About Me
- Russell Blackford
- Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).
2 comments:
I suppose it all depends on local laws, whether they can charge the guy with anything. With any luck, though, a shrink will pick up on his manifest mental pathology and recommend that he be shipped off to the nearest asylum for the safety of the general public; no charges required. (Does that still happen, these days?)
What jumped out at me about the brief Vancouver Sun article you linked to was this: "The man, brought into police custody Wednesday, is suspected of having created hundreds of email and Twitter accounts to harass scientists, atheists and public figures who diverge from his pseudo-religious world view."
Mabus' religious world view -- a variety of conservative Christianity emphasizing creationism -- seems to be in every way consistent with quite ordinary and widely held religious beliefs. His outrageous, obsessive stalking/threatening behavior in defense of those beliefs is unusual, of course, but there's nothing about the world view he defends in such a disturbing and anti-social fashion that deserves the label "pseudo-religious." I can only conclude that the unnecessary and wholly inaccurate "pseudo" was added in order to put distance between his religious views and widely accepted religious views -- distance that does not in fact exist. The automatic, knee-jerk, ridiculously overblown deference to and defensiveness about religion in public discourse strikes again. Heaven forfend that anyone should admit the plain truth that this lunatic's religious beliefs are in fact quite mainstream and ordinary, and that only his obsessive and psychotic defensiveness about those beliefs is unusual.
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