In a change from usual blogging…

I plan on Sunday to put up a post On Theology unless I can think of a better title. It could have gone up last weekend, or any time since January if I’d finished writing it, but I was trying to make it less boring. That may be an impossible task. Anyway the plan was to put that up agreeing with Dawkins that Theology tells us nothing about nature, but disagreeing with him as far as culture. So while pop-theologists attempts to debate Dawkins by proving the existence of God are pretty awful, that doesn’t mean I can ignore everything a theologian says about belief. You don’t have to read it now, but it’s coming anyway.

However, there’s going to be three other posts touching on religion and atheism in different ways. I’m putting up a warning because while I am atheist, I’m not that interested in converting (or is that de-converting?) other people. Not only do I go days without thinking about gods, I also go for days not thinking about not thinking about gods. I do think about gods for hours each day sometimes, but that tends to go with the territory when one of the things you’re researching is ancient religion.

So why three more posts all of a sudden?

There’s a debate sparking around various parts of the internet following the publication of Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. Amongst other things Mooney and Kirshenbaum posit that atheists who disregard the need for religious sensivitity in science writing are damaging the process of science communication. Others are arguing that Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s analysis is not as rigorous or reflective as it could be. Along the same lines I could describe the Great War 1914-18 as ‘a bit of a rumpus’. While it’s going to become clear I agree with one side rather than another, I’m not really interested in yelling “Burn the Witch!” Instead I want to see if there’s something which can be salvaged from a discussion which is in a Bad Place at the moment.