Saturday, September 01, 2007

Daniel C Dennett wrote something extremely interesting. I wish I could write like that, or at the very least form a coherent thought like this

Some people can juggle three tennis balls for minutes on end without dropping them. Most people can’t. Some people can whistle a happy tune beautifully, but most people can’t. It is obvious, is it not, that whether you can juggle or whistle has nothing at all to do with whether you are a good, honest, loving person. If only it were equally obvious that those who can manage the intellectual gymnastics required to keep alive a conviction that God exists in the face of all the grounds for doubting it have no moral superiority at all over those who find this proposition frankly incredible! In fact, there is good reason to believe that the varieties of self-admonition and self-blinding that people have to indulge in to gird their creedal loins may actually cost them something substantial in the moral agency department: a debilitating willingness to profess solemnly in the utter absence of conviction, a well-entrenched habit of deflecting their attention from evidence that is crying out for consideration, and plenty of experience biting their tongues and saying nothing when others around them make assumptions that they know in their hearts to be false.

I guess it would be the transmission part that takes some expertise. Of course, there are those that would argue most everyone can do it, it just takes perseverance and the necessary time. That may be it, I am not willing to take the time to pore over things as I did in writing classes, it's too painful searching for just the right turn of phrase.

Anyway, he's hit it on the head. People claim moral superiority with a conviction that there is a higher presence intent on human beings. He makes a good point, that the very things they practice amount to convincing evidence of something contradictory to their claim. This is the first of two paragraphs, and he could have stopped there. He didn't however, and with the second, jumps on the bandwagon deriding mother Teresa. It diminishes the impact somewhat.

People are much too quick to ride that flatbed, never realizing that this very same bandwagon is old. Hitchens drove it then, long ago, all by himself, with his essay pointing out the flaws in her facade that were so recently revealed by her. Still, the whole thing is so well written he can be forgiven. In the second paragraph he makes a very good argument for others to break their silence....

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