A religious schism in IDW land ~ is Charles Murray headed for hell?

Charles Murray fund-raising 
for neo-Nazis and racists
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Steven Pinker and Charles Murray are fighting over the existence of souls in the World Street Journal.

As we've seen, militant atheist Pinker is perfectly capable of ignoring the religiosity of his allies when it suits him, as when he gave a mild critique of Peter Thiel's antichrist-themed speech, without a single complaint about Thiel's religious extremism.

But I guess this is where Pinker draws the line: Murray published an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Can Science Reckon with the Human Soul?" apparently in support of a book he recently published. 

If I were to be cynical I'd say the difference between the way Pinker responds to Peter Thiel's religiosity versus Murray's is due to Thiel having far more money to donate to causes that Pinker cares about, like anti-trans and anti-DEI than Murray. 

Murray could be seen not long ago proudly fundraising for neo-Nazis Emil Kirkegaard and Bo Winegard, whom Pinker likes well enough to appear on their podcast and support their race pseudoscience cause.

I don't have a horse in this race. Both Murray and Pinker are gutter racists with a devotion to promoting race pseudoscience and both are anti-DEI and anti-trans. Pinker is a weasel and Murray is a ghoul who famously wanted to put the children of poor people into orphanages.

But it's always a good time watching associates of the Intellectual Dark Web fight each other.

On October 16 Murray published an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Can Science Reckon with the Human Soul?" 

Murray is supposedly retired but that doesn't stop him from continuing his career-long efforts to make the world a worse place.

Now I had assumed that like most libertarians, Murray was an atheist - their thought leader Ayn Rand was an atheist. And he was, but now he's having second thoughts, apparently through the feminizing influence of his wife and the supremacy of Western Civilization (aka White people):

Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. 

Murray's religious epiphany offers that old chestnut, the god of the gaps:

I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should. It took 18 years before Einstein’s theory of special relativity accommodated the anomaly. 

We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.

If we have not yet explained "anomalies" therefore it's a god.

Pinker responded on October 29 with Charles Murray’s Unscientific Case for the Soul, calling Murray's argument the soul of the gaps:

He admits that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet his “soul of the gaps” argument—there’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it—is extraordinarily weak.

Charles Murray responded the same day with Pinker Whiffs at My Case for the Human Soul. He takes several paragraphs to get there, but ultimately throws in the towel:

The empirical challenge to the materialist position from terminal lucidity implies that consciousness can exist independently of the brain but isn’t necessarily “evidence for the human soul.” That was a speculative leap on my part. I plead guilty.

But he got some attention for his book and that was likely the point of this exercise. In spite of Murray's spiritual concerns, the endless quest for material wealth, even after being retired for years, seems ultimately what matters most to Murray.

Meanwhile, Pinker's leading fan-boy Jerry Coyne, who finally took note of Peter Thiel's religiosity very recently is now mad at Arthur C. Brooks and others, including Murray, for their  religiosity:

"groups" meaning "race"
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This bio implies (Brook's) a conservative whose trade books are mostly of the self-help genre. And this one article certainly is in that genre, because it gives people license to accept God. It’s part of the new spate of books touting belief in divine beings—of a piece with recent works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Ross Douthat, and so on. Why this sudden surge of goddiness? You tell me!

Because they are all grifters. 

Charles Murray's entire career of shitting on the poor has been funded by AEI and other right-wingers. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had a long association with AEI; the same with Brooks and Douthat. 

When their patrons decide it's a good political move right now to promote religion, they are going to promote religion.

Mystery solved.

And Charles Murray's Christianity, as is so often the case, has not stopped him from being a wicked man. Just recently he could be seen on X/Twitter promoting his 2021 book "Facing Reality" which argues that Black people are an existential threat to the United States because, per race pseudoscience, they are genetically inclined to criminality. Murray's atheist friend Razib Khan was in total agreement.

If there is a Jesus in heaven, the same Jesus who said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me," then Charles Murray is certainly bound for hell.