Sunday, June 06, 2021

If I Ever Get This Old, Shoot Me

I freely admit I don't like the works of James Joyce. Past Dubliners, I can't do it.  Tried Ulysses more than once; it's no go.  I've even read Proust and Beckett, so I'm no dilettante.  Just don't care for Joyce.

I do not consider that a badge of honor.  I respect people who read Joyce, and I wish I could.

And if I turn into this cranky and old man, I mean it:  shoot me.  It can only mean I'm a terminal asshole.  Until then, there's still hope for me.
Yeah, that would be fun. Internet equivalent of setting a bag of poo on fire on his doorstep. Clearly Dawkins' strong suit is not the humanities. Then again, neither is it genetics, or religion, philosophy, or theology. And yet....
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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal5:09 AM

    As isn't any surprise, Marilynne Robinson said it. From her review of The God Delusion:

    "It is never a surprise to find Dawkins full of indignation. In his new book, The God Delusion, he has turned the full force of his intellect against religion, and all his verbal skills as well, and his humane learning, too, which is capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry."

    I'm hardly a major fan of Kafka, but, then, I read enough to be severely disturbed about his sanity, but that particular work is quite a piece of creative imagination and a commentary on feeling trapped, I'd think not a little of it by modern scientistic culture.

    I find that with the neo-atheists and "skeptics" that they all seem to have had their minds warped by reading a lot of sci-fi and not much else. I'd dearly love to ask them what is "sci" about stuff that never goes through the discipline of restricting itself to what is known through science.

    Someone sent me a link to one of PZ's recent screeds whining about another atheist at Salon (of all places) who goes through the list of prominent neo-atheists from the 00's and shows how all of them turned out to be rotters. It's not exactly a wise article at Salon - he holds up Greta Christina and Rebecca Watson in a list of alternative, um, "thinkers" who could have made something of the fad, but it did entertain me enough to consider writing about it. PZ whines that they're desecrating the corpse that is the new atheism. Which is funny enough in itself.

    There are mighty few celebrity atheists who could take on the task of reading even theology written for an intelligent outsider audience, never mind the stuff that requires deep prerequisite familiarity. Dawkins ain't one of those.

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