This has been the week that the whiny little twits have risen up to complain about atheism. The latest entry is from Camille Paglia, and many have written to me about it. I’m not going to bother. I’ve never cared much for Paglia, and Salon’s infatuation with her as a columnist is incomprehensible to me — her specialty is haughty pseudo-intellectual blurts of pretension, strung together on the one common thread of her febrile narcissism.
So, sorry, no evisceration of her babblings — there have just been too many of them lately, so all she gets is a curt dismissal.
Molly Ivins nailed Paglia better than anyone: “What an asshole!”
Yesterday was both a funny and frustrating day for me.
The frustrating part was a lot of the Adams’ PHB’s essential ‘points’: “It’s funny to make people angry by lying about them! It’s funny to point out that people care about an issue enough to fervently refute a deliberately stupid argument designed to make them fervently refute it! What kind of losers care about something in this day and age!”
Heh, she’s right then – flaneur!
Babbling is right. She’s a pagan atheist, who subcribes to the New Age despite it’s excesses, and she manages to work in the now popular ‘atheists are driving people to radical islam’. And then drags in her geratric Dionysian Rolling Stones for some good old fashioned ‘kids these days’ complaining. At least she didn’t mention “Cthonic” anywhere.
Paglia can contradict herself more times in a paragraph than anyone I know. She states that she is non-theist but wants Universities to provide more theological curriculum so that people will be inspired for art’s sake or create meaningful dialogue. What??!!!??
Actually she wants more comparative religion courses, which may be a sly reverse psychology gambit. It’s easier to see the illogic of religion when it is compared and contrasted in an unbiased manner in an academic setting; but that, of course, is the rub. Most Comparative Religion instructors are not unbiased and many are ordained ministers from theology departments and any atheist philosophy prof. would be seen as prejudiced against religion. Catch 22, eh?
Well, she’s certainly hedging her bets with the insane idea of “pagan atheism”. WTF?! She dislikes Christianity, Islam, the “excesses” of New Age, and scientific, rational atheism.
I guess she’s going for Nietzsche, but still. She sucks so badly.
Never fight with rabid dogs, their madness is catching.
“haughty pseudo-intellectual blurts of pretension, strung together on the one common thread of her febrile narcissism”
As the Brits say: In one.
But Paglia uses words like “flâneur”! Attention must be paid!
With a modicum of diffidence, I beg to point out that Paglia and her tribe have long been known for exactly what they are. Gilbert & Sullivan said it very aptly in Patience, where the sarcasm is nicely understated (although understatement is a concept quite unknown to Camille and her acolytes). A habitual gender-bender like Paglia won’t mind that the subject is a young man:
If you truly wanted to dismiss her, you’d do what most of the thinking world does and not bother to read any of her drivel to begin with.
Years ago I read something by her in which she stated the the reason there is no famale Mozarts was the same reason there is no female mass murderers.
No female mass murderers? Right. As for no famale Mozarts; how many people with the same type of innate talents as Mozart never had the chance to develope and show it off because the were born into the wrong class. Mozart was a genius whose father was a court musician. Everything fell right for him to shine. What of those who were born serfs, farmeres, soldiers or just about anything thing else that passed on musical ability. And let us not even talk about what many think of women musicians.
I just found that to be poorly thought out and insulting to both men and women and ignores the condictions people may find themselves in.
And that segment that Christian posted. Just an other reason why I found reading her to be painful.
It should tip you off that Paglia was mentored by Howard Bloom who showed the limits of his expertise when he published that insignificant book full of squishy-minded concepts titled “The Lucifer Principle.”
C’mon, PZ! You know you can’t resist it. How can a biologist pass up a chance to eviscerate something?
Bronze Dog: Did you do hard time at Adams’ blog? Did any of them explain exactly how Adams’ post was funny?
No, I didn’t go far into it. Just skimmed some of the idiocy in a couple main posts. If he can go that deep into the gutter, I can hardly expect anything good to come out of the same hole.
Hence my growing suspicions of ghost-writing being involved in the strip. Dilbert is funny often enough for me to continue reading. Scott Adams just doesn’t seem at all funny for any of this, and seems to be the opposite of Dilbertian humor: PHB-style seriousness.
About the only thing I can see even the most marginal of amusement coming from is the thing about Islam, just because it was unexpected, at least for me. If it came from a Jihadist, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising, and most certainly not funny, just like a Christian equivalent wouldn’t be if it came from a typical fundie.
I am so turned on right now.
Paglia is a Binghamton whore.
Which reminds me, I haven’t seen ichthyic in ages. Did he hang it up for good after getting his Molly?
No, he’s been around… now and then. There have been sightings he he was inducted into the, ah, Order.
sigh.
“since” he was inducted
sigh.
“since” he was inducted
“Secular humanism has reached a dead end ”
And they call Dawkins arrogant.
“The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable.”
Secular humanism is nice and all, but it needs more pixie dust, dangit.
Well here’s what we get from Camille today (the link switched): “No one will ever resolve the eternal hatreds and ethnic rivalries of the Middle East, which have been churning and festering for 5,000 years. The extremist Muslim drama is only half the story.”
All right, we can right her off as a pretension moron. You can replace “Middle East” with any region of the world, excluding the historically denuded American colonies.
нет, ¡no es verdad!
Zeno … another splendid G&S snippet for you:-
“My Eyes Are Fully Open”, from Ruddigore.
“Secular humanism has reached a dead end ”
And they call Dawkins arrogant.
“The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable.”
Secular humanism is nice and all, but it needs more pixie dust, dangit.
I was having an existential moment last night wondering why I was here. Science’s explanation “Dumb luck. Reality had nothing better to do so why heck not?” is not very satisfying. It explains why there is slime mold better than self aware me, I think. But what ever Science’s limitation is certainly is better than Religion’s “Some invisible superman made you, so shut up.” It makes reality go from just some relentless machine to reality is somebody’s whim, and they might change their mind about it at any second.
The pixi dust sucks.
Gracias, thalarctos. :-)
Hmmm. The way I see it, Bobble, is that the theoretical likelihood of my existing is irrelevant to the fact that I do indeed exist, which puts the actual likelihood at just about 1 in 1. Ditto the universe, the Milky Way, our solar system, our planet, and all the life that lives, has lived, or has ever lived upon it. The reason for it is similarly irrelevant, for what matters more than what we do with our time here?
A couple of years ago, not long after my mother passed away, I was walking across a bridge, gazing up at the night sky into the great big beautiful void of the universe, and it hit me: Nothing here on earth really matters in the scope of the cosmos, so anything and everything can matter – to me – if I only wish it and allow it. It was a very liberating experience and I haven’t felt the need to wonder much about the meaning of life since that night.
Science’s explanation “Dumb luck. Reality had nothing better to do so why heck not?” is not very satisfying. It explains why there is slime mold better than self aware me, I think.
If you knew slime molds, you wouldn’t say that ;)
Yeah, and slime molds have their own sexual personae.
Zeno — “Gilbert & Sullivan said it very aptly in Patience…”? No, WS Gilbert said it aptly. Sullivan later set it to music.
Sheesh, Zeno! TWO guys don’t say stuff. ;}
So she hasn’t changed in 20 years (which was when I first(and last) read something by her)?
An acquaintance pressed me to read her stuff as she said very deep/important stuff.
I was not impressed.
It should tip you off that Paglia was mentored by Howard Bloom who showed the limits of his expertise when he published that insignificant book full of squishy-minded concepts titled “The Lucifer Principle.”
Paglia did her graduate work under HAROLD Bloom, the noted literary critic and all-pro killjoy.
Double-quoting be damned, I had to do it!
PZ, you seem to have glossed over the fact that you did in fact eviscerate the All-Capricious Ur-Contrarian – just because said figurative disembowelment was perfectly effortless in its pithy grace is no excuse for false modesty, good sir.
For shame!
“all-pro killjoy”
Thank you Sean, for my new favorite epithet.
Paglia has been authoritatively eviscerated by Molly Ivins (I miss her) here:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/%7Eerich/misc/ivins_on_paglia
Why should athiests care what crazy religious nuts say. It seems athiesm is more logical. I don’t think athiesm is ever going to be an issue. It’s not a whole other race or something. Athiesm is safe and will not be an issue unless athiests create thier own places of worshipping no God(s).
“Secular humanism has reached a dead end ”
And they call Dawkins arrogant.
Camille Paglia transcends mere arrogance, as all of her writing reveals an almost religious awe of herself…if besotted, soft-brained self-adoration was a gravitational force, not even light could escape Camille Paglia.
“The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable.”
Secular humanism is nice and all, but it needs more pixie dust, dangit.
Camille rambles like she’s been hitting the angel dust, not pixie dust. She sputters out nonsensical strings of two dollar words like a gibbering speedfreak reading a thesaurus out loud. Her quest for meaning ended at the sound of her own voice, and sadly, the dopes at Salon continue to inflict her on the rest of us like a biblical plague.
My pagan brand of atheism is predicated on worship of both nature and art.
*Sigh* As always I cannot completely dismiss Paglia – there are occasionally rewarding gems in her swag pile – but crap like this reveals her for the fool, or the shameless panderer (or both) that she is. “Paganism,” “atheism,” “nature,” and “art” are whatever she redefines them for the moment – she’s championed women’s magazines as “art for the masses” (my, do you think? Gosh, maybe also to sell things? Unbelievable! She figured that out all alone?) and once called Egyptian hieroglyphs “advertising” as if that was original and provocative. (Egyptian figures display things with their arm gestures! Did you know that, everyone?) And how does one “worship nature” while simultaneously celebrating men’s (and I mean men’s) “resistance against the clthonic”? Ladies and gentle-, er, well whoever, do we sense another book tour coming up?
She’s a sloppy thinker, not the scholar that she pretends to be. And I don’t care if she does like Cocteau.
What’s so special about BINGHAMTON whores? I always thought the town a mite dull. Or is that the point?
“I’ve never cared much for Paglia, and Salon’s infatuation with her as a columnist is incomprehensible to me — her specialty is haughty pseudo-intellectual blurts of pretension, strung together on the one common thread of her febrile narcissism.”
Worse than any of that: she’s boooooring.
I guess I’ll take that assessment over “Binghampton whore”.
This is quickly becoming my favorite Pharyngula thread ever. So much delicious hatred of pretense. It tastes like honey.
Redf:
first it’s a-theist, not a-thiest. We have been through this before on Pharyngula. There is no athey, athier, athiest. There is only theist, and atheist. and here endeth this lesson….
To move on…
We don’t except when they pretend to be logical or science based or attempt to proselytize.
Why, thank you! It is!
Wow! Really! No! I think you’re on to something here!
Couple of problems here —
1. why would an atheist create a ‘place of worship’? WTF would we be worshipping? Tea? Ath’es?
2. why would anyone else be challenged by atheists having an ‘organized place to *worship*’?
The biggest chllenge with your viewpoint is mindset.
See, atheists (that’s us) tend not to NEED herd behaviors for validation or comfort.
Sure, we’ll join clubs based on our interests (finger painting, needlework, basket weaving, even crochet) – but we don’t need group affirmation of our non-belief. That would be a pretty quick ‘service’:
Hello everyone.
Still no god?
Ok. Thanks.
See you next week.
So – – as they say at the Eurovision for those ‘
lesser’ countries…. ‘Nil Points’