According to Awesome Genius Lee Siegel, who was last seen putting on a sockpuppet show at TNR, danger lies the way of atheism, because questioning faith "amounts to an attack on the human imagination," and ergo an inevitable failure to appreciate truth and beauty and goodness and decency and love cannot be far behind. Understanding the world is perilous, you see, because scientific comprehension kills wonder and whimsy and mystery and stuff, and then we don't like crap as much anymore. And I'm quite certain he's right, because ever since I found out storks don't really deliver babies, I've totally hated babies.
Drum's got some smart stuff to say in response to this pile of rubbish, as does TBogg, who notes, "I still have no idea why anyone would pay him to write anything," which is the same thought I had when I saw Siegel's byline. Leaving aside for a moment that he is ethically challenged, he appears to have carved out for himself the distinct but utterly pointless niche of commenting anxiously from the sidelines of various fields on which are played games with whose basics he has only a passing familiarity. Here, Siegel sniffs that he is "not a particularly religious person," but we should nonetheless be roused by his concern about militant atheists. Previously, he stood just outside the blogosphere exhibiting a profound ignorance of its breadth while denouncing it as "hard fascism with a Microsoft face" and its participants as purveyors of "intolerance and rage ... thuggery and fascism."
I see that his author bio at the end of today's LAT piece includes the note: "His 'Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob' will be published in January." Someone more cynical than I might suggest that Siegel appears to be using the spaces in which he's been afforded a platform to create narratives about which he can then later write books as an "expert."
That would just be so despicably slimy, though, it beggars belief. Only journos with absolutely no ethics at all would do something like that.
Oh. Right.
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