I'm a Scrooge Obsessive

Yes, I know it's August, but I like to think ahead. Come the autumn and winter, I'll be blogging regularly about Ebenezer Scrooge, the "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Have a gander at the Ebenezer Scrooge Archive for tidbits related to the miser we all love to hate.

The Good Writing Blog

I've started gathering my thoughts on what makes good writing, along with practical tips about the craft. Visit, bookmark, subscribe to -- and, of course, learn from -- the Good Writing Blog.

Here's a few sample articles to get you started:

How to Pitch an Article to an Editor

Writerliness and Being Writerly

Formal v Informal Style in Writing: Knowing the Difference

And, if you're just starting out in the freelance world, here's a handy article I wrote a few months back on how to become a published writer.

RIP Michael Spencer, 1956-2010

I've been typing and deleting and retyping and redeleting and rephrasing and dephrasing and unphrasing and rephrasing all over again for the past hour.

So I'm settling on something simple.

I admired Michael Spencer. Not for his message or his writing, though there's much good to say about both.

What I admired were his unsung achievements. He spent his ministry teaching English and pastoring young people in a private Christian school in Clay County, Kentucky, one of the poorest counties in the USA. By all accounts he worked for peanuts. By the end of his life, he no longer even had health insurance. He devoted his life to an impoverished community that offered very little materially in return - but then the dividends of a life in the service of others are far greater.

I first met Michael through Internet Monk, the online home of his writings. For a while (way back when) I was a member of the Boar's Head Tavern, the group blog he founded.

We parted ways theologically, and even had some personal clashes, but I never ceased to admire his character.

Michael had become increasingly sick from cancer over the past four months. He passed away on Monday, April 5, at the age of 53. He leaves behind his wife Denise, daughter Noel, 24, and son Clay, 21.

Read his full obituary here.

'Fessing up

I've been tagged for a meme by the lovely Ruth Moss at Look Left of the Pleiades. It's an 'honesty' meme, requiring me to 'fess up to 10 secrets, or at the very least things that my readers probably don't yet know about me.

1. I Google my name often. I'd wager most writers do this, but don't admit it.

2. "Gay" is a label I use because it's the most convenient commonplace label for me, but if I laid all my sexual thoughts bare, I'm much more complicated. I'm attracted to women, but not as intensely as I am to men. And it's almost always strictly sexual, where my attraction to men is as much romantic. "Bisexual" might be technically correct, but I think most people think of that as a 50/50 thing. I guess you could say I'm gay, but with a fetish for women.

3. Related to that, I did actually lay all my sexual thoughts bare one time in an anonymous blog. It no longer exists.

4. I support marriage equality because it's a right that others deserve, but I'm indifferent to the idea of gay marriage for myself. If I ever made that kind of commitment, I'd just as soon have a civil partnership. I can't imagine calling my partner "husband," but I'm all for the rights of others to do as they like.

5. I have a tasteless sense of humour. I'm usually wise enough to know when and with whom I can and can't express it, though I've made mistakes.

6. Almost everything I say and think has a tinge of irony to it. In my mind that doesn't detract from being serious about something. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and it bugs me when people think they are. It also bugs me when irony is mistaken for sarcasm. I rarely intend to wound others with my irony.

7. I take medication for depression and anxiety, and have done since 2005. The writing life suits me because I tend towards reclusion. Ironically, people generally perceive me as outgoing.

8. I vlogged on YouTube for about a year. I had 500 followers. I gradually lost interest, and eventually deleted most of my videos, finding them embarrassing to watch.

9. I think most religious beliefs are nutty, but inconsequential. In my experience, moderate believers tend to have a cognitive dissonance so that their most irrational beliefs rarely have an affect on their reasoning, thoughts and actions outside a very limited sphere.

10. Even though I've rejected theism, I can't shake off Jesus or religion. Nor do I particularly want to.

'Climategate' arguments take nasty turn

There has been invective on both sides of the climate debate, and never more than since so-called Climategate, the scandal rather euphemistically dubbed the "Climactic Research Unit hacking incident" by Wikipedia. The scandal is that climate researchers at the University of East Anglia were caught manipulating data in an effort to bolster scientific evidence for anthropocentric global warming.

In the immediate aftermath, the media was full of environmentalists, global warning campaigners and scientists trying desperately to downplay the controversy, alongside climate change deniers having a field day hailing the revelations as a harbinger of the wholesale collapse of the man-made global warming theory.

Neo-conservative commentator James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph blogs has emerged as one of the most popular (and vitriolic) online voices decrying climate change and keeping Climategate alive. His tone is generally both strident and nasty, if tongue-in-cheek - not just on this, but on any politically charged subject.

On Sunday, George Monbiot of The Guardian reports, Delingpole overstepped the mark severely by publishing an email correspondence from a member of the public to a Conservative Party parliamentary candidate, along with the name and address of the sender. The email was described outlandishly as "nauseating," and a case of "stalking" by "eco-bullies." He suggests a suitable response to the email would be "f--- off," and asks which "disgusting eco-fascist organisation" might be sponsoring the emails. According to the article, several Tory candidates have received "similar" emails, suggesting they were part of a campaign.

Delingpole's description alone is worrying. Stalking? Bullying? Disgusting? Nauseating? Eco-fascism? Worthy of an F-off? All conclusions extracted from one email? You might be surprised how placid and inoffensive the actual email was:

From: XXXXXXXX
Date: 2010/1/22
Subject: Conservation Query
To: XXXXXXX

Dear Edwin Northover,

I was concerned to note the results of a survey of 140 Conservative candidates for parliament that suggested that climate change came right at the bottom of their priorities for government action.

I hope you can reassure me that you recognise the importance and success of climate change action by the UK government at home and internationally.

Can you clarify that:

You accept that climate change is caused by human activity?

Do you support the target to achieve 15% renewable energy by 2020?

Do you support the EU imposing tougher regulation to combat climate change?

Kind Regards,

XXXXXXXX

I am quite dumbfounded. Regardless of the scientific rights and wrongs of climate change, why such a wildly disproportionate reaction to a person exercising his perfect right to ask some questions of a potential parliamentary candidate? Perhaps it was part of a campaign. And? Is this illegal? Is it morally objectionable? Is it deserving of such an unfettered attack? He later says his concern is that it may be "concerted campaign by a green lobby group, masquerading as the work of concerned individuals." However, the two are not mutually exclusive. It's perfectly possible to be a concerned individual and join a collective campaign in a course of action.

But, of course, it gets worse. Delingpole published the name and address of the email's sender. A Google cache of the article shows the name and address missing, but this is a cache of a later version. Only a few lines down the thread, the first comment to mention the identity of the correspondent assumes everyone already knows it from the article. Further down, another commenter quotes from the article, and the name and address remain intact. Eventually, Delingpole himself says he published the details, but later removed them.

If you spend any time at Telegraph Blogs (personally, of the political commentators, I've only found one author I respect), you'll have noticed that no matter how objectionable their content, the commenters the site attracts are far, far more extreme. In my experience, the average commenter votes BNP and would happily set back gay rights to some time in the 1950s.

So it is unsurprising that a disturbing and vicious attack followed from Delingpole's irresponsible post. Within a couple of posts, a commenter had identified the address on Google Maps and posted a photograph of the emailer's house. If I were that man, I would feel very threatened by this. I imagine Delingpole would feel similarly intimidated if a bitter enemy had posted details of his address and photographs of his house online.

Soon his phone number too was posted, and other commenters were posting other personal details.

Ironically, amid all this, someone chimes in to condemn the email as "intrusive and abusive lobbying."

Within a few hours of the post, a commenter was claiming to have personally telephoned the man in question:

I tried to telephone XXXXXXX on the number helpfully posted in this blog, but he’s out until tomorrow. Perhaps he is out ‘tackling climate change’? – anyway his missus didn’t seem to know where he was.

Delingpole later interrupts:

It’s a bit late but I’ve taken out the bit where the sender of the email is named. And I really think it’s wrong to ring up the chap or bother him. It’s not him I was getting at. I’m after the green organization which encouraged all this mass letter-writing.

Did Delingpole not notice that half his followers were unhinged enough to abuse the information he'd so carelessly published? Anyone to the left of Enoch Powell could have predicted this outcome.

Eventually, the entire discussion thread and the original post were removed.

I find this very worrying. James Delingpole, who has the affront to make hysterical claims of bullying, fascism and stalking, is himself engaged in a very nasty piece of bullying.

And how did he get hold of this email sent to Edwin Northover, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Leyton and Wanstead? Did Northover himself pass this on?

I have read the Telegraph daily since the mid-1990s. I've always found the quality of the journalism very high, but the shrill, hysterical, increasingly extreme right-wing tone of Telegraph Blogs has left me with much less faith in the newspaper. Delingpole's outrageously misjudged, vindictive post has finally stepped over a line. The Telegraph ought to ask some serious questions of this incident.

And the Conservative Party should be asking some questions of its candidate Edwin Northover to determine his part in this farce.

[Edit: In the thread, Delingpole admitted to publishing the name, but not specifically the address. However, the user theunbrainwashed posts what appears to be a direct quote from the article, which includes an address. This still suggests Delingpole was the first to supply the address.]

[Later edit: This thread confirms that both were published. I am really baffled by this. Either Delingpole had a deliberate aim in publishing the man's name and address, or he experienced a spectacular lapse of judgment. What journalist overlooks such details as a private name and address?]

Loftus defends Bill Maher's Religulous

Atheist John Loftus writes a thought-provoking defense of Bill Maher's Religulous, the 2008 documentary that pokes fun at religion, mostly through interviews with and about Christian fundamentalists.

Though I've watched the movie, I don't remember many of the specifics, truth be told. Perhaps that says something about its nature - it really isn't anything new, but a compilation of idiotic Christians saying and doing the same silly things we're used to hearing and seeing them say and do day in, day out.

I'm with Loftus in agreeing with Sam Harris for "calling upon thoughtful people to cease granting religion a free pass from criticism."

For the record, I generally agree with the atheist arguments against the existence of God, or rather I agree that the evidence for God is lacking, which I think amounts to the same thing. The best argument for atheism is simply the principle that if you're to believe something extraordinary, like the idea of God, you need some evidence - and it's just not there.

However, I think it's a mistake to jump from "God does not exist" to "therefore all religion is bad," as if it were self-evident. This is why I don't think I can let Dawkins off the hook as easily as Loftus does:

I myself question how much scholarship it really takes to reject any given religion. ... That best explains why Dawkins probably thought it was a waste of time researching into religion for his book. He already knew from the fact of evolution, his stock and trade, that religion is a delusion. Until someone can show him that evolution does not explain everything in the biological world, he has no need for the God hypothesis, and no need to put a great deal of time researching into it.

This more or less equates religion with God, and assumes that religion is only useful as long as theism is literally true. I'm not sure that is logical, and even if it is, surely it is primarily a social-scientific and philosophical question, and not one that Dawkins can presume to answer purely on the basis of biology?

What about about religion as metaphor? As a basis for philosophical thought and action, even apart from a literal interpretation? As a human creation that can nevertheless be a meaningful way for (some) people to connect to something sacred, but not supernatural? As a creative framework within which to explore, reflect on and bring meaning to the world around us, but again, apart from a literal interpretation? In other words, are the myths, language, values, rites and rituals of religion only of value if they describe a literal reality? Or can a religion still be a framework around which to structure life and thought, even a community?

I also think Loftus lets Maher off the hook too easily when dealing with the objection that the film deals only with the "fringes" of Christianity. Of this objection, Loftus writes:

This raises the question of “who speaks for Christianity?” There isn’t a consensus. There only seems to be a rabble number of voices each claiming to know the truth. The truth is that Christianity has evolved and will continue to evolve into the future. The Christianities practiced and believed by any denomination today are not something early Christianities would embrace. And future Christianities will be almost as different. The trouble we atheists have when attempting to debunk Christianity is that we have a moving and nebulous target which evolves in each generation. So how can any of us be faulted for not knowing which specific sect to take aim at if there is no consensus between believers on what best represents their views?

This strikes me as a little lazy: It's impossible to pick a single target; therefore no one can be blamed for picking any old target. There is an excluded middle here: we can at least strive for approximation. While Maher's targets represent a very large and disturbing swathe of religion, the extent to which it approximates religion in general is debatable.

Maher claims to adhere to the gospel of "I don't know," and I can agree with Loftus's protest at the suggestion that this makes Maher a dogmatist himself:

Professor MacDonald faults the movie for it’s own kind of dogmatism, especially the ending. But I think there is a huge epistemological difference between rejecting a metaphysical answer to the riddle of our existence, and affirming the correct one, since affirming an answer demands verifiable positive evidence that excludes other answers.

Here Loftus rightly identifies a fallacy frequently used by the religious to attack their critics.

I have mixed feelings about this final argument:

So who really cares if the New Atheists are attacking what liberal scholars don't consider true religion or true Christianity? They are attacking a real threat to world peace regardless! And who really cares if religion doesn't poison everything as Hitchens’ extreme rhetoric proclaims? Religion causes a great deal of suffering.

The first rhetorical question is fair enough. It is a ubiquitous, but unjustified trick of liberal Christians to argue that they alone should be allowed to define "true Christianity," thus insisting that any valid argument against the Christian religion should engage with their version alone. In terms of openness to critical scrutiny, in no other arena does (or should) one group have the unique privilege of representing the whole.

The second rhetorical question is more than a little blase, perhaps irresponsible. I would suggest that statements as strident as "Religion poisons everything," if false, are not harmless exaggerations, but as potentially dangerous as generalizations like "Homosexuality is destructive," and "Jews ruin everything."

Even if I do think there's a lot of danger lurking in religion, even if theistic arguments don't hold up, and even if a lot of people do a lot of bad in the name of religion, I don't think religion poisons everything. In fact - and I think this is a reasonable position that has no logical connection to the question of God's existence - I think religion motivates a lot of people to do a lot of good in the world.

First Things and its strange Calvinist bedfellows

I'm not sure what First Things thought it was getting when it signed up a couple dozen mostly Reformed conservative evangelicals to blog on its pages.

First Things is an American journal of religion and public life with a reputation for being Roman Catholic - although I was informed by one of its own editors that it is actually ecumenical. The Catholic association probably owes a lot to its former editor, the late Richard John Neuhaus, who famously converted to Catholicism from Lutheranism. I've never been a regular reader, but on the few occasions I've read it in recent years, it has had a decidedly neoconservative, "culture wars" bent.

Evangel is one of a few new blogs to be hosted on the site. Its authors include Frank Turk, Jeremy Pierce and David Wayne, all well-known voices in the Reformed blogosphere. We're talking hardline Calvinists, what the folks at the vaguely evangelical Boar's Head Tavern call the Truly Reformed - the TRs - on account of their unswerving dedication to smoking out anything that doesn't conform to Calvin's Five Points. (I'm caricaturing here, but there's more than a kernel of truth to it.)

When Evangel opened for business a few weeks ago, it puzzled me what First Things thought it was going to achieve. Were they going to have an ecumenical dialogue? No chance. It is obvious by now that few of the most prominent Evangel authors even believe in ecumenism, although those familiar with the Reformed blogosphere knew that already. Most don't believe the Roman Catholic Church can even be called Christian.

It wasn't long before Frank Turk revealed his discomfort, asking whether it bothered anyone else that the site had banner ads for a movie about the visions at Fatima and (steel yourselves) books by the current pope. The guy accepts an invitation to blog at a place well known - perhaps chiefly known - for its Catholic allegiances, and is then surprised that he has to share the site with Catholic content?

So if First Things wasn't looking for ecumenical dialogue, what did it want? Allies in the neoconservative war on liberalism? Perhaps. But I think what it mostly ended up with was just the same Reformed blogs writ large. The same Reformed-centric voices continue to have the same Reformed-centric discussions and reach the same Reformed-centric conclusions. Judging by the comment threads, they appear to be attracting the same Reformed-centric, anti-Catholic audiences they attract on their own blogs.

To be fair, there are a few writers in there that don't fit the mould. There's Jared C Wilson, for example, a BHT fellow who early on conflicted with co-authors and readers alike. But it seems dominated by the same Reformed types preaching to the choir.

Hey, I don't really care that there's another culture-war/Reformed blog out there. I'm just confused what First Things expected to get from it is all.