Tag: Reason & rationality

God’s artillery opens fire

Articles & Essays

It’s hard to resist the pull of military metaphors when talking about the recent battles between religion and the so called new-atheists: Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchins, Sam Harris et al. Fighting talk is only natural when combatants on both sides have often been vicious in their attacks. And like the western front in World War I, for all the blasts and flashes, neither side ever manages to advance its trenches. Yet in the very definition of madness, both forces persist in trying the same tactics that have never worked before as though they might suddenly prove efficacious….

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Do we need emotional intelligence?

The Shrink and The Sage

The biggest problem with multiplying intelligences is that it opens the door for people to deflect criticisms on the basis that the critic simply lacks the appropriate one. “Spiritual intelligence”, for instance, cannot be a straightforward capacity since there is wide disagreement about what it means to be spiritual and whether all sorts of allegedly spiritual phenomena are real. Yet on some definitions, a materialist atheist would simply be spiritually thick. A substantive, contentious worldview can thus be disguised as an objective cognitive capacity. A clever move, but not one that can be described as truly intelligent.

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Can’t or won’t?

The Shrink and The Sage

As long as something remains logically possible, some people can’t help but wonder if their dream might become a reality, given enough desire or effort. This is exacerbated by the fact that our culture encourages people to dream big and believe that “impossibility” is simply the hobgoblin of negative minds…

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Bibliocide

Articles & Essays, Videos

No civilised person is supposed to make bonfires of books. ‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in the century before Nazism. Burning books is a sacrilegious act, and the taboo against it particularly binds writers. So what was I doing in a Somerset field lighting a match under the 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica?

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The demolition man

Articles & Essays

John Gray has given us a lot to think about, and has done so provocatively and eloquently. But The Silence of Animals suggests he needs to push his own thinking too. The work of demolition is done and there is little to be gained from continuing to swing the wrecking ball over the ruins. Gray needs to say more about how civilised westerners should live, at least as individuals if not as a society, once we have given up the most egregious myths and illusions of western civilisation.

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