Attack Ads and Religion

I do agree that Christians' evasive answers about the Trinity does amount to flip-flopping on a perfectly simple question.

Still, this comes as a bit of a surprising contrast to Woody Guthrie's song "Christ for President", made famous by Billy Bragg:

Academic Freedom and Teaching

So those Zegna-suited Blackshirts known as the Young Liberals have been (for a while now) campaigning against academics who express left-leaning opinions when teaching. The problem is it's not just targeting discriminatory grading practices or demonstrable bias against legitimate differences of opinion. Rather it's a crusade against anything perceived as a leftist perspective. (Broadly construed to include anything that shows a moral dimension, from the sound of some of the complaints.) Some of the complainants really show their true colours by whinging about lecturers who so much as admit that they have political opinions of their own! One said she felt she had to drop a class because the lecturer outed himself as a member of the Greens. (No report on whether he was willing to name other members or fellow travellers for the black list.)

John Kaye has already spoken out against this crazy Senate inquiry:

Unless [the terms of reference] are ignored they could end up stifling academic independence, academic freedom and freedom of expression in schools and universities around Australia

This would be a dreadful outcome at a time when we're already facing a skills shortage, and when universities and schools are already under enormous pressure.

And today, another academic I used to know quite well, Peter Slezak has argued that the teaching styles the witch-hunt is looking for are the best methods at the tertiary level.

Here's the email I sent Peter:

Hi Peter,

I just read your article in the Herald and wanted to tell you how the more teaching experience I get, the more I come to agree with your approach when teaching certain topics.

I had heard about the Young Libs' campaign and was just as shocked as everyone. Disgusted really at the quote from one young woman who said she couldn't stay in the class taught by a member of the Greens. I fear we may not see the real damage of the Howard era until that generation of Young Libs comes to power.

But here's a glimpse at what it might be like:
I'm sure you're familiar with the stereotype of the "liberal college professor" that working-class Americans fear will corrupt their children. Here in the States (particularly right here in the Midwest) all academics are acutely aware of this and try very hard not to have students put up the shutters.
The best example I saw was when I was tutoring for (the philosopher of biology) Elisabeth Lloyd's class on evolution and creationism. It wasn't just equal time (which is fine in a philosophy class); her attempts at respect and even-handedness went too far, it seems. A more-astute student said he appreciated the equal time given in lectures but was disappointed that she never presented equally-strong arguments for creationism. It was then I switched into Slezak-mode and told him there weren't any, that he'd need to find one himself if he wanted a strong argument.
Conversely, a less astute student actually asked me, "What do you [the two tutors and the lecturer] actually believe, evolution or creationism?" My jaw dropped to the floor at that point. It took a lot of restraint to maintain that veneer of respect for creationism as I explained that this was a philosophical controversy, not a scientific one, that there's no doubt where the evidence points.
At the end of the course there were a number who had counted themselves creationists at the start that came to believe in evolution but this was just for lack of knowledge. Apart from doing some good, I fear that we might have legitimated "the controversy" a little.

So you might be pleased to hear that I take a less-sympathetic approach when I lecture on the history of evolution. A respectful critique of Paley is contrasted with a brusque dismissal of neo-creationists; I defend catastrophists such as Cuvier who only believed that the Noah legend was based on an actual event etc. (I expect Americans find me a little bumptious but you can get away with a lot if you say it with the right accent!)

Hope all is well at UNSW. Keep fighting the good fight,

Nick

Almost Omniscient

An Italian professor in my dept made a joke this afternoon at a colloquium when we were talking about nuns. Apparently there's an old saying:

There's only three things God doesn't know:
How much money the Vatican has,
What Jesuits really think, and
How many different orders of nuns there are.

But a quick Google bring up a couple of different versions:

What the Dominicans are thinking,
What the Jesuits are doing, and
How many orders of nuns there are.

or

What a Dominican just said,
What a Jesuit is going to say, and
How many Franciscan orders there are.

Looks like the Jesuits are a common theme (no surprise) but the Vatican's money version wins the prize for most cynical!

Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar

Whenever I think about the Political Compass, I have to keep asking myself why it is I believe in government control of economic matters but great liberty in social matters. This is an important question as I apparently do feel strongly about both, as my location on the compass indicates. (For me, it doesn't feel like being extreme in any way, it's just commonsense. This could be partly due to the other thing this pic tells you, the fact that I don't associate with people whose views are very different from my own.)

Libertarians claim that they are being more consistent in embracing both freedoms but I don't buy it. As is often the case, Chomsky manages to express my instinct far more lucidly than I can:

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".

It goes without saying that Keynes was far from being a socialist! This swing back towards government intervention is only going to bring the political spectrum back to centre, not to the left. Even if Americans will consider that the left.

The Problem of Evil

So elegant!

Still, I know that my theist friends will reply that evil is just a privation of good but I'm yet to hear a good justification for this premiss.

I'd Turn Gay for David Marr

I've recently been catching up on Australian current affairs. I only just discovered that Tony Jones has a new show, even better than Lateline was. I've been downloading the episodes that boast the most interesting guests. I downloaded episode 9 because it had David Marr on the panel and I wasn't disappointed!



Not being a reader of The American I'd never heard of Angela Shanahan before this. I still kind of wish I hadn't; but it's nice to see a bigot put in her place. Her talk of immutability makes a tory like Downer sound like real leftie!

What I don't get is how anyone can keep a straight face while claiming that people have to actively place themselves outside the Church. How can they seriously assume that Christianity is the default position when their imaginary friend is invisible?