Karrie:
Two things irk me about your comment regarding D'Sousa meeting the mean and nasty (to paraphrase) atheists.
First is that is a false assumption. D'Sousa is a major American intellectual: the atheists he sups and talks with are the likes of Daniel C. Dennet, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, Wendy Kaminer and Tom Flynn. These are all leaders in the Humanist world, all public intellectuals, and they are all, I'm pretty certain, civil folks with good table manners, a sense of hospitalty, and can disagree with someone without calling them names.
Disagreeing with another's ideas is what all of these folks do for a living, D'Sousa included. D'Sousa, for some reason, has decided to be insulting and inflammatory in his writings. Why? I don't care - should Rosa Parks have asked the bus driver why he was trying to throw her off the bus, or should she simply stand in opposition to segregation and racism?
Second is why you would try to find reasons to explain or justify D'Sousa's bigotry. Would it matter (to take an extreme, but still valid, example) that a member of the Nazi's SS had been bullied as a child by his Jewish schoolmates, as a way of explaining why he raped, robbed and killed scores of Jews? Of course not: a bad act is a bad act.
While it is helpful to know why someone does bad things, to say is is because of something other than the individual, autonomous actor's choice, is to infantalize all of us, and render the question of accountability moot.
As an adult with free will, I will take responsibility for my actions, and not blame my parents, society or the girl in kindergarten who punched me in the nose.
I suspect D'Sousa would say much the same thing.
Pangloss
Two things irk me about your comment regarding D'Sousa meeting the mean and nasty (to paraphrase) atheists.
First is that is a false assumption. D'Sousa is a major American intellectual: the atheists he sups and talks with are the likes of Daniel C. Dennet, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, Wendy Kaminer and Tom Flynn. These are all leaders in the Humanist world, all public intellectuals, and they are all, I'm pretty certain, civil folks with good table manners, a sense of hospitalty, and can disagree with someone without calling them names.
Disagreeing with another's ideas is what all of these folks do for a living, D'Sousa included. D'Sousa, for some reason, has decided to be insulting and inflammatory in his writings. Why? I don't care - should Rosa Parks have asked the bus driver why he was trying to throw her off the bus, or should she simply stand in opposition to segregation and racism?
Second is why you would try to find reasons to explain or justify D'Sousa's bigotry. Would it matter (to take an extreme, but still valid, example) that a member of the Nazi's SS had been bullied as a child by his Jewish schoolmates, as a way of explaining why he raped, robbed and killed scores of Jews? Of course not: a bad act is a bad act.
While it is helpful to know why someone does bad things, to say is is because of something other than the individual, autonomous actor's choice, is to infantalize all of us, and render the question of accountability moot.
As an adult with free will, I will take responsibility for my actions, and not blame my parents, society or the girl in kindergarten who punched me in the nose.
I suspect D'Sousa would say much the same thing.
Pangloss