a rambling miscellany

Many events are worth commenting on.

For example, US elections always generate a lot of talk. My take: Both sides, if they’re smart, will try to lose. The winner will be blamed, unjustly, for the upcoming economic collapse.

Here in Canada, a natural and worthy topic would be the PM’s recent historic apology to aboriginal people – a first, tiny, step in Canada’s Vergangenheitsbewältingung. (No one is yet talking about the near-impossible constitutional overhaul that will be necessary if the process is ever to be completed properly.)

Many more things.

There’s the crazy (and doomed) intervention in Iraq. There’s the somewhat more justifiable (but still doomed) intervention in Afghanistan. There’s the possibility of a completely idiotic (and doomed) attack on Iran, advanced by an utterly bogus one-size-fits-all misapplication of the Munich argument.

There’s the fact that the world’s oil is quickly running out – and that if I had any sense (which I don’t), I’d be frantically learning everything I can about gardening. When the trucks can no longer deliver to Sobey’s or Superstore, I may have nothing to eat beyond what I can grow in my own yard.

So many important things! Yet I find myself drawn to something relatively trivial.

After decades of Christianity, Øystein Elgarøy, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oslo, is now an atheist, as reported here by fritanke.no. The delicious part of this story is the role played by the weak arguments of Oxford’s Alister McGrath contra Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. (One infidel has described this as an “own goal” for McGrath.)

The mere existence of weak arguments is unremarkable. But when very bright people (like McGrath) use them, one cannot help but think that good arguments must be unavailable.

In retrospect, I date my own wake-up call to my reading of the appalling little booklet History and Christianity by John Warwick Montgomery. (I review it here.) If it were possible to argue for the traditional Christian account of the origins of the Church without stooping to such glaring fallacies and misuse of evidence, surely someone with Montgomery’s considerable intelligence and encyclopaedic knowledge would have done it.

So many possible topics to rant about. I need to find my focus.