Link blog: atheism, meme, sam-harris, politics

[pw201]

New Statesman - Faith no more "Earlier this year, Andrew Zak Williams asked public figures why they believe in God. Now it’s the turn of the atheists - from A C Grayling to P Z Myers - to explain why they don’t "
(tags: atheism richard-dawkins philip-pullman daniel-dennett sam-harris)
Pompous Theist You've seen Advice Dog and Courage Wolf, now enjoy

Comments

[ciphergoth]

Might have to cook up some new Pompous Theist entries. In particular I can't believe there isn't one about tides, and there's got to be a way of getting one out of "an unsophisticated atheist can't explain what theists believe. A sophisticated theist can't explain what they believe".

[livredor]

I think Holly makes a good point, and I've never liked the "privilege" framing. However, most of the commenters on that post seem to think that you shouldn't use the term privilege specifically because society is actually biased against men rather than women. And it's a lot of the same names who have been making the same cut-and-paste points on all the big feminist blogs for decades now

[pw201]

However, most of the commenters on that post seem to think that you shouldn't use the term privilege specifically because society is actually biased against men rather than women.

Well, I agree that that's not why you shouldn't use it (my main objection is that it's a conversation stopper along the "I pity you infinitely for your sins" line, close to Holly's third point).

Great idea, I'm all for it. But they won't moderate their comments to get rid of the repetitive monomaniacs, because they're too susceptible to the criticism "you're just like traditional feminists, you don't care about men's concerns". I wonder if it'd be possible to avoid that to some extent by moderating for comments being off-topic rather than off-message. Holly's post is about why the term "privilege" is bad, not whether some form of systematic advantage exists