The most poisonous thing I've read all day.

[the_grynne]

Roger Sandall:

'Which best nails the canard that “religion poisons everything” and that it is the main cause of “violence”? A scholarly examination of Islam’s fierce military expansion that eventually, after 463 years, provoked the counter-militancy of the Crusades? Or a philosophical trawl through the oceanic deeps and limitless intellectual

Comments

[rez_lo]

In October 2005 Michael Crichton chose his 2001 book The Culture Cult as one of the "five best books" in the past twenty years about the social effects of romantic primitivism (see the Wall Street Journal for 10.29.05).
...tells me all I need to know about this guy. Not to mention the nauseatingly arch tone of the "About Roger Sandall" page on that blog.

You don't have to deal with him in any direct way, do you? Because yeah.

[the_grynne]

Oh good God! The University of Sydney! I HAVE NEVER SEEN HIM AROUND THANK HEAVEN. Jugding by the members of faculty I know, I don't think his views would go over very well with them at all.

I came across the article via Arts & Letters Daily, and like a real academic environment, there's a lot of real BS to sift through.

[the_grynne]

"A BA in anthropology took him to Columbia University in 1956, but the prospect of further work in this alarming subject made him turn aside and take up film-making."

And yet what made him change his mind and enter academic life in "this alarming subject"?

[rez_lo]

I have this theory that every academic discipline tolerates the occasional assy blowhard for their usefulness in those times when the smart people are too busy researching to do their publicity duties properly. So they let these privileged few monstres sacres honk their honks, and the usual journalistic suspects go, Ooooh, polemic! and write it up, and the university/discipline gets some ink so the rest of us don't forget about them, and it's all good.

They're sort of like howler monkeys in the zoo. Godawful, but a very big draw for the enterprise overall.

[poisontaster]

CHARLEMAGNE, MAN, CHARLEMAGNE.

*tiny fists of rage*

[the_grynne]

EXACTLY.

[mr_kit]

And the prose is very poor. Tighten up, academia!

[the_grynne]

It is. I wonder if his books are as bad.

He doesn't even allow comments. (I wonder why... *sarcastic*)

[the_grynne]

the foremost protectors and "creators" of modern Western civilization

Yes...just conveniently forget about those pagan Greeks and Romans.

if you don't have a knowledge of Christian history you are ignorant

That bit I can partly agree with. But I wonder if your Catholic school would consider the Byzantine empire, the Reformation, the Crusades, etc. as important periods of "Christian" history.

[tanwen]

OMG. I'm a Christian, Catholic to be specific and Christians have been some of the most violent people the world has ever known.

[the_grynne]

Or at least, certainly on a scale that few religions can hope to match.