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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

Specific Density

By John Pieret

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Whew!

Jerry Coyne is not only somewhat crippled in his ability to address the subject of religion rationally, he seems to lose his ability to comprehend the English language when the subject comes up. His latest is dubbing the following from Josh Rosenau as part of some "Hall of Shame":

If the goal of this blog is to be at all educational, one hopes that a vigorous defense of analogy will serve some salutary effect in the difficulties people have with analogical thinking, whether they be religious fundamentalists bent on Biblical literalism, or atheists bent on insisting that literalism is the true form of religion.

Coyne's response is:

I weep for the NCSE if this kind of idea is running the railroad. We atheists don't give a tinker's dam about what the true form of religion might be, because we don't think there is one! Nor do we have one. We don't worship Darwin, nor think that he's infallible. Is this part of a strategy to marginalize atheists along with Biblical fundamentalists?

I'm sorry, if Coyne doesn't care what the "true form" of religion is, why does he keep telling us that it isn't what liberal theologians think it is? Here is a recent, but hardly solitary, example:

[T]here's one thing that both atheists and the devout agree on: Karen Armstrong's God-is-but-a-transcendence-beyond-a-symbol theology is not only unrepresentative of religion in general, but hard to distinguish from atheism.

So, in point of fact, Coyne has, on his own, put himself in exactly the same company Josh was alluding to. Of course Coyne doesn't believe that religion itself is true. But he most certainly does believe that there is a form of religion (that he is opposing) that is the "real" religion, as compared to the "unreal" religion of someone like Armstrong ... just as the literalists believe.

Nor is it surprising that other people think Coyne insists that the "true form" of religion is closer to literalism than the more liberal and less primitive faiths, since the former is so much easier to debunk.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on September 25, 2009 (boomark / email).