An easy calculation says the heat isn’t worth it to people with tenure issues and professional reputations at stake. Destroying your career to further some blog debate which won’t affect anything anyway sort of thing.

Not that it isn’t the most critically important topic in the contemporary landscape.
Not that its possible outcomes aren’t desperately crucial to all of us.

Just that the real power, in the US and UK at least, isn’t morally clear enough to be able to tolerate open debate. Nor is it morally clean enough to abstain from pressuring said academics in all kinds of unpleasant ways, should they provide a forum for that intolerable debate.
Bill Donohue’s not the only thuggish zealot at work these days.

In a related note: Eric Shinseki writes a letter

I am greatly concerned that OSD processes have often become ad hoc and long established conventional processes are atrophying. Specifically, there are areas that need your attention as the ad hoc processes often do not adequately consider professional military judgment and advice. . . . . Second, there is a lack of strategic review to frame our day-to-day issues . . . . Third, there has been a lack of explicit discussion on risk in most decisions. . . . Finally, I find it unhelpful to participate in senior level decision-making meetings without structured agendas, objectives, pending decisions and other traditional means of time management.

I predict deep unease at rainbow sherbet.

There was no money. There was no robbery.

And there was no murder either.

Oh dear. All the chess pieces are on the floor now.

Future scenarios: more Knoxvilles, fewer Knoxvilles, as the polarity either heightens and deepens, or subsides. You choose!

Unless you’re like some who believe they have no direct influence on where all this goes and therefore are justified in pursuing immediate self-gratification wherever it leads.

ScOfV @#295:
…you refuse to condemn the beneficiaries of his [Donohue’s] intemperate remarks…

YOU are a beneficiary of said remarks! You! Yourself!
You are youare youare! And I condemn you!
You are condemned! Nyahh nyahh.
You like it! So does Myers! It’s exciting and fun!
You are also an intellectually gifted crazy person. Yes you are.
Myers not so much so.
I especially like the part where I say you’re throwing your own auto-obscured self-criticisms onto me, and then you say that I’m doing that to you without even mentioning I already said that.

Crazy person is okay but it’s better for the rest if you can carry it consciously.
A little self-doubt now and then, yeah. It can be beneficial in so may ways.
I know this from much time spent in rigorously unbiased introspection.

Hah! Unh! Yeeaaahh!
Hoopa hoopa!
Uhmmmmm…YEAH!

‘Bye

Gotta disagree with you there.

“Well, if truth, reason, virtue, etc are not objective qualities that people exemplify to varying degrees, but are rather relative to each person, we have a way out: everyone is as smart and good as anyone else to himself. Then democracy rests on no lie, since everyone really is cognitively and morally equal. Relativism steps in to save democracy from its noble lie. Thus relativism finds a foothold. But relativism is rubbish; so where does that leave democracy?”

But carry on ranting, it’s a free country.

The issue is less religion than our continuing [animal] habit of relying on assumption and faith. “Faith Explained” would interest me more as a title. Though Boyer might even agree. The absurdities of grand faith are a byproduct of the biological function of an everyday variety we live by. We’re pattern-makers. “synecdoches for community” Our patterns are collective that’s all.
Still, my only question, for all concerned, is this:
Would you prefer the rule of reason or the rule of law?
History has shown the rule of reason to be a failure. Those that have claimed to represent it in the past have given us the rule of unmediated faith; and hell on earth.

while I am perhaps the last person on earth who is well-placed to tell anyone else that winding people up for the sake of it is a really silly and childish thing to do … well, winding people up for the sake of it is a really silly and childish thing to do, and furthermore Dawkinsite militant atheists holier-than-thou “secular liberals” are as annoying as fundies in their own way and perhaps deserve a bit of winding up too

How are you going to do this? Make more death threats over a bit of doggerel? Have powerful, tax-exempt religious organizations use government money to prosletyze? Or maybe use their not-inconsiderable resources to pass legislation that obligates the rest of us to hew to their silly sectarian beliefs?

Yeah, that might wind up a few people.