VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Tesh|DATE|1382355909|CONTENT|Own thoughts, part 2 - and apologies for the sheer amount of time and space I have taken up - I just hope it is of some interest to somebody. 
I found the end of today&#039;s TftD really weird and unconnected.  It is a relief to me to have dropped all belief in any personal God and to find belief in an impersonal God really rather pointless. The universe and to have lived is enough.  nevertheless, I still want to defend Higgs who was 83 at the time of this interview and has done more with his life than I ever have. this is what I continued to write in 2012.....
&quot;The context of the whole interview is science and it forms the context of these remarks too.   Higgs would agree totally, I am quite sure with Coyne’s  lecture on it as two systems of thought; I think Weber would have called them ‘ideal types’.   But human beings do not inhabit a universe of pure metaphysics, a world of some kind of Platonic  forms.  Science is done by human beings.   We are not robots or perfect metaphysicians.  Newton is one of the great example of brilliant scientist and mathematician combined with sheer wackiness.  I know I have cognitive dissonances in my own life and thought; they just do not happen to cluster round science and religion.  I would be suspicious of anybody who believes they have none. 
And why such emotional  energy of anger and despair over this?  If only 10% or less of scientists are also religious believers – what is the problem? Coyne did not break down his figures into age cohorts [or not as far as I remember anyway] – fewer and fewer people are going to be believers given all research figures  showing lessening rates of religious belief and allegiance among the younger generations in the USA. What do you want to do – demand that questions about religion are asked and ‘correct’ answers given before anyone is allowed to join research projects?  Reading the posts of 27th December brought to my mind inquisitors weeping and roaring and asking highly emotional rhetorical  questions, whipping up emotional audiences. 
I share Higgs’ view – [I know you cannot forgive me Rev, but I have no repentance].  It seems to me dangerously close to other ‘slippery slope’ arguments [gay marriage signals the end of the family and civilisation; making assisted dying possible is a code for mass slaughter of the elderly and disabled; contraception signifies a ‘culture of death’].  It is easy also to attack  power and its abuses in a manner no different from attacking those religious believers  who suffer those abuses, thus conflating aggressor and victim: to fulminate against the Taliban but forget what [predominantly Muslim]  Kabul was like before the Taliban took over and what happened to those Muslims who tried to resist  Taliban culture;  to forget Shirin Ebadi  finding herself on a ‘death list’ for her views;  easy to rage against ‘the Catholic Church’ but forget the thousands of Catholics that this Pope [ie Benedict] has ‘silenced’  because they disagree with him, particularly in Ireland and the United States.  You mention the suppression of liberation theology  – but Archbishop Romero had not given up believing in God.   Why, according to this viewpoint, should I care about any difference between Romero and John Paul 2 who treated him so badly at the Vatican that afterwards Romero wept in despair, and those who assassinated him,  some suggesting that the assassins felt they had Vatican ‘permission’?  ‘Didn’t the stupid man just bring it on himself?’
Among my friends and people I know are people I know to be religious believers with a particular affiliation,  mainly from Christianity,  people I know to be ‘atheists’ and some about whom I haven’t a clue.  Most people, including most believers in my experience, live lives such as that described of Dorothea at the end of Middlemarch ... no great name on earth ...unhistoric acts ... lived faithfully a hidden life, will rest in unvisited tombs’. 
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