Correction And Mocking Those Who Would Walk In The Footsteps of Bruno

I have gone through yesterday's post and corrected a quote I got wrong, I had to go digging for the video on which I saw it which is the problem of quoting people through transcription - there is no word-search function for audio that I'm aware of.   As well as several other points. 

Re-reading it for corrections, I left out two of the biggest reasons I think the criticism and debunkery racket is generally considered to be above criticism, other than the inefficiency of fact checking in the ink on paper era.  I think one of those is the thing farthest from the truth, that such debunkery presents the best facts out of the diligence of the critic or debunker which is ironic when it is generally the shallowest of intellectual endeavors.   It is a rare critic, as such, who is as careful as the constructive quasi or genuine scholar of a subject.   I have said that in the period since I started reading theology that it has astonished me how many of them, and not only in the modern era, are among the most careful, the most wide reaching the most even handed and fair minded of academic writers I'm aware of.  Hans Kung is only one of many such modern scholars and he is carrying on what is a long tradition of such expansive breath, depth of scope and rigorous and fair consideration of his intellectual opponents.  

Related to the misrepresentation of the debunkery of modern criticism as rigorous scholars is the cowardice that is the most common response to a bully, which is the general character of these big, bold, iconoclasts who present themselves as brave  in the footsteps of  Giordano Bruno when they are not only in absolutely no danger from the modern establishment or even, really, from religious fanatics, they generally have great expectations of profiting from their writing, maybe even getting a teaching gig out of it, talk show invitations, at least.   I think the force of cowardice should never be ignored in the culture of modernism which is generally the merely credentialed gulling the gullible that they are the biggest, boldest trash talkers there are.  Much of the method of any era's peddlers of words and ideas is related to the kind of PR that is not unknown in the phony illusion of American or Japanese pro-wrestling.  Only it's physically less rigorous and even less likely to injure those applying merely words of violence. 

I have to say I read with pleasure Marilynne Robinson's take down of John Spong, who I've always thought was a jerk.  I should mention that one of the reasons for the influence of the debunkery bunch is that it's a lot easier and breezier to read than real scholarship.   It's easy, one of the greatest motives in corruption that plagues popular culture.