Now I just need three points and a scripture
Stephen Fry's Bone-Crushing Final Remark In A Debate Against The Catholic Church
Bone crushing?
More like: straw man; match, puff of smoke.
Or: groundless generalization. Conflagration. Obscurantism.
This is what passes for intelligent debate in the modern world.
I'll retire to Bedlam.
It's the kind of thing that an upper-class Britatheist says and people think it's just brilliant because they don't know anything and have no ability to handle nuance and detail.
ReplyDeleteI would counter with Thomas Huxley's Emancipation Black and White
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE3/B&W.html
as certain an example of scientific racism and eager "scientific" anticipation of the extinction of an entire race - commonly held by a number of members of the anti-religious, especially anti-Catholic "X-Club."
Looking Fry up, I found this quote:
There has been a history, let's face it, in Poland of a right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history, and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on and know the stories, and know much of the anti-semitic, and homophobic and nationalistic elements in countries like Poland.
Perhaps the Cambridge educated Fry doesn't realize that Poland also has the distinction of having the largest number of those named "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem, for those who risked their own lives to save Jews from the Nazis and that the Poles were marked for extermination just a little down the list. Polish priests and nuns were the targeted for murder by the Nazis.
The twit might also have failed to research the issue of laws against being gay in Poland, where being gay was not illegal EXCEPT WHEN THEY WERE EITHER UNDER RUSSIAN OR GERMAN OCCUPATION. He could contrast his dear old Britain and its laws during the same time.
The man is a phony intellectual of the kind that celebrity atheism is built by and on.
While the atheists of the X-Club were operating under the belief in a mechanism if inheritance that would have, quite literally, made natural selection impossible - a logical operation they missed for about forty years - the Catholic priest Mendel had published his genetics, an exemplary scientific study far more in line with scientific thinking than Darwin's and sent their hero a copy which he neglected to read. I strongly, strongly suspect that it was unread BECAUSE it came from an obscure Catholic priest. The resistance to the Big Bang would mirror that, with a lot of the resistance to it being explicitly on the basis that they didn't trust it due to Lamaitre's being a Catholic clergyman. They suspected it was too much like the first verses of Genesis.