Steven Parmenius

  Mr. Matt Dillahunty is an atheist who is an ex-fundamentalist. Watching clips from his show The Atheist Experience , where he mugs and grimaces at the naïve fundies who call in, I have come to the conclusion that being an ex-fundamentalist is something he sucks at. [1] I hope he does not mind my candor here but, as he pulls no punches with his callers, I will pull no punches with him. The worst atheists, bar none, are those who began as hyper-conservative evangelical protestants. That particular smell DOES NOT rub off no matter how many times you refute creationism or point out there is slavery in the Pentateuch. The smell is one of earnest, doctrinaire moralism and aggressive proselytizing. I don’t like that smell when fundamentalists emit it and I don’t like it any better wafting from atheists. I think though, that I have worked out the reason this is such a problem in the atheist community. I can only imagine the misery of growing up a JW for instance. In my house, a fairly pio

    Inter-confessional polemics are not my thing as I have often said. You Tube pastor Mike Winger, though, still regularly posts videos detailing what is wrong with JW’s, Mormons, Catholics and other such riff-raff. I have zero problem with this personally. Pastor Mike is a preacher grounded in the reformed tradition and accepts its dogmatic formulas on justification, sanctification, the mediation of the saints and the blessed virgin and so on. He defends these vigorously and publicly as I suppose a clergyman should. One thing I notice though is that he has no new arguments. He repeats all the old ones. In his mind, and I have no personal problem with this, the theological polemics of the early modern period, the period in which Trent squared off against the reformers, are just as vital and relevant today as they were in the 16 th Century. These battles still need to be won and he is out there winning them. One reason I don’t blame him is that there are many old school Catholics and

  A 17th Century scholar named Alexander Ross was having none of this nonsense about unicorns. He has been ridiculed as a fool, of course, but this is winner’s history for his observations on the matter are quite reasonable. While his bitter rival Thomas Browne mused about modern unicorn powder coming from any number of monocorns (such as the rhino or narwhal) Ross insisted that the substance that circulated in his day as unicorn powder was the same substance to which the ancients attributed such marvelous properties. He was adamant that the unicorn question was not to be resolved by simple semantics in spite of the confusion on the question. Moreover, he accepted these properties of unicorn powder as a well attested fact. Why? By what criteria? Testimony! As far as he was concerned the testimony of the ancients was broad and consistent as to the use of the powder and this would not have been the case if the powder had been ineffective (the notion of placebo does not seem to have been

      Self-understanding has never been my strong suite. For this reason, I have any number of beliefs and attitudes to the world that I am always in the process of rationalizing. Part of this is simply how I am situated practically. I am a professor at a publicly funded university and so some of my aims and attitudes are the product of what I think to be my professional duty as an educator. If I were a clergyman I would, no doubt, say all kinds of things that would be reprehensible if I said them as a professor. As a clergyman I would have to preach from a confessional standpoint and what I said would be subject to certain kinds of review or even censure. Of course, as a secular academic, I am also subject to review and censure on a whole different set of principles. The fact of the matter is, though, that I could simply not do my job unless I were some sort of pluralist. I have to take on the education of 18-22 year olds across an entire spectrum of ethnic, religious and sexual ident

  Mandy (I can’t remember her last name) was a bright, perfectly pleasant young woman who insisted that unicorns existed and that her belief in unicorns was neither symbolic nor allegorical but literally factual. I suppose one might say this was a basic abandonment of intellectual responsibility for a person who was, after all, a grad student being trained for a future as an academic. This is true in terms of the socialization of academics. As an academic Mandy is responsible for investigating the assertions she makes. This would involve reading up on the history of unicorns and finding that it was an animal only ever talked about and never actually seen. In the middle ages it was an animal used largely as an allegorical entity to symbolize the Christian mysteries. Of course, for a medieval person the unicorn existed in a kind of dream state or demi-world between the symbolic and literal and depending on context could land on either side. A medieval person did not really need to make