Spleen
I suppose one must make a nod in the direction of R. Joseph Hoffmann, who has, once again, with little point or purpose, attacked and vilified some of the ”new atheists” (as they have come to be called). He even includes me, rather generously, as one of the “sidelights” of the “movement,” such as it is, and even more of an honour to be yoked with Ophelia Benson, of whom he says, with ill-humour, that she “has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen.” In case anyone missed the point, the Oxford English Dictionary parses the word ‘spleen’ as follows:
1 a. To regard with spleen or ill-humour; to have a grudge at. Obs
b. To fill with spleen; to make angry or ill-tempered. Obs
c. To feel spleen, or deep anger. Obs
It seems fair to point out that no one, of all the names mentioned in his post, is nearly as splenetic as R. Joseph Hoffmann himself, baying raucously on the trail of the unbelieving fox, Stephanie echoing in close pursuit. (I thank Professor Myers for allerting me to Hoffmann’s embarrassing post.)
Sidelights or headlights, there’s very little to choose between the insults directed at Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Coyne or Myers (the headlights) or those aimed at Ophelia Benson or Jason Rosenhouse or Greta Christina (I apologise, Greta, for having left you out on the first pass) or me (sidelights all). There is very little point in responding to the post itself, since it is composed, almost entirely, of vituperation and ill-humoured insult. He does, however, referring to me, say that I don’t
… seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion and pretends that there is no difference between what he read as a young priest (mainly liberal post-Tillichian pap) and what’s being taught to PhD candidates in Religion at Harvard.
I admit, freely, that, other than my theological training, I have not made a close academic study of religion as such, though I will insist that I did not stop reading either comparative studies of religion or theology after having been made a priest. Nor, I will add, have I ever so much as suggested that “theology is not worth the trouble.” Indeed, while I think the study of theology does reach a point of diminishing marginal returns, since the more you read and study theology the more it becomes increasingly clear that it can never stray far from its supposed foundation in revelation, I have repeatedly said that it would be unfortunate if theology were ignored, since theology contains thousands of years of human memory, and explores in detail ways of being human that it would be nothing short of a disaster to lose completely.
In this respect I agree with Richard Holloway, that theology and other religious texts are witness to a vital exploration of what it means to be human, and have achieved a sensitivity to the emotional and moral complexity of being human that is often not met with in other areas of study. Even if we have to cancel through by its claims to speak of supernatural beings and their relationship with us, we are still left with human texts, often of great value. Nor can we afford to ignore the complex philosophical dimension of so much theology, and if I have a bone to pick with the “new atheism” it is precisely here that Hoffmann will find it. Even if, as Jerry Coyne says, theology is, in some, perhaps even in large, measure, a matter of “making stuff up,” much that is made up is still of significance to our understanding of being human.
But, no, I am not an academic student of religion in a PhD programme. If Dr. Hoffmann is any indication of the quality of thought in religion departments of universities in the United States, then I have to say that I count myself fortunate not to have been subjected to the kind of academic discipline that produces thought like his, for there is a slightness and slackness of intellectual rigour in most things that he seems comfortable writing that I would be ashamed to place in public for consideration. The post that I am discussing now is simply for the most part embarrassing; and coming as it does from someone who works in a context where the academic study of religion is carried out, I am embarrassed on Dr. Hoffmann’s behalf, as well as for the academic specialty he represents.
At the end of his post Hoffmann tries to tell us why it matters so much that the new atheists know so little of the history of religion and its place in history. Here he begins to sound like a serious scholar. But to what effect? Here is his point:
The ignorance of the new atheists matters because it makes almost impossible the work of serious religion scholars who have no commitment to belief, but who happen to feel that the study of religion belongs to and is inestimably important to the study of history and culture.
Have any of the new atheists claimed that it is not important to study religion as an integral part of the study of history and culture? No, of course not. The new atheists are concerned about something quite different than this. We are concerned that the contemporary practice of religion is dangerous, divisive and culturally stultifying, however much importance is accorded to religion in the study of history and culture.
Indeed, the study of religion as an aspect of the study of history and culture is a vital part of the new atheist argument that demands attention. It is surely not by chance, for example, that increasing secularisation brought about both increasing individual freedom and a decreasing use of savage and brutal types of punishment. Nor is it entirely by chance that the most religious parts of the world today are plagued by repression and brutality. And whatever the importance of religion to a study of history, this does not change the fact that religion, as a living force in today’s world, is, in the view of activist atheists, in need of opposition and defeat. People like R. Joseph Hoffmann will continue to take an interest in the place of religion in history. Our attention is more closely focused on the deforming effects that religion has on the lives of people today.
Hoffmann says of me and my blog:
The ex-Revd Eric MacDonald touts his website as being devoted to death with dignity. I’m for it; a close colleague and collaborator of mine, Gerald Larue, was one of the founders of the Hemlock Society. Unfortunately MacDonald has become just another horn in the bagpipe blown by Coyne and Myers.
First of all, I am not, officially anyway, an ex-priest. I have not resigned my orders, and letters still arrive in my post box addressed to The Rev’d Canon Eric MacDonald. Second, I do not tout my blog as being devoted to death with dignity. If Hoffmann cares to read the masthead of the blog he will read this: “Arguing for the right to die and against the religious obstruction of this right.” This is vital. Almost all the significant arguments against the right to die (with dignity, if you like) are religious, although the religious usually, in their play of smoke and mirrors, leave their religious objections unspoken, since they are not appropriately made in a secular context, and speak about other things instead: about risks to the vulnerable, and slippery slopes, and other harms that, we are to suppose, will immediately empty life of its meaning and value. I oppose religion, because religion interposes itself between people and their right to die with a measure of peace and dignity. Of course, once you notice the interference of religion in one area it is hard not to notice that this interference is endemic to religion, and so opposition to religion itself, as now practiced, is an essential aspect of what I am concerned about. Religion and sex, religion and abortion, religion and the rights of women, religion and politics, religion and the habit of obedience, religion and social division, religion and anti-intellectualism: all these then come within the scope of my brief as I understand it.
What is odd is that Hoffmann, though reputedly an unbeliever himself, does not seem to see, despite his own knowledge of religion and its impact over the centuries, how destructive religion can be. As a priest, one of my greatest concerns was for the children. It was wrong, I believed then, and still believe, that children should be indoctrinated in a particular faith. The thought that children should be taught the stories of Christianity as though they were in any sense reliably true was something which troubled me enormously. I held Christian belief as at best a mythological way of understanding what it means to be human (post-Tillichian pap, Hoffmann would doubtless call it), and Christian practice as a way of living most fully in the present, and yet it is almost impossible to convey this way of being religious to children, who tend to be naive realists when it comes to religion, because their elders take it so seriously, unlike the fairy stories they read to their children at home. What Hoffmann does not apparently recognise is how destructive this can be to a child’s grasp of reality, or a child’s ability to reason. Rationality tends to be corrupted before it can be effectively taught, and I was always glad when young people turned out not to be religious, for it showed that my endeavour to keep religion from being an imposition on a young mind had succeeded.
Hoffmann offers his assistance, in these words:
Let me offer my assistance. Scientism is a form of nominalism (q.v.) that collapses important methodological differences and qualities into a single term as though the term had an existence apart from the methods that comprise it. Scientism is the belief that “science” is a supervening mode of knowing that can be imposed willy nilly on other disciplines whose methods have had a different organic evolution, yet methods normally just as true to their subject matter as biology, for example, has been to its own. Most of the concrete results in historical studies biblical studies, the history of religion, textual studies (paleography), linguistics and assorted disciplines have been based on methods specific to their objects.
To deny the authority and validity of those methods without knowing them is just as heinous an offense against reason as a fundamentalist’s rejection of a theory–like evolution–that he doesn’t fully understand. That is what scientism is and what it means and why it must be rejected. As Wittgenstein was finally forced to conclude, the belief that science is the final arbiter of what constitutes truth (or true propositions) is as “glaringly metaphysical” as the premises of traditional philosophy.
Regarding this I have very little complaint, and I cannot see those whom Hoffmann accuses of “scientism” disagreeing either. As the Oxford Companion to Philosophy says (q.v. scientism): “Nobody espouses scientism.” Nevertheless, the concrete results of “historical studies, biblical studies, the history of religion, textual studies …, linguistics and assorted disciplines” are, in so far as they are based on physical or documentary evidence, analogous to science, and developed in its wake, though I agree that science strictly understood cannot be the sole arbiter of truth. One of my principal criticisms of most Christian theology is that it simply does not take the findings of biblical studies, or the history of the formation of doctrine, with appropriate seriousness as shedding light on the question of justified true belief. As Hector Avalos has pointed out on many occasions, the study of the Bible tends to favour the Bible in ways that its critical study does not encourage. Jason Rosenhouse, whom Hoffmann also abuses freely, has pointed this out on a number of occasions. We may all be amateurs at this, from Hoffmann’s point of view. Nevertheless, the matters that are at issue are not simply answers to academic disputes; they concern how we should think and live, and therefore they concern all of us as men and women, whether we are academic experts or not. Hoffmann seems to suggest that we have no right to speak, because we are amateurs; but, like Socrates, we are bound to speak because being amateurs means that we are trying to find out what it is most reasonable for us, precisely as amateurs, to believe.
As for being a horn (or, more correctly, a drone) in the bagpipe played by Myers and Coyne, I think for myself, thank you, Dr. Hoffmann, and when you have put 2 + 2 together and recognise that the issues we are concerned with are not simply what PhD candidates are qualified to discuss, but what, as men and women, we feel constrained to discuss, and endeavour to understand, then perhaps you will recognise why I feel so embarrassed for you, and for the pitiful criticisms you try to make. It won’t do simply to snipe at us. You must respond to what we say, and if you do not have the time to do that, then you should just get out of our way, because your criticisms invariably miss their mark, and we have places yet to go.
How much do the true faithful in the pews know about the finer points of Dr. Hoffman’s studies I wonder? Anyway, if the best that he can do against the Gnus is to hurl insults, that pretty much proves that he’s got nothing better.
While John Gray’s ideas are worth taking seriously, it appears that Hoffman has had some kind of mental breakdown, and fallen into a kind of narcissism of the most nasty kind. I think it’s fair to say that mental illness is not a nice thing to happen to anyone, and that the best thing to do is not feed the illness.
“We may all be amateurs at this, from Hoffmann’s point of view. Nevertheless, the matters that are at issue are not simply answers to academic disputes; they concern how we should think and live, and therefore they concern all of us as men and women, whether we are academic experts or not. Hoffmann seems to suggest that we have no right to speak, because we are amateurs”
Exactly. That seems to be the burden of the complaint, every time it is made. But it’s absurd, because religion presumes to tell everyone how to live and how to be, so we all have to be allowed to retort to it even if we don’t have a PhD in divinity. Joe seems to resent amateurs horning in but he just doesn’t get to own the subject while religion continues to try to retain its authority.
Ophelia, precisely. I simply do not understand his complaint, other than a peculiar proprietary concern he has for an academic specialty. It’s simply idiotic to suggest that we should remain silent in the face of the overpowering barrage of (arguably deleterious) religious influence on the world in which we live out our lives. He seems to suggest we have nothing of substance to say, when, in fact, that influence affects us closely, and simply mangles the lives of so many people. Joe needs to remember that the subject he studies has real world effects, and that those effects are often very unlovely indeed. If he doesn’t think so, and if he doesn’t think religion deserves criticism for its destructive effects, he should tell us why he thinks of religion as a matter of merely academic study. I simply cringe with embarrassment for the man when I read what he has to say. Does he not recognise how silly and irrelevant he seems to be? Does he not read the newspaper or watch the news on TV? It is astonishing that he seems unable to see the harm that religion does, harm for which there is mounting evidence, as religion leaves a trail of destruction behind it.
What makes it all the more puzzling is that he does know. (Never forget – he wrote the Foreword to Why I Am Not a Muslim.) He does know, yet he rages at the pesky interlopers anyway. It makes no sense.
But he has his punishment. “This is hell, nor am I out of it.” He has Steph pouring out her voluminous sycophancy all over the post.
What a remarkably silly and scurrilous piece of writing Hoffman’s piece is. No wonder ‘Steph’ likes it. But he does do one good thing in directing his readers to Scott Atran’s review of Sam Harris’s book on morality. It is worth reading.
I wonder if such a thought has ever occurred to Hoffman.
Thank you for the correction Ken.
Ophelia, I didn’t know that Hoffmann had written the foreward to Ibn Warraq’s book. I usually ignore forewards, unless I know the writer, and when I read Why I am not a Muslim I didn’t know Hoffmann. Now that I do, I have read it, and I can see from it why he might think as he does. Indeed, it seems to me that he misunderstands a lot of things, and, in particular, Why I am not a Muslim. To speak of Islam as he does, and then speaking of Warraq as a religious pilgrim is, I think, to make a serious mistake. Warraq says, in his first paragraph of the Preface that
To suggest that the man who wrote that is a religious pilgrim is to give too much credit to religion, and not enough to the secular humanist values that he very quickly adopted after his early indoctrination.
There are other things in the foreward that are opaque and misleading, that could have been written only by a man who spends too much time with religion, and not enough time with the knowledge which defeats it. He rightly points out, for example, that
This is not true as written, though it is right that knowledge of scripture is not compatible with human knowledge. What Christianity at the reformation did was to proceed on the assumption that knowledge of Scripture is human knowledge, and that is a very different thing. As the ‘Christianity is compatible with science’ movement shows, it still makes this assumption, despite the fact, as Hoffmann points out, that “discovery of the original meanings of the texts, linguistic and philological study, historical investigation, and so on,” shows that it can never be.
This has immediate and disastrous consequences for religion, as Hoffmann must see, and it means that those who study religion should be trying to make this clear to people who have not yet got the message. Instead, he thinks of this as somehow a betrayal of religion, and this makes him cranky at the new atheists for pointing it out. Yes, it is true, that Islam did not choose to cross the sea of faith as Christianity did, and so did not discover that there is no god on the other side. But, nevertheless, like the author of Why I am not a Muslim argues, this makes Islam a backward, regressive and wholly anti-humanistic force in the world, whatever might have been said of Islam’s earlier flirtation with the ancient culture that it inherited and in part developed — but, importantly, as Warraq says, Islam never accommodated itself Greek thought and science, saying that it is a “myth that Islam encouraged science”. As he says on the same page (273):
As I read little bits that I have highlighted, I begin to wonder whether Hoffmann actually read the book before he wrote his approving foreward.
foreword!
I think R is just stirring up s*** because he’s lonely and nobody pays any attention to him except when he’s being a complete ass.
He’s like a 3-year-old who acts up in order to get Mommy’s attention.
I won’t read him — there are many other ways to improve myself that don’t involve abusive behavior.
I suggest the rest of you do likewise. When he finds nobody responding to his little diatribes — in the way that parents of 3-year-olds don’t respond to their tantrums — perhaps he will find more productive use of his time.
I would applaud theology if it were studied as a division of anthropology or of psychology – studied as one of the inexplicable things that people do. Otherwise, theology is a manifestation of abnormal psychology, psychosis and delusion.
Dear Eric
Long time no see. Never see, really.
Two things: One is your correction of “foreward” is still wrong: It’s Foreword–as in “afore-word.” I am sorry that that’s didactic but as you never read them, you need to know how to spell them. It’s ok. You have to keep trying; that’s how we learn.
Second. The foreword to Why am Not a Muslim was indeed written after the author invited me to write it. I still count him as a friend. Frankly, your niggle is totally niggling: “This is not true as written, though it is right that knowledge of scripture is not compatible with human knowledge. What Christianity at the reformation did was to proceed on the assumption that knowledge of Scripture is human knowledge, and that is a very different thing.” Christianity at the Reformation, as I said, went on the assumption that human knowledge was entirely compatible with revelation and it backfired didn’t it? It turned out not to be true. But what i also said is true: that this came in the course of events as a late surprise to those who demanded vernacular translation. It’s the major reason for the historical critical method in biblical studies. Do you mean human knowledge now or then? They are two different things, and clearly I didn’t mean the former.. The introduction to the book has always passed muster with historians and the implicit call for an Islamic reformation as brave as the protestant one was bold pre-9-11, when the book was written. So your critique, while interesting, is way off the mark. “Ibn Warraq” is a pilgrim, as I said, who journeyed beyond islam at a time when it was really dangerous to do so. I think I said that as well. Shame that we can’t have this conversation in a calmer way: you strike me as someone who might have been a sensible conversation partner. Perhaps we are too far into insult hurling and silliness P Z style for any such conversation to take place. It is a shame that that’s what it’s come to.
I guess I should thank Dr. Hoffmann for listing your blog Rev. McDonald. I found it well written and interesting. I come this way via Neil Godfrey’s blog, Vridar.
Would it be contemptible of me to say I think Dr. Hoffmann may be an accommodationist of religion based on what I have read so far? Whether a non-believer or not, I find his diatribe most insulting of the laity and the amateur alike. Yet, like almost everything I have read, I have found something of interest, your blog for instance. The same goes for the Four Horsemen of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens who wrote very well for their target audience. This applies to the rest of the List as PZ Myers puts it, or none of you would be targets of his rant.
Am just reading through the post and was reminded of Stephen Fry’s post about the Elgin Marbles by the slippery slope argument. Incase you haven’t seen it yet:
http://www.stephenfry.com/2011/12/19/a-modest-proposal/
Oh, I think that’s a bit harsh. Somebody should tell him to sharpen things up a bit, though. Everybody who agrees with me disagrees with them isn’t exactly incisive commentary.
RJH. I’m not quite sure I’m not trying to have a conversation in a calm way. Indeed, I am surprised that you should think otherwise just because I disagreed with you. I don’t think there is any evidence in Ibn Warraq’s book that he is a religious pilgrim. It is a root-and-branch rejection of religious ways of looking at the world, and a repudiation of his childhood faith. There is no evidence in the book for anything else, not a smidgeon of doubt, not an indication of sorrow at leaving faith behind. It takes some ambivalence in order to pass from faith to unfaith, if there is a pilgrimage. I do not read this is Ibn Warraq’s book. Whereas my life has been a religious pilgrimage from start to finish, never seeming able, quite, to rid myself of childhood indoctrination, Warraq seemed to make the transition with relative ease (I say relative ease, because he does not make us privy to the personal aspects of this transition).
I still think that, while what you say in the Foreward (I’m not sure what the niggling point you are trying to make about that is all about. I am quite aware of what a foreward in a book is), about the asummption made by the reformers is correct, it does not seem to me to be correct in the way that you say. The reformers believed that scripture in fact gave them access to human knowledge of God, and they were wrong. That may have come to them as a surprise, though in fact there are still many prominent Christians who still believe that this is true. So it did not come as a surprise to some that knowledge of scripture and knowledge of the world are in fact different, because they still treat scripture as a source of such knowledge. McGrath writes a scientific theology, after all, and uses the Bible unproblematically as a source of knowledge, still working assiduously at the reformation paradigm, and Biologos thinks of Christianity as fully compatible with scientific knowledge, despite the fact that the critical study of the Bible has really brought such illusions to an end.
You seem to think that the conclusions reached in university departments of religious studies have had a significant effect on the way religious believers believe, but for many (and perhaps for most) this is simply not true. Most Christians that I know read the Bible in a fairly straightforward way (if they read it at all) as revealing truths about God’s work amongst us, and indeed many clergy, in my experience, after trying to speak from what they learned at university of theological school, revert to a fairly conservative view of the scriptures and what they tell us. Telling them that scripture is to be read figuratively still comes as quite a surprise to them, even though they have been taught to read scripture in that way. For the most part, clergy do not find that this learning is helpful in dealing with lay Christians, many of whom share the reformers zeal and belief that the scripture is a fairly straightforward account of God’s dealings with us.
This is why, as it seems to me, it is hard to speak of Why I am not a Muslim as a religious pilgrimage. It is simply too wide awake to the fact that the religious categories in which Warraq was made to think as a child simply lost any reasonable sense or application once the period of his indoctrination was safely in the past. I think here of people like Ayan Hirsi Ali, who also made a rapid and what seems to be a total transition from Islam to secular humanism. No religious pilgrimage for her, simply a repudiation of something that belonged to her years of tutelage, and was then cast aside. This is a very different experience to the experience of a protestant Christian making the same transition, for in this case the assumption of compatibility is always there dogging one’s footsteps, and then it does indeed become a religous pilgrimage, with hesitations and backslidings, until some major obstacle pushes them out of the tradition altogether (and even then it is not quite gone). Islam, never having accommodated to secular knowledge, seems to present only two options, faithfulness or apostacy, and it is not surprising, therefore, to see a very different kind of movement from faith to unfaith in the case of those brought up within the confining boundaries of Islam.
You say that the point is niggling, but I think it is very important, indicating as it does the very different relationship that Muslims have as they make a transition away from faith. It also indicates why it is so very much more difficult a transition for them to make. Protestant Christians, by the very presuppositions upon which reformation theology is based, are already half out of the church already. They can make the transition through various degrees of liberalism to full unbelief, or they can maintain a kind of non-realist attachment to the traditions of faith, something in the manner of Don Cupitt or Richard Holloway, while being in fact, for all intents and purposes, completely secular unbelievers.
As to your parting shot:
That comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since you have, for the last while, been the one hurling the insults. You have spent a good bit of time slandering me, and I have often wondered what I had done to deserve your focused animus and contempt. For example, you said this:
Ophelia Benson points out that this was undeserved, and noted that you also called me a “smeghead”. And, while it may be true that I sometimes read things at speed and sometimes answer precipitately, I don’t think I deserved that. You have also said:
But one thing I am not is an angry village atheist. I have a great deal of fondness for my years as an active priest in the church, and for the opportunity to share my life with so many others, especially in times of trouble, despair and grief. But I did find, in the circumstances of my wife’s illness and wish to die before being trapped in her body by MS, that the church was an obstacle in the way, and anything that stood in her way in the way that the church did (and still does) deserves my contempt and repudiation. The inhumanity of the church, whilst all the while protesting its humanity and compassion, is the last face of the church that I saw.
But then, to continue with your “calm” appreciation of me and my attempts to express my views, and even to argue for them, in your latest, you say:
And while I have answered, to some extent, in kind, I don’t think I have stooped quite so low. If you think I am wrong, then it seems to me that you might take the effort to say what is wrong, and not simply repeat silly remarks about my lack of academic credibility. For instance, in responding to a hasty comment made late last night before going to sleep, you make some points, but you don’t address the concerns that I express in this post, upon which that comment was made.
You are an academic student of religion, and so you know more than I do. Big deal. I must write from the well, however shallow, of my own knowledge. Religion, it seems to me, is an obstacle on the road to a better world. You think I should spend more time reading and becoming an expert on religion, but I’ve spent a lifetime in religion, at the coalface, as it were, and religious belief, in my own estimation, comes up wanting. I write about that, but you think I am unqualified to speak about it at all. I am just and old man who can’t read. That’s not an answer.
I could easily say the same kinds of thing about you, but for the most part I forbear, though I have ventured in to the same territory from time to time.When you are ready to have a reasonable conversation, I am prepared to have it, but I am not going to bow down before your gods of academe in order to begin the process. I think religion, while obviously an important cultural project at the present time, given the numbers of people involved in it, is responsible for the continuing ignorance of so many people that it is almost impossible to build a world that is sane, safe and sensible. Show me how religion might contribute to such a world and I will change my tune. But there is so much plain inhumanity practiced in the name of religion that I don’t see my tune changing any time soon.
But do, if you like, have a pleasant conversation. I’m always open to such a thing, but all I hear from you on your blog is insult and vituperation, and an unwillingness even to consider the points of view of others. Your remarks about Jason Rosenhouse, Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers are completely off the wall. Jason Rosenhouse, for example, in his comments on the Bible and hermeneutics, has some very sound things to say, in my view, and instead of berating him, if you find what he says wrong, the least you could do is to offer your own view of the same matters. Failing to do that, and indulging in abuse instead, is not, in my own experience anyway, the way that experts are supposed to behave. You have your echo Stephanie Fisher, but she is so full of hot air that it is hard to believe that you find her kind of sychophancy genuinely rewarding. But I have read some of the things you have done for Butterflies and Wheels, so I know you are capable of better than you now do. If you want to address the issues that interest me in a reasonable tone of voice, without the obvious animus, and without the continuing patronising tone, then we might get somewhere. Failing that, we will continue this online duel which accomplishes so little.
Kevin,
Lonely and acting like a 3-year old would probably describe most of us who post on the internet. No matter how obnoxious Hoffman pretends to be, he’s still a human who was once a baby happily soiling his nappy. Or maybe he was an evil happy baby, um…I should shut up.
I think Hoffmann and MacDonald demonstrate the difference between someone who has some expertise, and someone who would tout themselves as an authority.
Hoffmann essentially relies upon the fact that he is in academia in order to make his arguments, and his arguments are divorced from the day to day to the point where he actually actively ignores priests talking about religion as it is experienced.
Despite his high qualifications Hoffman’s arguments present less academic rigour than rigour mortis.
The same trap he puts himself in is present in other fields, economists who ignore the shop floor and theoreticians who ignore the engineers, generals who ignore the concerns of the soldiers. Snobbery works about as well as any field of deliberate ignorance works.
Meanwhile for all MacDonald’s arguments lack the authority of academia, they have the authority of being honestly presented by someone who listens to the other side of the argument, and considers things for himself.
MacDonald doesn’t rest his arguments on his clerical training, nor require that everybody have the exact same experience as he does. Where he wants people to know something he explains it, and where he contradicts he does so free of the sneer that so dominates Hoffmann’s work.
MacDonald does not write things written by other people off as simply ignorant because they don’t have his level of theological training, instead he encourages others to attain his level of knowledge while considering their experience as valuable.
If Hoffmann were to actually destuff his ego he may actually achieve something worth discussing more than his failings, but that would require him to become a different person.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you vent spleen.
Well said, Mr Gorton. I think you hit all the nails on their heads. If you are going to express contempt (not a very attractive emotion), as Hoffman tries so hard to do, you need to be in a proper position with respect to the object of your contempt to express it; and Hoffman is hardly in that position.
Ego is apparently all Hoffmann has left – everything seems to have failed him.
Sorry, Beachbum (#13), your comment got caught in the spam filter, and I hadn’t cleaned it out for a few days. My apologies for holding up your comment.