Comments on: Values

By: Dagon

Dagon — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:04:33 +0000

Fish actually falls into this in his New York Times anti-atheist piece:
�the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking; rather than being swept under the rug of a seamless discourse, they are the very motor of that discourse, impelling the conflicted questioning of theologians and poets (not to mention the Jesus who cried, �My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?� and every verse of the Book of Job).�

Just terrible, especially how the argument just kind of trails off into critical theory gibberish. I love also that he submits the entire Book of Job into evidence–that should satisfy those atheists.

This line of argument was frustratingly common in the Harris and Dawkins book reviews. I even remember a few atheist reviewers spouting some version of this.

By: jcasey

jcasey — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:31:37 +0000

I misspelled “Rawlsian” now it is fixed. Dagon I think you’re observation is right on the mark. There is an analogy with the critiques of atheism: “as a form of believing, it’s just as much believing as theism, so they’re the same really,” or some such. That critique, however, is just laziness.

By: Dagon

Dagon — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:26:10 +0000

This “facile critique” you point out bears a strong resemblance to recent critiques of so-called “New Atheism” which argue that as a passionately held belief, atheism proves itself to be just another form of Fundamentalism, one that has the same relationship to the “dogma” of science that Fundamentalist Christianity has to the Bible. Religious “moderates” are especially prone to this kind of sloppy thinking.

By: Matt K

Matt K — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:36:01 +0000

Excellent point! I think the Fish type critics of Rawlsian Liberalism must have missed the point where Rawls states that any REASONABLE person would make a similar decision behind the veil of ignorance. Fish’s critique isn’t reasonable. However, to continue with the Rawlsian metaphor, Fish and his ilk certainly do drop a veil of ignorance of another kind over their own heads plus any they convince to listen to their garbage!

By the way, is it “Rawslian” or “Rawlsian”? I was just following the spelling of his last name, but I’ve been known to get these things wrong.