The Dish

Fear itself:

Here’s an aside Jonah Goldberg makes at NRO:

What is staggering here is that Bryan Burrough honestly thinks Christian conservatism or social conservatism actually represents something as goofy and intellectually illegitimate as Leonard Jeffries style Afrocentrism. That’s self-discrediting.

Really? Let’s leave aside personal insults, shall we, Jonah? Tell us why the notion that God made the world 6,000 years ago in six days is not as goofy and intellectually illegitimate as Afrocentrism? (Burrough doesn’t name Leonard Jeffries, so don’t misrepresent him) Tell us why the notion that a book that contradicts itself on countless occasions but is regarded as literally inerrant in every respect by fundamentalist Christians is not as goofy and intellectually illegitimate as Afrocentrism? Tell us why the notion that withdrawing from the West Bank is wrong because the Bible says so is less goofy than Afrocentrism. C’mon, Jonah. Back yourself up with argument. You don’t believe this nonsense either, do you? So stop pretending you do.

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster," РTerry Eagleton, defending my kind of Christianity, in the London Review of Books.

Here’s an open letter to Abraham Foxman about his attempt to silence Tony Judt. I signed it, gladly – not because I agree with Judt in every respect, but because I find the attempt to squelch open discussion of important issues inimical to democratic society.

"It’s the war or the deficit. One of those things put them over the edge. These are die-hard, longtime Republicans, and they’re switching," – GOP precinct committee member, Lois Sheridan, in Chicago.

"Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love. In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.

I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost. There are some, however, still extant, collected by Fabricius, which I will endeavor to get and send you," – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.

Can you imagine what the religious right would say about him if he lived today?

Ken Blackwell gets his comeuppance from a conservative newspaper.

The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman asks that question about my book. He says he is "mildly encouraged". Money quote:

Sullivan makes a persuasive case for his sort of conservatism. But, by the end of the book, I was coming to the conclusion that he is not a conservative but a classical liberal. Or rather that in the new fundamentalist world described in "The Conservative Soul", what unites Sullivan-style conservatives and liberals is now far more important than what divides them.

A reader writes:

Thank you for the Bronowski clip.

I have had the Bronowski quote "This is what men do when they believe they have absolute knowledge" on my board at work since 9/11. It sorrows me greatly to have to see it used about my own country less than 5 years later. But there it is.

Jim Sleeper tells me something I didn’t know.