#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Australia has an atheist leader!
As a child, she was a Baptist, now she’s an avowed atheist. Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard this week completed the image of a thoroughly modern Australian leader by telling the nation she doesn’t believe in God.
Oh relax, all you hyperventilating godless pansies. Not all ambitious atheists are mass murderers. There’s only a 3 in 5 chance that she’ll be bathing in the blood of Australian virgins as Australia’s Dictatrix-for-Life ten years from now.
In which the connection between godlessness and the commission of acts of mass violence is explained by Napoleon, as per his personal secretary and biographer, Bourrienne:
During the negotiations with the Holy Father Bonaparte one day said to me, “In every country religion is useful to the Government, and those who govern ought to avail themselves of it to influence mankind. I was a Mahometan in Egypt; I am a Catholic in France. With relation to the police of the religion of a state, it should be entirely in the hands of the sovereign. Many persons have urged me to found a Gallican Church, and make myself its head; but they do not know France. If they did, they would know that the majority of the people would not like a rupture with Rome. Before I can resolve on such a measure the Pope must push matters to an extremity; but I believe he will not do so.”—”You are right, General, and you recall to my memory what Cardinal Consalvi said: ‘The Pope will do all the First Consul desires.'”—”That is the best course for him. Let him not suppose that he has to do with an idiot. What do you think is the point his negotiations put most forward? The salvation of my soul! But with me immortality is the recollection one leaves in the memory of man. That idea prompts to great actions. It would be better for a man never to have lived than to leave behind him no traces of his existence.”
It is those last three sentences that demonstrate the connection between atheism and large-scale tragedy that Richard Dawkins and other historically illiterate atheists have so much trouble recognizing. It is not atheism itself that is the problem, but as I explained in TIA, atheism combined with a burning ambition to achieve immortality through material ends. Whether this immortality is achieved through military glory, the creation of a New Man, or the construction of a new society on the ashes of the old one is not important, the point is that the underlying motivation to commit acts of horrific violence involves more than the simple absence of the belief that one will face judgment for one’s actions in this life.
Those who trouble to actually read the words of the historical individuals will see a striking similarity in the mindset of men as superficially different as Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao. Again and again, it becomes apparent that the ideology that supposedly drove each of them was merely cover for their burning personal desire to seek immortality through action. This is the most obvious in the case of Napoleon, who secretly loathed both the liberty and the bloody regicides of the Republic whose armies he led so effectively, because his biographer was privy to his private thoughts long before his actions began to contradict his supposed republicanism. But, the same concept quite obviously applies to many of the more lethal Communist leaders as well, since most of them were no more genuinely committed to Communism than Napoleon was to liberty, equality, and the French Republic.
For such men of burning ambition, ideology is nothing more than a means to a self-serving end. Men have little to fear from an atheist libertarian or a Christian monarch, but they have everything to fear from an ambitious atheist who dreams of great actions and is determined to leave the world with the recollection of his existence.
Scientific American reports on a study which implies that atheism may be a form of virtual Asperger’s Syndrome:
Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the Bering in Mind blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American Mind), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened—for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.
In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)
This sounds a more than a little sketchy in the usual social science manner; it’s actually a smaller sample size than was the case in the utterly unscientific comparison of the high AS Quotient average reported by atheist Pharyngula readers to the neurotypical range reported by regular readers here at VP, which involved more than 100 individuals. I think it would be more illuminating to learn whether those diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or full-blown autism are more or less likely to be atheists, as the reported predilection for non-teleological thinking suggests that those suffering from this form of mental impairment would be tend to be predisposed towards atheism and materialism.
Of course, the existence of neurotypical atheists should not be a surprise since many atheists do not exhibit the impaired social cognition that is the hallmark of the militant New Atheists. This is why it is always important to distinguish between the individual who merely happens to lack belief in gods from the anti-religious socially autistic crusaders who simply cannot understand that your religious beliefs, whatever they might be, are no legitimate concern of theirs.
And while we’re on the subject of impaired social cognition, I found this comment on the article to be as amusing as it is ironic. “Socially speaking, the world is full of all kinds of people, but the atheists I choose to associate with are outspoken because of their innate consideration and compassion in light of another’s plight with respect to primitive irrational superstitions.”
I don’t think atheists who strive to argue in support of the existence of non-religious objective values, regardless of whether they are based on philosophy or science, have any idea how weak their case is from the atheist perspective:
“There are no such things as absolute values, independent of the subjective preferences of erring men. Judgments of values are the outcome of human arbitrariness. They reflect all the shortcomings and weaknesses of their authors.”
– Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy
It seemed strange to me why atheist arguments related to objective morality were always so crudely simple and vaguely familiar until I realized that this is because I had seen very similar arguments before in a different context. As it happens, the current atheist attempts to determine an objective basis for morality are following exactly the same path that economists of the 18th and 19th century trod in attempting to determine the objective basis of value. They are literally 200 years behind the best efforts of economists from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen to find something that does not exist, and due to their general ignorance of economics – Michael Shermer excepted – they have no idea that their quest is destined for complete failure.
I can only conclude that sometime around the turn of the next century, the marginal utility of morality will become the dominant paradigm for a time prior to the whole quest being abandoned in response to a series of massive and inexplicable moral depressions.
PZ Myers provides an illuminating example of the careful logic and deep thought that goes into so much atheist reasoning:
A couple of years ago, I sat down one morning, bemused by yet another bit of empty apologetics from god’s sycophants, and banged out a short bit of amusement called The Courtier’s Reply. It got picked up everywhere, to my surprise. I mean, seriously, I have to confess that I whipped that out in 20 minutes, no edits or rewrites, just shazam, it’s done.
That’s certainly amusing, if not exactly surprising to anyone who has read it. As I have mentioned before, The Courtier’s Reply is a blitheringly stupid attempt to justify atheist ignorance of that which they are criticizing. In his recent post, PZ tries to claim otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that whatever PZ’s original purpose may have been, that purpose is not synonymous with either its logical consequences or how it is habitually utilized by atheists who refer to it. He states “they see the Courtier’s Reply as an attempt to excuse atheists from bothering with theology at all, when it’s quite the opposite: it’s a rebuke to theologians, pointing out that going on at length about rarefied epiphenomena and delicate points of dogma is a waste of time when you haven’t even established the central point of the matter, a reasonable justification for believing in a god or gods, period.”
Of course, being cited to excuse atheists from bothering with theology at all is exactly how The Courtier’s Reply is utilized; it is the ONLY way it is utilized. PZ’s attempt to provide a belated defense is easily proven to be false by no less than Richard Dawkins himself, who publicly cited it as an excuse for his own ignorance of theology in the Times.
You can’t criticise religion without detailed study of learned books on theology.
If, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, I had expounded the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller, it would have been a miracle. I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom had there been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question: does God exist? But I need engage only those few theologians who at least acknowledge the question, rather than blithely assuming God as a premise. For the rest, I cannot better the “Courtier’s Reply” on P. Z. Myers’s splendid Pharyngula website, where he takes me to task for outing the Emperor’s nudity while ignoring learned tomes on ruffled pantaloons and silken underwear.
As if Richard Dawkins knows the first thing about the theology of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Tertullian, or even CS Lewis. But this example of Dawkins is far from the only one and many more can be found on PZ’s own site for those with the fortitude to slog through that swamp of pseudo-scientific smuggery. The core problem with The Courtier’s Reply is that it is a category error. PZ does not understand that while the discussion of God’s Will or divine characteristics are conceptually related to discussions of God’s existence, they are not synonymous. The Courtier’s Reply is that of the innumerate individual claiming that because no one has ever shown him a “one” or a “two”, it is a waste of time for mathematicians to go on at length about rarefied imaginary numbers and delicate points of calculus. The fact that religion and the theology from which it derives makes real, material, and observable differences in the lives of its practitioners, be they for good or for ill, is sufficient to justify its study regardless of whether one can establish its ultimate source to the satisfaction of scientists or not. And only a complete ignoramus who knows nothing of history, economics, socionomics, or demographics would be foolish enough to assert that the material effects of theological differences are too unimportant to bother with the matter.
The thing that is so ridiculous about latter day atheists like PZ is that they are not only theologically ignorant, but they know next to nothing about secular philosophy either. Intelligent atheists have known for decades that science can never provide the replacement for religion that fantasists like PZ and Sam Harris believe it can for the simple reason that science does not and cannot dictate values. This is why a strong dedication to rational science, with or without the additional complication of atheism, so readily produces monstrous leaders like Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin in such short order, monsters of the sort that were so few and far between in the centuries prior to the Enlightenment.
Theology is the precise opposite of useless because it provides that which science intrinsically cannot; a basic framework upon which guidelines for human behavior can be structured in a viable manner that is coherent, self-consistent and understandable even to the non-believer. Consider how it is entirely normal for the atheist to criticize the Christian for failing to live up to the standards set by Christian theology; to what scientific standard can the non-atheist ever hope to hold the atheist?
Myers further demonstrates his astounding ignorance when he claims: “Science provides tangible evidence of its accuracy and importance. Religion makes excuses for its absence of the same. There is no “rich tradition of rigorous inquiry” in religion, as we can see from its lack of progress, and the apologists are deluding themselves when they claim there is.” And yet, ironically enough, there is no shortage of empirical evidence, scientific evidence, demonstrating both the accuracy and importance of religion. PZ’s incompetent blathering would be entirely amusing, were it not for the panoply of self-deluded idiots at Pharyngula that actually take the man’s illogical meanderings seriously. But, if nothing else, the forthcoming book he mentions should provide for a deliciously target-rich environment.
UPDATE – Buttressing my point about how mathematics, among other disciplines, demonstrates the philosophical absurdity and irrelevance of The Courtier’s Reply, wrf3 quotes from Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Philip C. Jackson:
“[T]he mathematical theory of Euclidean geometry gives us certain axioms or postulates concerning the undefined concepts of “point,” “line,” “plane,” “between,” etc.; the “thing” described by this theory is a “geometry,” consisting of interrelationships existing among lines, points, planes, circles, spaces, etc.
The ingredients of a mathematical theory, then, are the following:
1. A set of basic words (e.g. “point,” “line,” “between,” “distance,” “x,” “y,” “not,” “implies,” “for all,”) that refer to different objects, relations between objects, variables, logical connectives, quantifiers, and so on. These are the undefined words or symbols of the theory.
2. A set of basic sentences made of these basic words. These basic sentences are the axioms or postulates of the theory.
3. A set of logical rules, also made of these basic words, that tell us how to derive new statements from the ones we are given.”
If one is so foolish as to take The Courtier’s Reply seriously, one must then throw out all mathematics since mathematicians haven’t established the central point of the matter, a reasonable justification for believing in the undefined words or symbols of the theory. As I have said on numerous occasions before, the New Atheists are logical incompetents and philosophical ignoramuses. This is precisely why I have referred to them from the very start as The Clowns of Reason.
Never forget that the smarter and more knowledgeable act put on by many atheists is inevitably nothing more than that, an act, and one that has absolutely no basis in empirical reality except for a three-point average advantage in IQ which is almost surely a statistical artifact of their insignificant numbers and self-selected identification. Do ANY of them, from the Antipope of Oxford on down, know even the first thing about history? Here’s a lovely example:
WorldNetDaily columnist Vox Day bends over backwards to argue that James Watson’s recent criticism is worse than the Spanish Inquisition’s threats of torture against Galileo. Seriously.
I wouldn’t think a great deal of bending is required in order to establish that simple fact. Seriously. Monty Python had it right, no doubt Galileo wasn’t expecting them! And, I wonder, to whom has James Watson been directing his criticism of late?
On a related note, Chad the Elder quotes David Hart’s piece on the decline of intelligent atheism: “The utter inconsequentiality of contemporary atheism is a social and spiritual catastrophe. Something splendid and irreplaceable has taken leave of our culture–some great moral and intellectual capacity that once inspired the more heroic expressions of belief and unbelief alike. Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets–a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.”
And now we have the spectacle of Dawkinsian atheism, which warns of how a revival of the Spanish Inquisition’s terrible witchburnings during the Thirty Years War, which cost Galileo, Bruno, and Sarah Good their lives at the siege of Jerusalem, poses an imminent threat to science.
It would appear I am not the only one who has noticed. David B. Hart’s highly amusing essay at First Things pours disdain on the best efforts of a murder of atheists to rationalize their neurosociological shortcomings in public:
Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.
To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect. For this reason, the philosophers—who are no better than their fellow contributors at reasoning, but who have better training in giving even specious arguments some appearance of systematic form—tend to come off as the most insufferable contributors….
The scientists fare almost as poorly. Among these, Victor Stenger is the most recklessly self-confident, but his inability to differentiate the physical distinction between something and nothing (in the sense of “not anything as such”) from the logical distinction between existence and nonexistence renders his argument empty. The contributors drawn from other fields offer nothing better. The Amazing Randi, being a magician, knows that there is quite a lot of credulity out there. The historian of science Michael Shermer notes that there are many, many different and even contradictory systems of belief. The journalist Emma Tom had a psychotic scripture teacher when she was a girl. Et, as they say, cetera. The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.
You really have to have read several of the New Atheist books to fully comprehend the astonishing lack of intellect, knowledge, and reason on offer. And I note with great amusement that the utter speciousness of Richard Dawkins’s “unrebuttable” argument does not go unremarked.
“But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness…. But all the evidence suggests that Dawkins has never understood the point being made, and it is his unfortunate habit contemptuously to dismiss as meaningless concepts whose meanings elude him. Frankly, going solely on the record of his published work, it would be rash to assume that Dawkins has ever learned how to reason his way to the end of a simple syllogism.
“
It would be rash indeed. The “unrebuttable” Ultimate 747 argument, which Dawkins himself declares is the central argument of The God Delusion isn’t just wrong, it is provably wrong at multiple steps along the way. To say that it “scarcely rises to the level of nonsense” is almost too kind. This is precisely why so many intelligent individuals, religious and irreligious, have contempt for Richard Dawkins and why Dawkins has largely abandoned all debate. Having fooled a number of moderately intelligent people into thinking that he knows what he is talking about, he is now desperate to avoid being exposed for the charlatan and logical incompetent that he quite clearly and demonstrably is.
Richard Dawkins reconsiders the wisdom of his war against Christianity:
Even among the world’s most famous atheists, the crisis of faith among Christians in Europe has been met with concern. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”
Translation: “I’m beginning to worry that Vox is correct after all and the replacement for European Christianity may not be that shiny, sexy, secular scientific society of for which I have labored.” As I have been warning for some time now, atheism and scientific secular humanism are little more than speed bumps on the decline into paganism. And paganism, as the historically literate know, made for some horrific societal structures that took Christians literal centuries to stamp out. The legalization of abortion and euthanasia is only the beginning of the post-Christian Endarkenment on a silent continent that has rejected the Light of the World.
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens once more demonstrate that while it isn’t necessary to be a consummate horse’s ass in order to be an atheist, it certainly doesn’t hurt:
RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.
The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.
Being a nondenominational Christian with Southern Baptist ties, I am not inclined to be a defender of popery. And being a casual student of medieval history, I am fully cognizant of the various crimes that have been committed in Rome, Ravenna, and Avignon by men who claimed St. Peter’s throne. I also see a clear distinction between Christianity and Catholicism; although many Catholics are Christians, many are not by any reasonable Bible-based definition of the latter term. While I respect the organization and the historical contributions of the institution, I do not confuse it with my religious faith. Nor do I approve of the sexual abuse of children; I would have absolutely no problem with every priest, schoolteacher, and sports coach confirmed to be guilty of preying upon the children in their care being taken out and shot, were it not for my opposition to granting the government a hunting license on its citizens.
Since, ironically enough, it is Richard Dawkins who has openly minimized the damage to children from sexual abuse, it is obviously the Pope’s Catholicism that he wishes to prosecute, not the Pope’s suboptimal human resources management 25 years ago. The fact that Dawkins is targeting the Pope, who is not even accused of committing any abuse, rather than the hundreds of English school teachers – including one of his own teachers – who have actually done so is conclusive evidence that this is nothing more than the world’s most famous atheist demonstrating the Argument from Social Autism. It’s a remarkably stupid PR stunt, even by the low standards of the Clowns of Reason
“Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, as horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing up the child Catholic in the first place…”
– Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 317
The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church is the direct result of allowing homosexuals to enter the priesthood. Unless and until the Pope addresses that ludicrous decision of his predecessors, more predatory abuses will occur. But the Pope is no more personally responsible for those crimes than the Minister of Education is responsible for the same crimes taking place in the English schools.
“The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America.”
– Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 316
It would appear that Mr. Dawkins isn’t quite as opposed to unfair demonization as he used to be.
The Baseball Savant questions my time allocations:
Leaving aside the fact that we pretty much disagree about everything when it comes to Christianity, the one thing I have a problem with in reading your blog the last couple of years is your fight in atheism/religion. Admittedly I haven’t read “TIA”, but I think for this discussion I get the gist that you basically used the same logic that the unholy trinity provided to disprove atheism or at least show that it’s more unlikely than religious thought/belief. I might be oversimplifying it, but I think you get my point. My problem though is that you spend an enormous amount of time on this very topic. That I don’t understand. I would think even as an open theist we would have similar views on eternal perspective and the problem that I have is that your writing of TIA, although interesting, doesn’t further that cause too much.
I can certainly see the rationale behind it if you believe that you are the first domino to fall in that equation in that
ATHEIST –> READ TIA —-> DOUBT ATHEISM —–> DISREGARD ATHEISM —-> BELIEVE IN RELIGION —-> COME TO CHRIST
But the last part is very dicey. There are a million religions in the world, and it seems your argument is only that atheism is illogical. I agree with it. I guess I’m just wondering the end? Not that everything has to be done with eternal perspective in mind, but this is something that I think definitely coincides with that sort of thing because you are delving into religious matters. Does open theism teach that God is pleased if something comes to religion even if that religion is still pagan in nature and hell is the final destination for the person who converts to that religion from atheism?
If it’s all for intellectual masturbation then I get it, but you seem too bright to waste time on an endeavor such as this with no real cost/benefit analysis in the end.
Obviously you write for you. You’ve always said as much, but the time aspect is odd for me. What do you think?
First, I don’t spend anywhere nearly as much time on the subject as most people think. Because I read very fast and think a bit more quickly than the norm, it doesn’t take me very long to notice the flaws in an argument and use them to pick it apart. The only thing that occasionally takes an amount of time is doing the research to prove what I already have concluded to the satisfaction of others. Second, as always, I highly recommend reading the relevant material before commenting on it.
Because the Baseball Savant hasn’t read TIA, he isn’t aware that my ambitions for the book have always been modest. I not only think the last link in his chain is very dicey, I think the one preceding it is too. TIA is not a work of Christian apologetics nor is it even a theological work, the one speculative chapter notwithstanding, as it is nothing more than a work dedicated to destroying a collection of spurious, illogical, and demonstrably false arguments by a small group of well-known intellectual charlatans. Convincing the reader to disregard a specific form of atheism is the most that the book was ever even potentially going to achieve, and it’s quite clear that it has been very successful in that regard. The feeble and insubstantial protestations with which the Against the New Atheism slideshow has been met is testimony to the way in which even the most militant atheists have largely abandoned certain arguments they once believed to be powerfully effective.
Removing a bar to belief isn’t always going to lead to belief. I would even say that it usually isn’t. But, having seen so many well-meaning Christians struggle so ineffectively against unoriginal and outdated arguments that were fundamentally flawed, I thought it was worth the small effort it took to dismantle them in such a comprehensive manner that practically anyone who has read the book can now do the same with ease. I expect that I will continue to tear apart their future arguments since it costs me nothing and I find it more entertaining than sitting down and watching 151 hours of television per month like the average American. Needless to say, I will be providing a detailed critique of Sam Harris’s all-too-characteristically incoherent argument in favor of utilizing science to answer moral questions at some point in the future.
The truth is that I spend far more time on what could be characterized as even less important matters. I am currently designing five games, none of which are of any importance to the human race and only two of which will be potentially profitable to me. I am spending a great deal of time and money on a superior input device which will allow people to do useful, useless and even harmful things on a computer up to 50% faster. I am writing a sequel to a novel that probably didn’t sell more than 500 copies. I play board games and computer games, alone and with others. And I just finished reading a novel by Balzac that wasn’t particularly interesting and has taught me nothing useful.
The ironic thing about this email is the way it shows how people, even those who haven’t read the book, are still far more interested in discussing The Irrational Atheist than they are in discussing either of the two books I have published since. And this is despite the fact that we’re now in the midst of the very economic contraction that I describe in The Return of the Great Depression!
Time passes whether we spend it wisely or not. I have numerous regrets for opportunities and time I have wasted in the past, but writing TIA and discussing the related issues is not one of them.
