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I was quite shocked by Alf Baird’s article (14 February). I reckon many Scottish ‘senior academics’ are only too keen to flee to promotion in other parts of the world (or south of the border) if Alf Baird’s narrowmindedness characterises their Scottish working environment. I know of one at least who said she was astonished by the sense of freedom and space she experienced: ‘I felt I could breathe’, on leaving the claustrophobic, gossipy atmosphere of her Scottish working environment.
Helene Witcher
Most of those of us contemplating voting Yes in the referendum will certainly not be doing so to achieve the kind of inward-looking protectionist Little Scotland that seems to be favoured by Professor Baird and Alasdair Gray. And many of those who vote No will have done so because they are terrified that the Baird/Gray model might just be the one we end up with.
Peter Graves
Alf Baird’s article would be a textbook example of narra nationalism, were it not for its incoherence.
Ann Caldwell
Readers of SR may remember that I wrote a piece about Eileen Reid’s good suggestion that Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard University should be invited to Scotland to conduct some public discussions on the subject of the Scottish referendum. (I had bumped into Professor Sandel in Edinburgh and he indicated that he would be keen to do it.) Thirteen weeks ago I emailed Ewan Angus, whose name I got from the BBC Scotland website, asking that Eileen’s idea might be taken up. I said I would report back. So far, I have received no acknowledgement. I will now try snail mail.
Ron Ferguson
The uncommunicative Ewan Angus is commissioning editor, television, BBC Scotland – Ed
I can only think back to my own days in an English classroom (14 February). The English teachers had a penchant for abandoning the curriculum and introducing something different and interesting. I think if someone of Ian Hamilton’s pedigree had produced an article on an important topic it might well have displaced Keats or Chaucer, etc, for a period. There would be discussion and debate and we would have made up our own minds about the content.
Stewart Wright
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty and, boy, do some people not have certainty in spades? The notion that the scriptures are literally, scientifically, socially and psychologically true for all people in all places for all times is patently absurd as is the belief that the levitical code worked out for a desert people over 2,500 years ago should be normative for us in the development of our moral principles today. In her recent book ‘Dishonest to God’, Dame Mary Warnock writes: ‘It would now be generally agreed that to treat the Bible as a kind of once-for-all revelation, with no regard either to its historical context or its variable truth content, is a view to be embraced only by cranks and fanatics’.
So the question arises: why are some people literalists and so dogmatic in their dismissal of people like me as being inadequate in our faith? I suppose it has to do with a need for psychological security, a need for a certainty to shield them from the risk of living with questions to which there is no clear answer. I personally feel sorry for the ‘fundies’ – they are missing out on all the richness and diversity of life in their clinging to a view of scripture which is manifestly false, or, in the case of Roman Catholics, to a view of the Church’s inerrancy firmly rooted in the middle ages. We are under orders to ‘love God with our minds’ – there are too many who don’t want to venture down that path of reason and inquiry.
David A Keddie
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