1. The Lions NEED Dean Richards.

2. We must STOP SCHALK BURGER

3. The players must have control over the tour.

4. BORTHWICK must skipper the tour.

Just to give my post some credibility i’ll make a prediction for the england scotland game: england 21 – scotland 12.

9. Phillips
10. Henson
11. Vainikolo
12. Banahan
13. Shaw (why not try our biggest player in the centre???)
14. Tait
15. Lewsey

BTW I’ll be back in Durham next season with a few lads from Sacremento RFC so look forward to renewing old rivalries.

Any feedback would be most welcome. Anyway, i’ve got to go and take Mr Tibbs for a walk as he’s getting a bit edgy and might be ready to drop a brown bomb or two!!!

1. A Sheridan
2. J Flannery
3. E Murray
4. A W Jones
5. P O’Connell
6. R Jones
7. M Williams
8. S Taylor
9. M Blair
10. J Wilkinson
11. S Williams
12. R Flutey
13. B O’Driscoll
14. P Sackey
15. C Paterson

DOG ‘CHOD’ ON THE HILD BEDE CAR PARK

That’s right, and its become more than a joke. I myself have copped for 2 separate piles in 2 consecutive weeks, and am now going to call for a blanket ban on the chodding of said car park.

STUDENTS UNITE!!!

I have studied theology at Durham and am now in my third year. It seems pretty insulting – after having studied my faith critically and in great depth – for these kind of generalistic statements to be made.

You state that, ‘The Bishop says that, instead of creating a divide between people, we should engage in “wise discourse … listening and sharing with people’s arguments.”‘ which seems to me a good aim at least.

The Bishop of Durham, along with Professor Gary Habermas, is currently touring the country to argue that believing in the resurrection of Jesus is historically sound.

That is to say, there are two ‘venerable’ academics making the case that, within the framework of naturalistic explanation, it is rational to believe in something undeniably supernatural (if anyone can explain how a resurrected Jesus falls into a different category to fairies, which were believed to exist by large numbers of people until the twentieth century, then please do).

The mistake Dr Wright makes, so far as I can see, is to presume that extraordinary claims only require ordinary standards of proof (supposing they are right that these ordinary standards are met). No doubt if pressed they will throw in some sort of slippery subjectivity, something like ‘knowing through love’, to tip them over the edge of plausibility, but the message they aim to send is that the combative atheists are historically ignorant, not having devoted enough energy to Biblical scholarship, so should stop arrogantly debunking religious claims.

Is it any surprise that this sort of sophisticated apology for Biblical literalism coincides with Dr Wright’s Biblically-informed conservative stance on what he passively called in his interview with Palatinate ‘the gay issue’?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4548648.stm

Let’s call a spade a spade: Biblical literalism is a demonstrably false, demonstrably harmful and demonstrably venerated by sections of our society. If academia serves only in this debate to niggle at the populists who hope to take these demonstrations to a wider audience, then so much the worse for academia.

C hristian
U nion
N o
T hanks
S ir!

Even if you don’t find Grow Truth particularly funny, it is ridiculous to claim that the Palatinate’s content is of such high quality that the cartoon just wasn’t good enough, or that the paper was improved by cutting the cartoon and replacing it with an awkward-looking letter.

Let’s just be honest and say that some people find any satirical take on religion blasphemous and offensive. Cutting the cartoon amounts to saying that certain viewpoints are too provocative and nasty to be associated with the student paper, which is purely and simply self-censorship.

See Hitch for an admirable disagnosis of the state of the press today in this respect:
http://www.slate.com/id/2184493/

You asked me before specifically about my rude and dismissive judgement (‘bullshit’) which is most definitely directed at Know Truth, not at religion. If I generalise about religious people in this article, it is on the basis of what I have observed of them in our secular country. Which might be a false judgement, but let’s not conflate it with a much more obviously false judgement about all religious people in the world (you don’t get much choice not to be religious in most parts of the world, after all)!

My previous argument with Donnchadh concerned how much ‘Christianity’ could be judged by particular representations of it in the public sphere (eg DICCU and bishops) – and, more specifically still, how much the nature of this public face of Christianity justified the pucturing process of the anti-clerical polemic, and how this should affect polemical criticism of the philosophy of particular polemicists (and I’m not sure, John, that the Courtier’s reply is sufficient on this count – though it probably is a fair rebuttal of most of what Eagleton has to say).

I just don’t see the analogy with Marxism, which you do want to dismiss finally on the grounds of atrocities committed in its name. If Marxism were a venerated philosophy and these atrocities were often overlooked, then I’m sure you’d be well qualified to write anti-Marxist polemic. But I’m not suggesting we venerate Marxism or Marxists, or instigate a Marxist political program, only that the ideas are too interesting and influential to dismiss on the grounds of the evils of communism.

I hope this is coherent – sorry if it’s a bit long-winded.

If it’s simply about DICCU why did you write “Religious people have an unfortunate habit of shifting their position, avoiding public confrontations, evading the issue with emotive rhetoric, hiding behind the notion of subjectivity and, in the most extreme cases, threatening violence against the apostates”? What, all 5.4bn-odd of them? (Most surveys suggest about 10% of the world’s population consider themselves non-believers.)

Also, if you have a problem with religious systems of belief having influence, why are you trying to increase the influence of Marxist thinkers? If your problem with religious thinkers is that they are somehow tainted with the crimes committed in the name of religion, then the same is true of Marxist thinkers. If your argument is basically that you personally consider religious theories complete guff but Marxist theories valid, then your attempts to undermine one undermine the other too.

Incidentally, 50 posts! All we need is jp and eblane back and then it will be like the old days of D21!

This has all got confused!

What I meant was not ‘I have no experience of the attrocities of Marxism, so they don’t bother me’ – that would be very very silly!

What I meant was ‘Religious systems of belief, unike Marxist beliefs, have platform, influence and respect here and today.’ The relavance of which is to the specific question Donnchadh was asking: why is it somewhat misguidedly brutal of him to eviscerate anti-clerical polemic on the grounds of his criticisms? All I’m trying to say is that the ‘New Atheists’ are the wrong target, even though Donnchadh seems to be right that at least most of them make mistakes while flagging up the virtues of rationality.

The article above refers to the content of DICCU’s Know Truth week as ‘bullshit’, not Christianity or religion in general. But the point was also to problematise the ‘straw man’ defence by suggesting that the more sophisticated apologists for religion act as something of a cover for religion as it happens on the ground, as DICCU advertise it, etc.

The really important question is whether this religion in the world is actually just harmless consolation, moral teachings, etc -or whether it is consists of slippery moralists who make a living by propagating ignorance and conservative values.

Also, my “very nuanced indeed” (really?) criticism of your article was prefaced by the fact that I enjoyed it, learned from it, and thought it was entirely valid as a critique of nostalgia for communism. If I had not been clear about the communism/Marxism devide in my P article, then that was a failing. This seems to me a sensible way to engage in nuanced criticism, rather than a flat-out catch-all critique of polemical atheism.

Hope that is clearer…

I’ve stayed out of this deliberately, with the exception of the post about DICCU which I have a problem with as an organisation and not what they believe, but feel I need to comment now; not because you disagreed with my article on Marxism/communism but because of why you disagreed. Whilst Arthur’s argument isn’t exactly a masterpiece of erudition it does make a important point that your last post completely fails to explain. This is from your post on my article on Marxism:

“An ideology is not an agent and therefore not in any simple sense responsible for anything, let alone attrocities.”

Yet this article is doing exactly that to Christianity. There’s nothing wrong with Marxism as an ideology any more than there’s anything wrong with Christianity as ideology (liberation theology is the most obvious example of the good that religion could do). What Donnchadh (and I) want to know is why you dismiss the murderous consequences of the theory of Marxism being put into practice, whilst using exactly that argument against why religion, which after all has been the most important force in the world for the last 5000 years if not longer, should be abandoned as “bullshit” (and that’s what you’re insinuating). Unfortunately, until you explain this disparity with more than “it doesn’t really affect me so I’ll go on believing” it frankly leaves this argument looking too hypocritical to be taken seriously.