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| From guard |
From jb in the comments:
I haven’t read Not Born Yesterday, but if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat I can strongly recommend The Enigma of Reason, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. It argues that, contrary to what philosophers have believed for centuries, the fundamental purpose of the human faculty of reason is not to understand the world through logical analysis of facts (something we are actually quite bad at), but to win arguments with other people. I found it a difficult book that required sustained focus to follow, not because there is anything wrong with the prose (which is admirably clear), but because the book puts forward new ideas on a subject that is intrinsically difficult. It was worth it though, and I came away feeling that I had a better understanding of what is going on in people’s heads (my own included). [PF: my emphasis]The J & M cartoons have been going for many years now. The cartoonist goes by the name “author”, and his books by the presumably pseudonymous “Mohammed Jones”. The latest book has a foreword by the Chicago professor of Evolutionary science, Jerry Coyne -- who I met here at at a talk he gave at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club a few years back. I have his signed copy of “Faith and Reason”. In any case, my point is that these comics are no more Islamophobic than they are Christophobic. They make fun of doctrines, of religious infallibilities, of blind faith, of the inanities of religions generally.
