Ran across this story about the Brooklyn College Sociology’s Department electing Timothy Shortell as its chair. Shortell has a number of defects, but the one I’m interested in here is that he is one of these annoying fundamentalist atheists that I’ve talked about previously.
The sound bite being repeated is that Shortell referred to religious people as “moral retards,” but that’s actually one of the least objectionable claims from his essay, Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained. Shortell appears to subscribe to the Madalyn Murray O’Hair school of atheism in professing religion not only to be wrong, but religion and religious people to be suspect if not downright evil.
For example, Shortell writes of Christians,
American Christians like to think that religious violence is a problem only for other faiths. In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they’ll just as soon kill you. For your own good, of course. Those who believe that they are acting out the divine plan are the most dangerous sort in the contemporary world. Make no mistake.
The paragraph just prior to that one includes the “moral retards” quote,
On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like bad taste. This immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others. One only has to read the newspaper to see the results of their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude and belittle. They make a virtue of closed-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot.
Presumably Shortell is dismayed by the successes enjoyed by “moral retards” such as Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. who went around pointing their fingers at others and relying on their religious faith to inform their respective movements.
Ah, yes, America’s academic intelligensia at its finest.
Source:
Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained. Timothy Shortell, Anti-Naturals, Issue 19.
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