Professor's Stance on Religion Enrages Some

[Tony]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,158337,00.html ..full article

NEW YORK — A Brooklyn College (search) professor has ignited a firestorm of controversy over comments he made about organized religion.

Timothy Shortell (search), who was recently elected as the chairman of the sociology department, wrote in an online posting that "religious adherents" are "an ugly, violent lot" and "in the name of their faith these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others."

The essay:

http://www.anti-naturals.org/theory/religion.html

French Sociologist Émile Durkheim observed that religion was the root of science. Religion, he said, was the first human attempt to systematically explain the world. Durkheim thought that religious rationality would wither away in modern times (for him, the early twentieth century) because scientific rationality would replace it, by virtue of its superior explanatory power. Alas, he seems to have gotten this one wrong.

But Durkheim was right about the genealogy of thought. Modern religion is an elaboration of a belief in magic. In the absence of a scientific explanation of events and institutions, faith in magical powers, fetishization of nature, and overinterpretation of random variation are inevitable. Durkheim expected religion to fall out of fashion as the outright belief in magic had, for the same reason. For anyone with the least education, the superior power of scientific thinking is obvious. Only a willful ignorance could lead to any other conclusion.

This is where we find ourselves. We live in a world that wants the fruits of scientific labor, but refuses the mental discipline of scientific rationality. Just like children, we want to have our cake and to eat it too.

Getting angry at people who criticize religion is the new PC.

 

[Grammatron]

They can get angry all they want.

Now if they fire, sanction or some such action him then it's a different story.

 

[BPSCG]

Do you think with language like this:

Here again, the temperate reader might sound a note of caution. "They are not all like that," he might say. No, they are not all like that. But that is not the point. Not all racists engage in lynching, either. It only takes a few. Soon enough, you have a mob and someone ends up dead. (Remember the rule of the lowest common denominator.)

...that maybe he wanted to make people angry?

 

[Skeptic]

What worries people is that he is the head of the department and might discriminate against religious people when hiring. After all, if someone said that he believed all non-Christians go to hell and are intellectually stupid, you might think they might discriminate against non-Chirstians.

I am not a big "antidiscrimination" buff, and believe freedom of speech is usualy more important. If he is a good professor, hire him and make him head of the department; just because he thinks religious people are stupid is no barring on that. But I can see why the department would not like him out of self-interest: if they want to hire the best people and he automatically excludes religious people, he is shooting himself in the foot.