“‘Conversations With God’ Author Accused of Plagiarism”

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Walter Olson

What? Not ventriloquism? (via Althouse).

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The Elizabeth Dole “atheism” ad

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Walter Olson

Before the 2008 election cycle entirely passes into history, let’s take note of the TV ad that, according to some, helped seal Elizabeth Dole’s loss in her effort to hold on to her North Carolina Senate seat for the GOP:

If this sort of thing goes over badly with voters in North Carolina, a state with strong evangelical church attendance and long the base of Sen. Jesse Helms, it’s hard to see it as a viable strategy nationwide. (And don’t write it off as an isolated lapse of some Dole staffers, either: as YouTube confirms, the official National Republican Senatorial Committee was hip-deep in the strategy.) At the moment there’s intense interest in the race for chairman of the Republican National Committee, in which organized religious conservatives seem to have placed their chips on former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell (who’s also drawn support from some more secular figures on the right). Other figures in the RNC race include former Maryland Lt. Gov. Mike Steele and Michigan GOP chairman Saul Anuzis.

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Way crazier than Creationism….

Posted on January 4, 2009 by David Hume

…is AIDS Denialism.  Christine Maggiore died before the New Year.  Those making excuses for the deaths in this particular family are not good Bayesians.

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Miscellany, January 4

Posted on January 4, 2009 by Walter Olson
  • Canadian blog Gods of the Copybook Headings — and is anyone here unfamiliar with the classic Kipling secular-rightish poem (bonus Bradlaugh content!) alluded to in that title? — interviews its founder/chief blogger about his classical liberal views (via);
  • Bon mot from Julian Sanchez: “Abstraction has a way of masking disagreement: Everybody’s in favor of ‘liberty,’ for some values of ‘liberty.'” The whole article, on efforts by conservatives to organize online, is worth reading.
  • Things are different in Britain. There’s the splash about the Conservative Humanist Association. There’s London’s amazing and dynamic Mayor Boris Johnson. And now comes word that not one but two MPs in David Cameron’s Tory Shadow Cabinet, likely ministers in a future Conservative government, have entered civil partnerships with their same-sex partners. Per Alex Massie, Shadow Justice Minister Nick Herbert “worked for the British Field Sports Society (ie, the fox-hunting and grouse-shooting lobby) for six years before entering parliament. Culturally at least, that organisation is to the Tory party rather what the National Rifle Association is to the GOP.”
  • Tabloid report: Mob sacks and burns Joseph Priestley’s laboratory to protest his Unitarian views (so maybe things have improved since 1791; via; more from Jonathan Rowe)
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Obama oath-of-office lawsuit

Posted on January 3, 2009 by Walter Olson

Per Religion Clause, Michael Newdow’s lawsuit “asks the court to enjoin the Chief Justice– who will administer the oath of office– from adding ‘so help me God’ to the constitutionally prescribed presidential oath (Art. II, Sec. 1). It also asks the court to declare unconstitutional the use of clergy to deliver an invocation and benediction.” It does not seek to forbid Obama from saying the words if he wishes, however. Newdow is the guy who unsuccessfully sued against the “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and he filed similar lawsuits over the 2001 and 2005 inaugurations, so there are elements of both “pounding his head against a wall” and “old news” here, but Eugene Volokh and Richard Esenberg have some observations worth reading.

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Our content, and its omissions

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Walter Olson

One of the disappointments that commenters often voice, in the current open thread and elsewhere, is: why do we have so many posts that discuss the role of religion in American public life, and so few that simply argue for one or another right-of-center position based on 100% guaranteed-secular premises? Why don’t we spend more time exploring the considerable differences between the various contributors on such topics as immigration or gay marriage or Middle East policy, in hopes of hammering out the “right” position for secular conservatives to take on that issue?

My own answer would run as follows: this site does not represent an effort to develop some sort of Secular Right platform. It’s a bunch of writers. Writers in groups often get compared to cats in groups, with one easily distracted by any passing flash of color or light, a couple of others enjoying a brief swatting match before resuming friendly interaction, and yet a fourth waiting impassively at a certain mousehole. By design the site includes right-of-center writers with a very wide range of views, what DH called a “broad church“, reducing yet further the chance of our reaching any sort of consensus beyond the most elemental premises (claims that sound governance and morality can rest only on a religious basis are erroneous; and the relationship between American conservatism and religion has gone wrong in certain respects and needs to be rethought).

At any rate, here’s my suggestion for those who would like to see our writers displaying their talents on issues unrelated to religion and its role in public life: just use Google to search a combination of their individual names and the issue (+ “economy”, “multiculturalism”, “Iraq” or whatever). To find various brilliant and provocative things about universities, abortion, and polygamy guaranteed to be based on secular premises, for example, follow this link or this one or this one.

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Who is pro-science, the Left or the Right?

Posted on January 1, 2009 by David Hume

In the comments below I made an assertion to the effect that conservatives are more likely to notionally reject the authority of science, which is one reason that I sometimes focus on right-wing Denialism. On the Left the main analog I experience are feminists and racial minorities who reject science’s authority due to its white male character. On some issues, such as the contention that population level differences between races and sexes are not trivial, the Left is more rejectionist than the Right. But, aside from feminists and racial minorities who reject science as a valid paradigm, my personal experience with Leftists is that they can often be moved into positions which are less rejectionist leveraging the fact that in theory they accept the power and witness of the scientific methodology. The main problem with Creationists, and the reason I simply refuse to engage with them, is that they reject the primacy of the scientific methodology on principle,* so that there is simply no leverage for me to work with (though to be fair, pointing out that St. Augustine noted that much of scripture was allegorical in nature is the sort of leverage which can be used with Creationists on a one-to-one basis).

But I decided to double check my intuition here by looking at the GSS in terms of attitudes toward science. First, if you are curious about “moderates,” they’re less intelligent than those at the political extremes. That should make their results more intelligible. In any case, I am tempted to walk back down from the assertion I made in the comments below, as a wider sampling of variables shows that the reality is more complex, and I am now skeptical that my model captures enough nuance to salvage it.

* I am aware that many avowed Creationists claim to be “scientific.”  Scientific arguments are not the real core of their Creationist commitments. They know that, you know that, but for cultural & legalistic reasons they need to retain the transparent farce that their Creationism is rooted in a scientific basis.

Continue reading →

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Open thread — topics we haven’t tackled

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Walter Olson

What topics haven’t we been blogging about on this site that would relate to our niche and make for interesting reading?

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Hell and the scientific method

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Heather Mac Donald

My good friend OpinionJournal.com blogger James Taranto drops his insistence that there is no tension between American tolerance and a belief in eternal damnation for wrong-believers (not without getting in one last crude mischaracterization of my argument, however). 

Now he says that our disagreement boils down to the following statement of mine, from which he deletes the final clause:

[I]t is an empirical matter, presumably verifiable after the Last Judgment, whether unbelievers and the unbaptised are eternally punished, not just a matter of feeling. 

James pretends that I was proposing a scientific test today for what will transpire after death.  In fact, I was just stating the obvious: If hell is real, we will all find out–some of us directly–after the Last Judgment.  By contrast, the statement which James offers as an analogy to the belief in eternal damnation: “She is the most important thing in the world” is a value judgment that cannot be corroborated by actual experience. 

In an effort to be cute, James states that I “must be the only atheist who thinks [that] the Last Judgment is a real event.”   Earlier James accused me of lacking imaginative sympathy with religious belief; now he accuses me of believing religious doctrine.  I wish he’d make up his mind.

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Miscellany, December 29

Posted on December 29, 2008 by Walter Olson
  • Per John Tierney in the Times, a new review of the literature has “concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control”, which may help explain why religious belief is often associated with greater success in such goals as personal health and marital stability. Mere going through the motions doesn’t seem to be enough, “Dr. [Michael] McCullough told me, because personality studies have identified a difference between true believers and others who attend services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress people or make social connections. The intrinsically religious people have higher self-control, but the extrinsically religious do not.”
  • A new Vanity Fair article based on interview with GWBush administration insiders includes this quote from David Kuo:

    “The reality in the White House is – if you look at the most senior staff – you’re seeing people who aren’t personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders,” Kuo said.

    “In the political affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at … basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated.”

    Note, by contrast or otherwise, DH’s just-preceding post on GWB’s personal beliefs.

  • For those who haven’t overdosed on the subject, the gang at Volokh Conspiracy have a lot to say about the “Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays” question, with attention to the use of the latter phrase (long before the recent culture wars) as an attempted way to avoid awkwardness between Christians and Jews. Relatedly, David Kopel brings word that readers of the Boulder, Colorado, Daily Camera, have now heard from one of the world’s touchiest atheists on the subject.
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