Aaro respects the Prime Directive
Our man strikes more or less exactly the right note with respect to the whole "God, for or against" debate, demonstrating that the problem with Richrd Dawkins' "we should treat the god-botherers with naked contempt! contempt I say!" thesis is not so much the actual reasoning, as the fact that Dawkins' own personality has been shaped, and not in a good way, by the fact that the last time he listened to anything anyone else was saying was 33 years ago, and they were saying "this is your publisher, Dr Dawkins, I've got your first royalty cheque for 'The Selfish Gene' and ...[fade]".
Aaro does good humoured mockery much better. Secular humanism is much more palatable when in the hands of people who remember that a little bit of humanism is worth a whole lot of secular.
Aaro does good humoured mockery much better. Secular humanism is much more palatable when in the hands of people who remember that a little bit of humanism is worth a whole lot of secular.
posted by The Rioja Kid at 5/05/2009 04:26:00 PM
9 Comments:
He's wrong about the Alpha press quotes not ezisting though.
Yes, and wrong specifically through laziness - he checked one online archive then gave up. This is the sort of scholarship that stops him from falling for conspiracy theories.
On the other hand the 'sophisticated' humanists who despair of the antics of Dawkins and co would be so much palatable if they weren't quite so patronising, smug, and self regarding.
Horses for courses I guess.
Is some kind of etiquette involved in you not reporting on the Aaro vs Atzmo story? Aaro himself wasn't so shy and covered it in his JC column. Who said eating yourself went out of fashion?
No, certainly not - in fact the reason that I didn't put up a post linking to Tony Greenstein's summary is that I thought I had done so. Ommission to be remedied soon, thanks and sorry.
I would also add that "Mission: Ziffoid" is a fucking ace book, and that for the last five years, I have been involved in an ongoing competition with half a dozen stockbrokers to see who can get the longest chain of "that's good news - no, that's bad news!" going in a financial presentation. The record is currently five, in a discussion of the renegotiation of the Liechtenstein/USA tax treaty.
Your difficulty with your stockbroker friends must surely be that the only formula that applies to them is 'that's bad news - oh no, that's worse news'. Mission debtoid, I think.
ps. I wasn't ackcherly calling for you to repro TG's line on it. I was ackcherly interested in your own aaro trainspotting line.
the post (and the line) is now up!
On the other hand the 'sophisticated' humanists who despair of the antics of Dawkins and co would be so much palatable if they weren't quite so patronising, smug, and self regarding.I agree. Dawkins is certainly unnecessarily obnoxious on occasion when pushing his views, and chooses highly dubious tactics (the "brights" thing is comically naive in my view). But I'm inclined to cut him a certain degree of slack on religion given that his opponents are a) typically at least as arrogant and b) wrong.
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