Here's an excerpt:
If Professor Dawkins is the “bad cop” of the New Atheists, the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee is probably the “good cop”, while Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the “corrupt cop”. I saw him on the British TV programme Question Time, contemptuously holding court like Jabba the Hutt. And I sat for half-an-hour at Waterstone’s dipping into the over-priced God Is Not Great as if it were dishwater, a highly flattering simile. Hitchens’ penetrating scholarly appraisals include descriptions of Augustine the “ignoramus”, Aquinas the “stupid”, and Calvin the “sadist”; while Niemöller and Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis was motivated by a “nebulous humanism”, and Martin Luther King’s faith was Christian only in a “nominal sense”. Enough said. It is all rather embarrassing.
hii!
ReplyDeletei did read the blog but i think it was a bit too clever for me!
nyways i just wanted to say happy new year!=] and maybe il remeber to blog more this year!
Hi rozi, happy new year to you too! No worries about the blog - maybe God has better things for you to do with your time!
ReplyDeleteI don't see PT as a good cop. Here she is on ++Rowan on October 26th:
ReplyDelete"Joining the Catholics and evangelicals, that pathetic weather-vane windbag, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has now dithered his way into the debate. Wobbly Williams is hand-wringing over "too many" abortions and loss of "moral focus" and "weakening of the feeling that abortion is the last resort". His Observer article last Sunday calling for a review of the 24-week limit was an archetypal self-parody, wandering around the moral maze and getting lost. Too many!
Either abortion is murder - which some think - or it isn't, which 83% think in a new NOP poll. So are a few murders OK with the archbishop, and if so, how many?
His contribution was yet another intellectual contortion to mollify his church's woman-hating, gay-bashing, Daily Mail wing instead of standing up for whatever it is he thinks."
Subtle, NOT.
How do I hate thee, Rowan? Let me count the ways...
Matt W
The only 'good cop' who comes to mind for me is John Humphrys, but then he's agnostic rather than atheist and not much of a fan of the militant secularists. I wonder if there are any other candidates?
ReplyDelete