The Intelligence Squared debate video
A recent debate in Britain takes-up the question: “Is the Catholic church a force for good in the world?” Interesting, but longish (and in 5-parts), and unlikely to change anybody’s mind about anything.
The most striking thing to come out of it is this comment by Andrew Sullivan:
The problem with the theoconservative take-over in the Catholic priesthood is not so much its extremism as its mediocrity. And it is mediocre because it has been trained not to think, not to argue, and not to engage the modern world. It has been trained solely for obedience – blind, dumb, unquestioning, intellectually moribund obedience.
My own education as an engineer, and roughly 25-years of private-sector consulting practice, probably left me with too-stringent standards for what passes as ‘knowledge’ and a bona fide education, which I remark because I saw exactly the same thing daily when I operated a bookstore for 2-years directly across the street from the campus of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The most egregious offense against intelligence is, of course, the insistence that the Bible is ‘inerrant.’ The word means ‘without error,’ an intellectual dodge that leaves open the possibility of allegory and metaphor but which, in practice on that campus, means ‘literally true.’
So: There are these texts of uncertain provenance, ostensibly written by persons who exist virtually nowhere in history but in the dubious pages of the Bible itself, acres of preposterous tales and contradictions — and on the strength of the unverifiable and implausible claim of inerrancy these students construct with glib confidence the most fanciful fairy castles imaginable. With no clue that they are being defrauded out of a proper education that teaches how to think, or that they’re preposterous jackasses.
