersons’ might say. To take the debate on same sex marriage, it has been know for some time that there was both a majority in the country and amongst Christians for it and that the outpourings from the bishops, the self identifed ‘Christian’ bodies and the campaigns did not represent the views of the person in the pew. A few religiously or… Read more »