Estranged notions

Strange Notions is a website devoted to discussion between Catholics and atheists and operated by Brandon Vogt.  It’s a worthwhile enterprise.  When he was getting the website started, Brandon kindly invited me to contribute to it, and also asked if he could reprint old posts from my blog.  I told him I had no time to contribute new articles but that it was fine with me if he wanted to reprint older pieces as long as they were not edited without my permission.  I have not kept a close eye on the site, but it seems that quite a few old blog posts of mine have been reprinted.  I hope some of Brandon’s readers find them useful, but I have to say that a glance at the site’s comboxes makes me wonder whether allowing such reprints was after all a good idea.  Certainly it has a downside.

Blogging, especially for a personal blog like mine, is a very different kind of writing than the sort one does for a book, a journal article, or a general audience magazine (whether print or online).  Blog posts are typically written in an ad hoc way.  They are often commentaries on the controversy du jour, direct replies to an article or blog post that recently appeared at some other site, responses to reader comments or questions, or reflections spawned by what the blogger happens to have been reading or thinking about lately.  The style of a blog post is informal and more intimate than that of a book or article, and more likely to reflect the author “with his hair down” than those other sorts of writing typically do.  It also reflects the interests, background knowledge, and attitudes of the blog’s regular readership.  The author knows that he can address certain issues, casually refer to certain other writers or ideas, and make certain jokes or offhand political remarks that would not be appropriate in other kinds of writing, because most of his readers, including the ones who don’t necessarily agree with him, already know “where’s he’s coming from.” 

The tone and content of a particular blog post are inevitably going to reflect the circumstances under which it was written.  If a blogger is replying to something a reasonable and polite critic has said, the tone is likelier to be gentlemanly.  If he is replying instead to a nasty and unreasonable person, the tone is likelier to be hard-edged.  If he is commenting on a matter of academic controversy, there might be a casual use of technical terminology or references to writers and ideas with which the average reader will be unfamiliar, whereas on more general topics a blog post might be more accessible to the non-specialist.  But in most cases, a blog post is simply not going to be written the way an article for a general audience would be, especially if the writer happens to be an academic. 

In short, context is crucial and has to be kept in mind if one is to give a fair reading of what a blogger has written.  It is hard enough to get even some of the regular readers of one’s own blog to keep this in mind.  I can hardly ever say anything about God, the soul, or natural law without some atheist reader complaining that I have not, in the particular blog post he happens to have bothered reading, proved the existence of God or the soul or the soundness of the natural law approach to ethics -- as if I ought to be expected to start from first principles and repeat everything I’ve already written elsewhere every single time I write a blog post on those subjects.  (And of course if I do go on at greater length about these matters, the same readers will accuse me of being too long-winded.)  It is also impossible to write about political matters without a contingent of crackpots, whether of the right or of the left, reading all sorts of ridiculous things into what one has said.  (A recent example here.) 

Naturally, the context of a post is even more likely to be ignored when it is reprinted years later at a very different website.  A case in point is provided by the post I wrote about a year and a half ago on my conversion from theism to atheism and then back again to theism.  It is currently being reprinted at Strange Notions, broken up (as the original was not) into three parts.  Quite understandably, some of the Strange Notions readers seem baffled by it.  Who are all these academic philosophical writers I refer to?  Why do I refer to them rather than just state the actual arguments for theism that I think are compelling?  Why don’t I say much about Catholicism, specifically?  Why the emphasis on philosophy to the exclusion of other aspects of religion?  Who do I think I am to suppose Strange Notions readers would want to read a three part piece on all this stuff? 

Those would be fair questions to raise about an article written for a non-academic website devoted to presenting Catholic apologetics to atheists.  But the article was not written for that website, and it was not my idea to reprint it there.  It was written for the personal blog of an academic philosopher, for readers not all of whom are Catholics but many or even most of whom have some acquaintance with and interest in academic philosophy, who are already familiar with the arguments I have given for theism in various books and articles but who are interested in knowing more of the details of how, intellectually speaking, I made a transition from atheism to theism.  I don’t know how useful the piece would be to general readers who aren’t coming from that sort of background -- if it is useful to any of them, great -- but I wasn’t writing it for them and it shouldn’t be judged as if I had been. 

I notice also that some Strange Notions readers are bothered by the polemical tone of some of the other posts of mine reprinted there, or by the fact that I don’t address this or that issue related to the subjects I discuss in the various posts.  Here too it has to be kept in mind that none of the posts were written as general purpose apologetics pieces in the first place, nor were any of them written for that site or reprinted there at my suggestion.  Some of them originally appeared in the middle of extended exchanges with other bloggers, and have been ripped from that original context.  For example, the post on the cosmological argument that Strange Notions has reprinted was written years ago in the middle of an ongoing exchange with Jerry Coyne and a couple of other New Atheist type bloggers, all of whom were gratuitously condescending and nasty.  My response to them was, accordingly, hard edged.  But removed from that original context and presented as if it were a general purpose stand alone article about the cosmological argument -- which is the impression given by the Strange Notions reprint -- that piece is bound to come off as needlessly aggressive and inappropriate for a website advertised (as Strange Notions is) as devoted to “charitable” discussion.  Had I written it for that site, or for an audience of fair-minded atheists (and I have always acknowledged that there are many such atheists) the tone would have been very different.  Strange Notions readers should also be aware that the criticisms some of them raise against that post were ones I answered years ago in a couple of follow up posts, here and here.

(As my longtime readers know, I maintain that polemics are sometimes -- by no means always, but sometimes -- appropriate and even called for, and I have given philosophical and theological reasons for this claim.  Readers interested in those reasons are directed here, here, here, here, and here.)

Another post reprinted at Strange Notions, which deals with the Catholic understanding of tradition, was written years ago as part of an exchange philosopher Dale Tuggy and I were having over the doctrine of the Trinity.  It was not in any way meant as a complete or stand alone treatment of the subject.  But the unwary reader might get the opposite impression given that it was taken from context and reprinted at a general purpose apologetics site.  Similar remarks could be made about some of the other posts of mine reprinted there.

Again, I hope at least some Strange Notions readers, whether theist or atheist, find the material useful.  If Brandon wants to keep reprinting my old stuff, I certainly appreciate his interest and he is free to do so if he thinks it conducive to the mission of his site.  But I would urge his readers to keep in mind the original context of the posts.  Estranged from that context, some notions are bound to seem stranger than they really are.