The secret police will never get me

"The secret in the poet's heart remains unknown to the secret police,
despite their ability to predict his every thought, utterance, and
movement by monitoring the cerebroscope which he must wear day and
night. We can know which thoughts pass through a man's head without
understanding them. Our inviolable uniqueness lies in our poetic
ability to say unique and obscure things, not in our ability to say
obvious things to ourselves alone."

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.123

The Rise of Atheism

There's an interesting convention on in Melbourne Australia this weekend. A global meeting of atheists led by Richard Dawkins. It is being covered by a blog on the ABC website. It will be interesting to see if the convention rings with the tones Alister McGrath attributes to the new atheists in his book The Twilight of Atheism:

Western atheism now finds itself in something of a twilight zone. Once a worldview with a positive view of reality, it seems to have become a permanent pressure group, its defensive agenda dominated by concerns about limiting the growing political influence of religion.