Martin Cothran â sometimes contributor to the Disco. 'tute blog, staffer for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family, general-purpose bigot, purported logic teacher â doesn't like Michael Shermer. Responding to an op-ed by Shermer, he writes:
Secularist atheists are all about having a "steely-eyed visage." â¦The problem is that, while a few secularists like Harris can pull of the "steely-eyed" thing, others, like Shermer, look like way too professorial and grandfatherly for the part. And besides, most of these kinds of secularists are of the politically leftist type that Rand would consider wimpy.
Maybe we ought to be thinking of the code heroes of the Hemingway type. But, alas, neither Shermer nor Harris have shot themselves yet. And clearly, if after arguments like the ones Shermer himself articulates in his Los Angeles Times piece and which he includes from others on his recent blog don't cause secularists to shoot themselves, I don't know what will.
On the other hand, maybe its just because these people are all opposed to the possession of firearms.
What can one say? Cothran's broader point is that morality must inevitably come from god, and that the godless cannot but be lead into immortality. He seems unaware that gleefully wishing people would shoot themselves isn't exactly moral behavior. Shermer manages to conduct his public debates at a rather higher moral tenor than Cothran is capable of summoning.
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That quote reads like someone who is having his evening drink(s) and didn't stop writing quite when he should have. I can smell the scotch on his breath from here.
OMG! You being, like, way too professorial.
How old is this guy?
Again with the assuming that atheists are men! ;-) Cothran could just crack open the Jan/Feb issue of Skeptical Inquirer and gaze into my come-hither athy eyes. (Shameless plug - we fallen women are so vain.) Eye-babygate! I called it.
Seriously, though, is it me, or are the IDudes rather, er, grouchy these days? The sudden emergence of bah-humbugs is striking. Shouldn't they be popping a bottle of malt and toasting the ever-approaching death of "Darwinism"?
Was Cothran ever classy to begin with? Josh's Feb 17 post suggests no. Besides fantasizing about other people committing suicide, he doesn't address anything Shermer said. Cothran's post is just bizarre, and sorta rambling, the smell of scotch indeed.