A great collection of quotations for people who like their reality just as it is. If, like me, you weren’t “imprinted” while young, or like others, you were imprinted, but managed to break free, you’ll enjoy these.
I think Scott Adams’ two line reply to the pastor is perfect.
One of the many problems with placing one’s ethical beliefs on supernatural metaphysical rather than rational and empirical foundations [EDIT: this should really read "humanistic grounds"], is that pretty much your every pronouncement on any matter of importance ends up degenerating into complete cack.
Ophelia Benson is a professional cack-buster. She can spot cack at 100 paces. She is one of the world authorities on spotting religious cack and she has comprehensively poop-scooped our blundering bishop.
In any realm that had the secular, the humanistic, the rational at its centre, Ophelia’s series of posts would effectively destroy the Bishop’s public status. He would be humiliated and banished to the realm where intelligent men who willfully compromise their intelligence by insisting upon the reality of fairy stories, are exiled to.
Of course, that won’t happen. Our society and culture still possess a large reservoir of tolerance for those who publicly espouse unfounded and contradictory beliefs. That tolerance runs throughout most of our key institutions, including our media and our schools, as well as the minds of many of our citizens. We have a sign on the door of our public space that reads “Espousing cack OK here”.
Fear not Bishop, you’ve been intellectually torn apart, you’ve been shown to be a bundle of irreconcilable contradictions, we can all see that you want to have your intellectual cake and eat it, that you are determined to square those pesky logical circles, but hey, worry not, you are living in a time and a place where you can do those things and still be taken seriously as a public figure.
Nice try Ophelia, but the Bishop has permanent residency at the “Embassy of Fuzzy Thinking”, a refuge that guarantees its occupants protection from the demands of those who refuse to allow public figures to espouse contradictory beliefs. In fact, he’s probably there right now, doing something useful, like praying for the souls of those poor, misguided, non-fuzzy people who just can’t seem to grasp that the desireability of avoiding “logical contradiction” is a notion that theists and other fuzzies are neither bound by nor beholden to.
A bit of danger
An important pillar of our social identity hem hem
Bravo is it?
When Yasmin met Archy
There is nothing woolly about communitarianism
He’s just making it worse
The postmodernist archbishop
No exceptions