The comments on CiF Belief, particularly Andrew Brown's blog in recent days that have been taking the piss out of the discussions have been tremendous fun.
Discussions about belief can get terribly serious to the point of becoming ponderous, and having your balloon pricked in such circumstances does no end of good.
I'm not good at that kind of creativity, and its hard to participate both in the event and the commentary on it, so I haven't joined in, but I've really enjoyed the Ringside commentary from freewoolly and GeneralX with colour commentary from BarabbasFreed (especially the way the discussion with tohimself was spun as an epic bout!), the mock biblical quotations by freewoolly, GeneralX, Beor and Savvymum, AmelieVincenzo's Italian tea lady (reminds me of Bella Lasagna from Fireman Sam, which I watched many times with my children when they were young!), Beors' janitor, and most recently AmelieVincenzo's "24" spoof.
Do please continue - I enjoy it all hugely!
Friday 19 June 2009
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Hey Jonathan, GeneralX here,
ReplyDeleteI hope you don't take to much time off from CIF belief because your contributions to any debate are always of the highest quality, well considered and presented, and I do enjoy reading them very much.
I would also like to say, that I too can relate to your perception of a resentment, which seems to be directed toward those of us who are not quite so enamored with the Emperor's raiment as perhaps some others would like us to be. Some times it would seem that there is a barely vialed hostility toward us, and I don't know if this is entirely appropriate from those that actually provide a forum for such discussions, in a publication such as the Guardian.
I ask, are atheists not allowed to present their opinions in these discussions?
Is it not appropriate for them to question the assertions of others?
Isn't this the point of the forum in the first place? especially when they have topics that involve atheism.
It seems to me, that of late, there has been almost a deliberate policy coming from CIF belief to, not discredit the arguments of atheism as such, but to smear the public perception of atheism, and I wonder where this actually comes from.
Your personal efforts are commendable in arguing for rationalism because I certainly don't have your patience or breadth of knowledge. I really don't know how you do it sometimes, when you just keep plugging away and plugging away at an issue, but I'm very glad that you do, because it really helps all of us who would like to see a more secular society, and I honestly don't see why the religious feel so threatened by us.
I'm glad you enjoy the silliness that some of us get up to sometimes, because lets face it this religion we are talking about here, sometimes we can forget, we get snowed under by all the angles, turtles and mad Catholics, so a bit of silliness can sometimes get things back in perspective.
So power to you Jonathan, and lets hope Andrew can find it within himself (he could always ask tohimself for some advice) to at least pretend to be bit more impartial. I don't know what the vision is that Andrew has for his blog: everyone sitting around holding hands and singing Kumbaya perhaps, I don't know, but on the Guardian????
Oh well. I hope to see you back soon.
GX.
Hi Jonathan -
ReplyDeletenikias1 here! Hi
Congratulations on your blog, and I hope that a number of other fellow CiFers will join us here.
Hi also, General.
I think that Dawkins and certain other people get under Andrew's skin. It doesn't seem to me that there's a bias as such (perhaps you would expect me to say that) but Andrew has become rather more dismissive recently. I think from what he says that he's reacting to what he feels is knee-jerk hostility.
I know that fellow contributors will make links between Guardian-progressivism-liberalness-atheism-liking of Dawkins, but that's not an inevitable route.
Anyway, I hope you'll be back on CiF after a short break - you'll be missed if you're not.