{"id":2490,"date":"2014-05-18T12:25:49","date_gmt":"2014-05-18T17:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=2490"},"modified":"2014-05-19T13:20:52","modified_gmt":"2014-05-19T18:20:52","slug":"freezing-peaches-at-harvard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2014\/05\/18\/freezing-peaches-at-harvard\/","title":{"rendered":"Freezing Peaches at Harvard"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m truly, deeply, sincerely hoping I’ve got some of the key facts wrong in the great Boston Black Mass clusterfuffle<\/a>, because what it looks like is that Harvard as an institution paid some fairly cheap lip service<\/a> to the notion of free expression all the while actively working to literally<\/em> marginalize the Satanists and drive them off campus. James Croft explains<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The outcry was sufficient to first get the event moved off campus, then to get it effectively cancelled, with the latest reports suggesting<\/a> that some version of the Mass was held in a Harvard Square Chinese restaurant beneath a comedy studio, no longer under the auspices of the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club. The jokes just write themselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What disturbs me most about how this turned out is not that Harvard’s administration\u00a0privileged Christianity over a marginalized minority\u00a0worldview,\u00a0but rather that the Humanist Community at Harvard<\/a>\u00a0passed on a chance to engage in “building, educating, and nurturing a diverse community of atheists, agnostics, and the nonreligious at Harvard” by engaging constructively with the Satanists. As you might already know, these Satanists are actually atheists<\/a>, part of the diverse community that the HCH claims to support and represent. Instead of supporting Satanist\u00a0efforts to engage in what is effectively a piece of provocative performance art, HCH chaplains such as Epstein<\/a> and Stedman<\/a> have condemned the Satanists for “mocking a sincerely practiced Catholic ritual” and engaging in “direct mockery of Catholic tradition and belief.”<\/p>\n

The Black Mass is a form of\u00a0anti-religious mockery, to be sure, but then so was Candide<\/em><\/a>, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters<\/em><\/a>, The Life of Brian<\/a><\/em>, much of\u00a0 the best of South Park<\/em>, and basically every parody religion<\/a>. Mockery has long been and always will be part of the Humanist arsenal for freeing minds from religious bondage, and it is a terrible shame to see the brilliant Humanists of Harvard advocating for unilateral disarmament on this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m truly, deeply, sincerely hoping I’ve got some of the key facts wrong in the great Boston Black Mass clusterfuffle,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":2089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,25,10,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-free-expression","category-free-speech","category-politics","category-theocracy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}