The sad saga of Jeremy Stangroom

Mr Stangroom has developed an obsession — an obsession with civility. It's an unfortunate condition that leads to tunnel vision, an infatuaion with the superficial, and most alarmingly, an increasing incivility on the part of the proponent of civility. I fear it can only end in an implosion of self-loathing.

He has a philosophy blog in which his latest project is to document instances of incivility among those pesky Gnu Atheists. No one else is deserving of the hall monitor treatment but atheists, I guess, and among those he's been singling out Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne, and most especially Russell Blackford are particular targets. It's not very impressive, though: every couple of days, Mr Stangroom announces one more example of rudeness by a Gnu. If we were really as incivil as his deep concern would warrant, you'd expect it to be easy to produce a deluge of horrors to make a prim young man blush. Right now, it's more like an occasional slow drip to which Stangroom is frantically gesturing while shouting that we're all gonna drown.

Of course, now he has discovered…me. That should help increase the flow of rude examples to something more noteworthy. This post of mine is the first to give the poor man the vapors.

Mr Stangroom does have one little problem now if he's going to come after me. I'm proud of my rudeness; every time he points at something awful I wrote some time back on my blog, I'll just squint at it, reread it, smirk, and say, "Yep, that was a good one. Coulda been a bit stronger." I get the impression he thinks the Gnus will all slink away in shame when their crude assertiveness is waved beneath their noses, but hey…I think being rude to the snotty stupidity of religion is entirely appropriate and the least that it deserves. So?

I don't think Mr Stangroom read the post he cited very carefully. He might want to look at the conclusion again.

I have zero sympathy for intelligent people who stand before a grandiose monument to lies, an institution that is anti-scientific, anti-rational, and ultimately anti-human, in a place where children are being actively miseducated, an edifice dedicated to an abiding intellectual evil, and choose to complain about how those ghastly atheists are ruining everything.

Those people can just fuck off.

Mr Stangroom lives in a world where millions of people believe in witches and demons, where education is poisoned by superstition, where religion spreads its pious wings and gets praised by politicians, and his crusade is against the atheists who aren't polite enough for his sensibilities. He will save the world with courtesy.

You know what you can do, Jeremy.

You can fuck off.

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