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Showing posts from August, 2009

Unscientific (and a whole lot else) America

There is a big hullaballoo going on in the blogosphere between P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum of The Intersection over Mooney’s and Kirshenbaum’s (M&K) new book Unscientific America . At issue are M&K’s perception of the so-called “New Atheists,” and especially the tone of Professor Myers’ blog and those that comment there. M&K’s main thesis regarding the outspokenly godless is that they are making reaching out to believers that are not already hostile to science that much harder. Of course, those reading this blog can pretty much guess who I think has the better points. America is indeed deeply mired in scientific illiteracy, but that is not what the “new” atheism, as a cultural phenomenon, is really about. If one had to pick a date to mark the beginning of the outspoken criticism of religious belief, it would have to be September 11, 2001 when it was made clear to many just how destructive dogmatic religious certainty was. Richard Dawki