OK, He's a Fool

By -
But still, his book is capable of prompting entertaining reviews.

Money quote: "If he had, he would have to conclude that it is not religion that poisons everything, but human beings that poison everything, including religion and atheism. They also poison garden clubs, baseball teams, industrial corporations, moose lodges, academic departments, and charitable trusts. In short, wherever one finds humanity, one also finds inhumanity."

Yes, and it is not government that poisons everything, or private enterprise, but human beings.

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy12:33 AM

    I'm just glad I wasn't the fool to which your title referred.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PH12:56 PM

    For anyone who's interested, I think one of the more thought-provoking critiques of the Secular Narrative is to be found in David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Yes, it has an irritatingly flashy title, but the content is pretty solid (which is not, of course, to say that I agree with everything in it).

    ReplyDelete
  3. TokyoTom5:00 AM

    I can't stand Hitchens, and liked this review too.

    Not sure I get your closing point, though; sure, we may lose sight of human beings/action when referring to "corporations", "the state" or "the Church", but that is not simply our wont but also can be very useful.

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah10:27 AM

    It's that anarchists, say, try to assign the source of evil to "the State," or Mraxists to "private property," but the actual source is human beings.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more