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06/22/2005: Long after all other forms of religious discrimination are stamped out...
atheists will still be fair game....
[Who am I kidding? Since religious partisans just love to fight with each other over who has the best imaginary friend, there'll be no end to religious discrimination. However, it'll still be the case that the deluded will still resent those of us who don't share their delusions. Anyway...]
Via Brian Leiter, we're pointed to this story about Tim Shortell, a sociologist at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York system, who has apparently been pressured to decline election by his colleagues to chair the sociology department there, allegedly because of an atheist polemic he published at a private website, anti-naturals.org. Supposedly, the tone of the essay was considered "offensive". Katha Pollitt, at The Nation, makes a very good point:
Besides, so what if Shortell's essay is offensive? Brooklyn College is a public, secular institution, not a Bible college. The Sun claimed Shortell's disdain for religion would cloud his judgment of job candidates, but there was never any evidence that this would be the case. No student ever complained about his teaching; his colleagues trusted him enough to elect him to the post; the student work posted on his website is apolitical and bland. Predictions of bias, absent any evidence, are just a backhanded way of attacking his beliefs. You might as well say no Southern Baptist should be chair, since someone who believes that women should be subject to their husbands, homosexuality is evil and Jews are doomed to hell won't be fair to female, gay or Jewish job candidates. Or no Orthodox Jew or Muslim should be chair because religious restrictions on contact with the opposite sex would privilege some job candidates over others.More on the story over at Majikthise, who also references an essay by Jerry Krase, one of Shortell's colleagues, which suggests that there are undercurrents of academic infighting to the story as well. Even so, that Shortell's atheism can be used as a weapon against him is something that all of us unbelievers (and if this keeps up, it won't be too long before "unbeliever" won't mean "atheist", it will mean "not-a-member-of-an-evangelical-Christian-denomination-of-which-we-approve") should be on our guard against...
But nobody ever does say that. As long as a believer ascribes his views to his faith, he can say anything he wants and if you don't like it, you're the bigot. Simplistic as Shortell's essay is, it does raise a useful point: Faith and morality are not only not the same, as Americans like to think, they express contradictory impulses. I believe Kierkegaard said something along these lines in Fear and Trembling in his discussion of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son. Or as the physicist Steven Weinberg put it more recently: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Would Weinberg be too "offensive" for CUNY? [Emphasis added. --LRC]
Len on 06.22.05 @ 02:37 PM CST
