Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
A Lebanon, Missouri resident called my attention to a post on Principal Kevin G. Lowery’s Twitter page, which indicated that he’s apologized yet again for having prayed at the Lebanon High School graduation.
The link goes to a Dropbox page that contains the following statement:
To those who are willing to listen, I offer the following:
First, it was never my intention to personally offend, alienate, or target any student or audience member at our recent graduation. Rather, I wanted my remarks to be heartfelt, full of compassion, and deeply rooted in the history, culture, and tradition of America and Lebanon, Missouri. In fact, I wanted my comments to reflect the values, hopes, and dreams of this great community. So, why then did I apologize? Not because of pressure from my superintendent or board of education and not because of pressure from social media bloggers. I apologized because it was simply the right thing to do. This gesture comes from a lesson my parents taught me early in life. For the last 27 years, I have endeavored to create learning environments where all students feel welcomed, accepted, and fully embraced for their individuality. Have I been successful with every student over the course of my career? Unfortunately, the answer is no. However, I have tried to learn from my mistakes in such a way that other students may benefit from my lessons learned. Therefore, to whomever I may have offended on May 23, I am hopeful that you will accept my sincere apology.
Second, I want to thank Dr. Widhalm and the entire school board for their continued and unwavering support of my leadership at Lebanon High School. With their unrelenting support, our school continues to be recognized for excellence in many areas at the local, state, and national levels.
Third, I want to thank the Lebanon community for also supporting my leadership at Lebanon High School. This community has embraced me with unparalleled love, generosity, and genuine appreciation. For that, I am forever grateful.
Fourth, I want to thank the Lebanon High School faculty and staff for helping me put into place a mission and vision that is truly student-centered. I have never experienced a faculty and staff that work so hard and with so much passion in order to bring out the best in kids each and every day.
Finally, to the public at large, I have received literally hundreds of letters, cards, emails, text messages, telephone calls, Tweets, and Facebook postings from people around the country. Please know that I truly appreciate your passionate support and your strong advocacy.
It is my hope that our students will have a safe, enjoyable, and relaxing summer and we can look forward to the coming school year with a strong unity of purpose and sense of pride. Go Yellowjackets!
Kevin Lowery
LHS Principal
The curious thing about this statement, which is not an official response to the letter of complaint from the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), is that Lowery refers to “mistakes,” adding that this statement was “the right thing to do,” but neither mentions his big mistake—praying at graduation—nor promises that he won’t pray in school again. As we know now, Lowery prayed constantly before school events, saying stuff like “The law says I can’t pray at school functions, but if I could this is what I would say,” and then proceeding to pray. That makes everything worse, for it shows that Lowery knew his act was illegal, but went ahead with it anyway. And I think his omitting a description of the “mistake” was deliberate, for many citizens of Lebanon are furious that Lowery had to apologize, and some have called for the resignation of the School Board because Lowery was supposedly “forced” to apologize. (More on that later.)
While I try to be charitable about these apologies, I don’t see a lot of contrition here, but rather lot of self-praise and fulsome, community-courting praise for his school. I don’t see that Lowery really grasps how much he offended some of his students, or that he did that by consciously and continuously breaking the law. Note, too, that he again apologizes “to whomever I may have offended.” May? That kind of qualifier always turns an apology into a notapology.
By all accounts Lowery is much beloved by his students and the community. And for that I give him credit. But he must learn that the oppressive atmosphere partially caused by his religiosity and enabled by his behavior has, as evidenced by the emails I’ve gotten and a few comments on this website, driven some of Lebanon’s brightest people away from his town.
This certainly doesn’t answer the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s complaint, which was addressed to the Superintendent of Schools and the school board members, not Lowery. But Lowery’s allusion to his continuing support by the school superintendent and school board doesn’t bode well for their legal troubles. If this is as far as they go in answering the FFRF’s complaint, I suspect they’ll face more trouble in the future.
As you may know, Steve Pinker has a new book coming out, hard on the heels of his 800-page behemoth, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Had I written that, it would take me several years to recover, but the man is a machine.
Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing? Why should any of us care?
In The Sense of Style, the bestselling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.
In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish.
Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.
Steve told me that it’s sort of an updated Strunk and White, but more discursive and less prescriptive. I, for one, am really looking forward to it (I’d get the Kindle version, but I’m simply unable to read electronic print).
The CBC has the first piece about it that I’ve seen: “Why politicians and academics don’t just say what they mean.” The first half is the author’s (Neil Macdonald) critique of obscurantist writing, and the second part gives some quotes from Steve about his book. From the piece (quotes are, of course, in quotation marks):
“Most academics … effortlessly dispense sludge,” writes Steven Pinker, the Harvard University psychologist and writer.
. . . He argues that while many scholars do groundbreaking work, and have important ideas, “their writing stinks.”
“There’s just a lot of bad writing out there,” he told me, and that has its consequences: “We pay for universities, we ought to be able to understand what comes out of them.”
. . . Pinker’s book — he provided me with an advance peek when I called to talk to him about the subject — is neither a style guide, nor another rant about the need for fewer dangling participles and split infinitives.
In fact, he regards many English grammar rules as classist anachronisms originally designed in 18th-century Britain.
Instead, his is an argument for simplicity: “assumption of equality between writer and reader makes the reader feel like a genius,” he writes. “Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.”
. . . In this book, he shines a pitiless light on our love of words like “framework,” “process,” and “model.” (I could easily add another 20 or 30).
These, he says, are meta-concepts, or “concepts about concepts.” He compares them to the layers of packaging material a customer has to hack through to get at the product.
And of course there’s our over-hedging — the use of qualifiers like “apparently,” “evidently,” “rather,” “comparatively” and “presumably.”
Editors call that journalistic caution. Pinker calls it “wads of fluff that imply [writers] are not willing to stand behind what they are saying.
What really hurts, though, is his diagnosis of such writing: “In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Ironically, he says, “it’s often the brightest and best-informed who suffer the most from it.”
The “hedging” stung a bit, for I’m occasionally guilty of that. It certainly comes from the hedging that’s absolutely necessary in writing scientific papers. When there are alternative explanations for your results, as there nearly always are, or you feel a need to emphasize that your results are provisional (“more work is needed” is the trite ending of many papers), words like “apparently” and “presumably” automatically come to mind. And I think that sometimes they are needed in popular works, too, for if you’re proposing a provisional conclusion, it may be appropriate to hedge it a bit. That doesn’t mean that you don’t stand behind it.
But perhaps I’m overly sensitive about this. I’m certain that my own writing skills will improve after I digest this book.
Steve, can you take a break now so the rest of us don’t feel so inferior?
I’ve heard from two more students at Lebanon High School in Missouri, one of whom (the first email below) was not afraid to be identified by name. As these emails mount up, perhaps the Lebanon School Board might want to take note of the number of students offended by overt displays of religion by school officials—but who say nothing out of fear. And surely there are others like these who are too afraid to tell anyone.
Apparently the Christian proselytizing by Principal Lowery in school has been going on for some time (I’ve bolded some bits of the emails showing that), but nobody outside of town was aware of it until the video of his graduation speech prayer was posted. There is a long-standing pattern here and it simply must stop. Again, the bolding below is mine:
My name is Alyssa Ishman and I am going to be a senior at Lebanon High School this coming school year. It does not matter to me if I am kept anonymous or not. I am an active member in the LHS Band, and a big part of being in band is playing at graduation; I have had to play at Lebanon’s graduation for 2 years now. The graduation speech Mr. Lowery gave my Sophomore year (2013) was no where as religious as this years was. I was ready for the normal “The law says I can’t pray at school functions, but if I could this is what I would say.” that he says every graduation, assembly, etc. What he said this year though appalled me. This being said his speech didn’t offend me at first. I have been raised a Catholic for a good majority of my life, and even though I don’t really believe in “God” I still go to church from time to time. It wasn’t until I started thinking about how the visitors that are of a different belief system must of felt did I really start to get upset. I have grown up in a very open-minded household; If I wanted to go to church that was okay, if I didn’t that was okay too. So, I don’t take to having religion thrown at me very well. People are arguing that if I didn’t like what was being said I should of left; For some people this would of worked, but I was getting a grade for being there. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mr. Lowery. He really cares about all of his students, not just the athletes. I’m glad someone finally called him out on this, but I really hope he doesn’t lose his job over it. I don’t think I can think of anybody who is more devoted to LHS than he is.
I hope this helped, feel free to ask any questions or anything of that sort.
I assured Ms. Ishman that nobody is going after the principal’s job (I’m certainly not). The students seem to like him a lot, and we simply want the school to conform to Constitutional law. I hope Ms. Ishman doesn’t experience too much pushback from her classmates or neighbors. When I write the students back to confirm that they want their names used (I always do this twice), I remind them of the opprobrium and hatred faced by Jessica Ahlquist—and she was in Rhode Island!
Here’s the second (anonymous) email, whose authenticity I’ve verified. For you skeptics, these two letters, though both from people raised as Catholics, were not written by the same person using two names.
Hello, I am a [REDACTED]- year old student at LHS. My name is [REDACTED], and I give you permission to post any comments from this email, however I wish to remain anonymous. I’ve attended Lebanon my entire high school career and I love it. I really do. And I love our principle, Mr.Lowery. He’s active in our school, and despite popular belief he pays a lot of attention to our academic teams as well as our sports teams. However, when it comes to religion, he has always made his beliefs clear in a very public manner. I couldn’t begin to tell you on how many occasions he’s pulled the, “Now I can’t pray, but if I could I’d say…” and it really has bothered me. I was raised Catholic and my entire family is fairly religious. However, I’m constantly in arguments about my lack of a religious affiliation. I prefer the co-exist and day-by-day lifestyle. So when my principle is closed minded when it comes to other religions, I get frustrated. I honestly wouldn’t care if he said what he had to say in a more relaxed social setting, but he said it in front of thousands of people, as a representative of LHS. I just wish he would be more open and respectful of other people’s, especially his students and their families, beliefs or lack there of. As I mentioned before, I love having him as a principle and I love attending LHS, but if religion is mentioned it’s a battlefield, and I’m in the minority.
In a subsequent email, the student added this:
Thank you for listening to me and taking an interest in our school, most the time my friends and I cope with the close minded ness by brushing it off with, “it’s Lebanon Missouri!” I’m glad that’s no longer an excuse. 🙂
There are two juvenile squirrels, but I haven’t been able to photograph them together. Here’s Tufty E enjoying a repast of sunflower seeds. Check out his magnificent tuft! It’s interesting to see that the pattern of ticking in the fur gives their tails a stripey appearance. If it has an adaptive significance, I don’t know what it is.
I have gotten by far more email on the Lebanon, Missouri issue than on anything else I’ve ever written about. And nearly all of it, save letters from Lebanon High School students who want to complain privately about the relentless Christian proselytizing of their school, is negative or hateful.
This, for example, comes from one Tom Chiusano:
I’ve been following your shtick against Lebanon and its citizens throughout the week. Apart of me wants to dust it off as summer boredom for a professor, but knowing and communicating with my fellow atheist colleagues, I assume otherwise. Like yourself, I am a Harvard educated college professor (at a local community college. Received my BA from BYU and MBA from Harvard Business School). Yourself and those who comment on your blog have painted quite an unfair strawman of our quiet and friendly hometown. You continuously claim that your issue with the entire ordeal is a defiance of the United States Constitution. We both know this is completely and utterly false. Your issue is with those who have faith, and have the cajones to express that. You are the vocal minority, and with that precious title comes unnecessary responsibilities I suppose. I can only imagine how admirable you feel that your superior intellect has prevailed over a town of God fearing citizens. Even after an apology was issued (which was hardly necessary), you continue to stick your nose in the air.
I know you’ve gotten numerous emails, and will most likely continue to get them. Some more eloquent than others. With that said, I pray that you understand our side in this issue. A town of 15,000 people and you have made it a priority to make this story breaking news. So much good comes out of our community, and all I’ve heard is the Chicago professor who had an issue with a moment of silence during a graduation that had no relevance to him. For somebody who believes everything came from nothing, I’m hardly surprised. It reminds me of a question a friend of mine asked a high school science teacher my junior year here at Lebanon. “Because termites cannot digest food, they have little critters in their stomach called the flagella that help them do so. The termites cannot function without the flagella, and the flagella cannot survive without the termite. Which evolved first?”
Yours in Christ,
Tom.
Here’s my response (to which I’ll alert Mr. Chiusano):
Dear Mr. Chiusano,
Our academic credentials, and the fact that we both went to Harvard, are of course completely irrelevant in this matter, which involves a clear violation of the Constitution. You claim that such a violation is “completely and utterly false,” but give not a shred of evidence that Principal Lowery’s prayers at graduation were Constitutionally allowable.
And my issue is not, in fact, with those who have faith, but with those who have faith and try to impose it on others. As you may know from reading the three letters from Lebanon High students who wrote to me and Hemant Mehta (I now have a fourth), all is not well in your community. The reason you don’t know that is because the relentless proselytizing for Christianity by Principal Lowery and many of your neighbors has cowed those with opposing views into silence. While you see your hometown as “quiet and friendly,” that’s simply a facade. The minute someone disagrees with your religious beliefs, or tries to stand up for the U.S. Constitution, that facade crumbles into anger, aggression, and sheer hatred. I should know, because I’ve received a lot of emails full of vitriol from your “quiet and friendly” neighbors! If you really were that friendly, three of the four students who dissented wouldn’t be afraid to make their names public. But they know that if they did, Christians like yourself would harass and terrify them, as they have done all over America. That kind of behavior is shameful, and something I wouldn’t expect from people who call themselves Christians.
It is in fact that tyranny of the religious majority that mandated the writing of the First Amendment, which was designed to protect all people, believers and nonbelievers alike, from having different religious views forced upon them by the organs of government. You don’t seem to understand that, nor the fact that the courts have repeatedly ruled that acts like Principal Lowery’s prayers do in fact violate the First Amendment.
What I fail to understand is why people like you must force your religion on captive audiences like those at the Lebanon High School graduation. Is it not sufficient for you to pray at home, in church, or even in school (silently and to yourself)? Why must you proclaim your belief in God and Jesus in public to an audience that may not all share your views?
As for myself, yes, I’m a nonbeliever, but in my official capacity as a teacher at the University of Chicago, or when I talk in public schools, I never proselytize for atheism. I could never get up at a high school graduation and tell the students that I didn’t believe in God, and that they shouldn’t either. That, too, is against the law, and I would obey it.
Finally, let me correct you on your statements about evolution, for you appear to be just as ignorant about that science as about the Constitution. First, the “critters” in termite guts that help them digest cellulose are not flagella, but flagellatedprotists. “Flagella” are the whiplike organs that help them move, but the protists themselves are called “flagellates.” You apparently are arguing that evolution cannot explain the strong mutual dependence of the termites and flagellates, which form what we in biology call a “mutualism”: each species benefits from its association with the other.
But that mutualism, like all mutualisms, can be easily explained by evolution. First, not all termites harbor flagellates: only what they call the “lower” termites. Other termites have bacteria that help them digest cellulose. Second, those bacteria and flagellates are not absolutely required for termites to digest cellulose, for all termites retain some ability to digest it without their symbiotic microorganisms. So here’s one evolutionary explanation. Assume that the ancestral termite had a poor ability to digest cellulose, and ate other things as well. It was then invaded by a protist that had the ability to digest cellulose, and to excrete some of those digestive products. In such a case, the termite and its little passenger would both benefit. And, over time, each of them would evolve adaptations that, by helping itself, would also help its partner. The termite would become more hospitable to the flagellate (or bacteria), for that organism helps the termite immensely; and the flagellate (or bacterium) would become more useful to the termite, for a healthy termite is something that the flagellate needs. (The termite, is, after all, its home and protector.)
Over a period of time, this could result in a very strong dependence of the two species on each other—to the point that neither could live without the other. This has also happened in lichens, which are a mutualistic association of a fungus and an alga, neither of which can live apart. But in both cases it is no problem for us to envision how such a codependency can evolve in a step-by-step way through natural selection.
So there is a biology lesson for you, Mr. Chiusano. I hope you learn it better than you learned your civics lesson. And, if you really don’t accept evolution, which appears to be the case, you might benefit from reading my book Why Evolution is True. It’s a pity that there’s no book called Why the Constitution is Law.
The atheist-bashing continues, and since there aren’t many new ways to attack nonbelievers, the critiques take the form of very slightly altered but still-familiar arguments. The latest is an essay in the Spectator penned bty the conservative and religion-friendly philosopher Roger Scruton, who specializes in aesthetics. But his piece, “Humans hunger for the sacred, why can’t the new atheists understand that?“, suggests that he also specializes in anaesthetics.
I don’t want to waste a lot of time on this, for the whole tenor of the piece is ludicrous: all humans hunger for the “sacred”; religion gives it to them but atheism denies it to its adherents. But his whole thesis depends on a semantic trick: conflating “sacredness” with “that which we value in our lives.” Using the word “sacred” to refer to things that we crave and respect, like love, books, children, or art, is a deliberate co-option of the term “sacred” as it’s used in religion—as something connected with the divine. Surely a philosopher like Scruton is trained to pay attention to words, and so must have performed this conflation deliberately, as a way to bash atheism.
I give some excerpts from Scruton’s article:
Hence there is another question, that seems to be much nearer to the heart of what we, in the western world, are now going through: what is the sacred, and why do people cling to it? Sacred things, Émile Durkheim once wrote, are ‘set aside and forbidden’. To touch them with profane hands is to wipe away their aura, so that they flutter to earth and die. To those who respect them, however, sacred things are the ‘real presence’ of the supernatural, illuminated by a light that shines from the edge of the world.
How do we understand this experience, and what does it tell us? It is tempting to look for an evolutionary explanation. After all, sacred things seem to include all those events that really matter to our genes — falling in love, marriage, childbirth, death. The sacred place is the place where vows are made and renewed, where suffering is embraced and accepted, and where the life of the tribe is endowed with an eternal significance.
He then has the temerity to suggest—nay, to assert—that love of the “sacred” must have been favored by natural selection in our ancestors:
Humans with the benefit of this resource must surely withstand the storms of misfortune rather better than the plain-thinking individualists who compete with them. Look at the facts in the round and it seems likely that humans without a sense of the sacred would have died out long ago. For that same reason, the hope of the new atheists for a world without religion is probably as vain as the hope for a society without aggression or a world without death.
Here Scruton defines “sacred” as “those beliefs which enhanced the reproduction of our ancestors, or the evolutionary remnants of those beliefs.” That, of course, opens the door for a whole host of other things, including taboos of all sorts.
Atheists, of course, lack this affinity for the sacred:
A person with a sense of the sacred can lead a consecrated life, which is to say a life that is received and offered as a gift. An intimation of this is contained in our relations with those who are dear to us. . . [JAC: Note the co-option again of the religious word “consecrated,” as if someone who loves others and feels connected to them is “consecrated.”]
. . . Atheists dismiss that kind of argument. They tell us that the ‘self’ is an illusion, and that the human person is ‘nothing but’ the human animal, just as law is ‘nothing but’ relations of social power, sexual love ‘nothing but’ the procreative urge and the Mona Lisa ‘nothing but’ a spread of pigments on a canvas. Getting rid of what Mary Midgley calls ‘nothing buttery’ is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things — sex, pictures, people — we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step towards understanding why and how we live in a world of sacred things.
Show me a single scientist who says that the Mona Lisa is “nothing but a smear of pigments”! That’s just a base canard written by a philosopher with an agenda. We are indeed made of molecules that obey the laws of physics, as is the Mona Lisa, but we’re also evolved collections of molecules whose evolution occurred in small groups of hominins; and we also have emotions and the ability to learn, themselves products of evolution that can be affected by our environments. These notions fully explain our strong emotional responses to some—but not all—stimuli. (Actually, I find Guernica and The Isenheim Altarpiece far more moving than the Mona Lisa.) And those responses, like love, may be physical phenomena that are partly evolved but still meaningful to us. Does Scruton really think that atheists don’t experience the wonder of love or the beauty of art? If he does, he doesn’t know many atheists. I’m tempted to say that the man is either ignorant of the world, possessed by some hidden agenda against atheism, or simply a fool.
Finally, Scruton’s proof that atheism rejects the “sacred” is—wait for it—the soullessness of Communist regimes! Yes, Stalin and Mao, not Denmark or Sweden, represent the apotheosis of godlessness and rejection of the sacred.
Nothing brought this home to me more vividly than the experience of communism, in places where there was no other recourse against the surrounding inhumanity than the life of prayer. Communism made the scientific worldview into the foundation of social order: people were regarded as ‘nothing but’ the assembled mass of their instincts and needs. Its aim was to replace social life with a cold calculation for survival, so that people would live as competing atoms, in a condition of absolute enmity and distrust. Anything else would jeopardise the party’s control. In such circumstances people lived in a world of secrets, where it was dangerous to reveal things, and where every secret that was peeled away from the other person revealed another secret beneath it.
Nevertheless the victims of communism tried to hold on to the things that were sacred to them, and which spoke to them of the free and responsible life. The family was sacred; so too was religion, whether Christian or Jewish. So too was the underground store of knowledge — the forbidden knowledge of the nation’s history and its claim to their loyalty. Those were the things that people would not exchange or relinquish even when required by the party to betray them. They were the consecrated treasures, hidden below the desecrated cities, where they glowed more brightly in the dark. Thus there grew an underground world of freedom and truth, where it was no longer necessary, as Havel put it, ‘to live within the lie’.
First of all, Communism, though a social experiment, wasn’t an instantiation of pure science, for there were no controls, and it rested on verbal theory that hadn’t been tested. It was an ideology—based on a dislike of the supposed evils of capitalism— that was put into practice but then corrupted by powermongers who used it to control their people through cults of the individual.
Those motivated by godlessness don’t seek to set up regimes like those of Stalin or Mao, nor did the vast bulk of persecution under those regimes take place against the faithful. And, I should note, even under religiously ideological regimes people treasure and secretly preserve “the sacred” against the ministrations of oppressive dogma. Do you think that in rigidly Catholic countries people give up the “sacredness” of nonmarital sex? It was, after all, the Catholic Church that set up the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which from 1559 to 1966 told Catholics that they couldn’t read works by Gide, Milton, Voltaire, Galileo, and Victor Hugo. Do you think Catholics refrained from reading them, or refrain to this day from using birth control, denying themselves the “sacred” pleasure of sex?
And, of course, Islamic society also represses the “sacred”: in many places the only book people ever read is the Qur’an, and they can’t exercise either freedom of dress (which women often deal with by wearing nice clothes under their burqas) or freedom of love and sex (what’s worse than not being able to marry someone whom you love?). It’s not atheism that denies the “sacred”, but totalitarian ideology: the desire to withhold what people want as a form of control.
If Scruton wants to see how much a truly secular society devalues the sacred, I suggest that he get himself to Sweden or Denmark. Do the Danes and Swedes abjure what Scruton calls the “sacred”? Do they not value life and love and art? Not that I’ve seen! Do they not appreciate knowledge and literature? Who, after all, gives out the Nobel Prizes?
Maybe I’m just grumpy today, but Scruton’s article seems completely dumb to me—just a tricked-out way to bash atheists from someone who doesn’t like them. And in his post hoc justification for something that Scruton believes a priori on purely personal and emotional grounds, he’s behaving exactly like a theologian.
Philosophers, clean up your field. It’s people like Scruton who give you a bad name.
In the video below, you can see Anthony Grayling and, especially, Christopher Hitchens, defend atheists’ adoption of what Scruton calls “the sacred.” Scruton himself is there and speaks for the last minute, conflating a feeling of transcendence with the existence of the transcendent.
