Many of the New Atheists seem to make a virtue out of not knowing anything about that which they condemn so vehemently; the so-called "Courtier's Reply" argument advanced by PZ Myers is an example of this claim that you don't need to know anything about religion to be able to dismiss it out of hand...(For the record, the Courtier's Reply is the position that you don't have to know every detail of a discipline to criticize its core concepts.)
[T]he superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times, once it is debunked, takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. . . . [O]ne of the functions of old-fashioned religion was to scare people by sometimes what might be regarded as myths into behaving in a way that long-run civilized life requires.
Monday, August 16, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (Reza Alsan's cock edition)
Reza Aslan on atheist fundamentalism:
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