-isms in my opinion are not good.

here : another email i wrote. this one to lotta; it was a reply to her rather fierce comments on the list i clipped from amazon (see 2 posts ago, about dawkins' book getting shelled by harry and oprah).

the sad thing about dawkins is that he's a good scientist. the selfish gene is, from the excerpts i've read and accounts i've heard, tremendous, and played a big part in helping to change the genomic game. just this weekend i had my brilliant scientist friend recount this to me and demand that i memorize it (this is the dude who's taught or pointed me to most everything i know about evolution, also a brilliant christian (by which i mean not that he proselytizes, but that his spirit is effervescent, his cup doth run over)) so it's just dumb to have dawkins fall of the edge like that. i don't get why he chose that route.

were we ever to take up a legit point-counterpoint stance, though, the core of my response would be similar to my complaint with christopher hitchens, which itself would read something like,

dear ladydawkins : you're not allowed to assault the objectivity of something without being objective. maybe when you're out for a fag, but not in an even slightly formal critique; not at book length. you're just not. and you know this—fuck, man, let's stop fooling and announce that you know or once knew it better than i know it. and you're not the forgetful type. so you're a fucktard, one who's been swallowed in the fleshy wet lips of his own ego, and now whenever i hear your name i'll have to quash the mental picture of one of those molly-mouth fake vagina deals they sell at the porn store. nice work.

ok, so the similarity with what i'd say to you ends after the 1^st sentence. how i'd continue, though, is to point to gw bush. the man is as good a face as any for the current-day regime of people and policies and –isms that make me not want to call myself a christian, or not want to state it as such. and christ surely knows that i've got my own struggles with trying to square my shoulders and heart up to him; i'm not in a position to be defending the retardedness of anyone else. so we don't have to call me a christian; call me a dude who's trying to follow christ. who despises everything focus on the family has done after about 1986. who thinks christian politics should be confined to the church (since she is the one best equipped to carry out the single verse in the new testament that explicitly describes the conduct of christian society (from early in james): take care of the orphans and the sick; and try to have a noble heart). whose sense of mystery and wonder has increased with every revelation about neuroscience and evolution and physics.

that's the other thing about dawkins, the thing that perhaps irks me most: the incompatibility of faith and science is the terrain of the biblical literalists, for whom metaphor is deceitful – when, in fact, metaphor is the primary framework by which we approach higher truth. (that sounds didactic and i'm sorry; what with it being the subject of 2 recent essays for grad school, i jump to the task of defending metaphor, which is unnecessary and lame.) the dawkster hems himself in and tweezes himself down: he's a recently brilliant and skeptical scientific mind who has reduced himself to the level of the kansas school board.

don't fall for that shit. blame the organization, blame the –ism (as ferris, years ago, wisely gave us permission to do) blame the inevitability of humans in significant power becoming corrupt and doing hateful shit. but it's a band-aid of an argument to fault any faith of any credence for the (inevitably vast) sins of its members. humans in power do bad shit, and religion will always be a prime motivator for rallying the masses; it's perhaps the best way humans have to trick other humans into excusing their individual selves while they rape de horses and ride off on de women. but it's a human trick played on other humans. my personal faith (which, fetal-alcoholic and prone to holdups though it may be, i'll never desert, having felt god's love rest on my own head) didn't sign up to defend anybody's pope, or anybody's –ism. to discount the legitimacy of all faith at all levels is to discount most of the wisdom gained and given by most of the wise people we've ever had.

in the 1^st excerpt on slate, hitchens calls cs lewis dreary and absurd. "…religious apology … some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming cs lewis…" it's crazy, but that was the lightest line in all the excerpted pages—that was hitchens being funny, smart and light and a leettle bit sassy. no, it's true, hitchens! one cannot avoid naming, can one! egads, the dreariness! if you do not desist i may chortle.