Differently Abled Or Simply More Virtuous In One Respect

June 4, 2010 By 2 Comments

Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency.  Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s [...]

Filed Under: Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Ethics, Evidence, Featured, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Secularism, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Virtues Tagged With: 2 Comments

A Little Evidence That Atheists and Theists Don’t “Simply Think Differently”

June 4, 2010 By 7 Comments

In order to respond to certain misunderstandings based on this post’s original, provocative title (Do Atheists Just Have Asperger’s?) I have re-edited it and retitled it.  There is now a new opening paragraph and extra concluding paragraphs. It is often suggested that the difference between theists and atheists might simply stem from differences in their naturally given [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Evidence, Featured, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, News, News Discussion, Philosophy, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences 7 Comments

Teen Werewolves

May 26, 2010 By 1 Comment

Am I just getting older or are teens really becoming a whole lot less distinguishable from children? The wisdom of a teen werewolf: I don’t believe any one is just human.  Everyone’s got something else mixed in with them, just they’ve got to actually look inside themselves to see what it is. Thanks to Brandy [...]

Filed Under: News, News Discussion, Pop Culture, Social Psychology, Videos Tagged With: , , , 1 Comment

Is Belief In Love Like Belief In God?

May 25, 2010 By 1 Comment

Roger Friedland finds an interesting correlation between the two kinds of belief and examines its possible causes and implications: We found that belief in God has no impact on young people’s sex lives. College virgins are no more likely to believe in God than non-virgins. Even those who took a virginity pledge are not sexually [...]

Filed Under: God, Psychology, Sex, Social Psychology, Sociology Tagged With: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

“Boy Renter” George Rekers’s Attempts To Modify A Boy’s Effeminacy

May 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

By now, surely you know who George Rekers is—he was founding member of the Family Research Council and former officer for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), who lost that last job when he rented a boy through a website called “Rentboy.com” to “carry his luggage” (and give him nude massages). [...]

Filed Under: Fundamentalism, Homophobia, Homosexuality, LGBTQAA, Psychology, Religious Extremism, Social Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

Untangling The Language Of Racists Who Deny They’re Racists

October 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Sendai Anonymous pointed me to a really interesting sociological study by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva which attempts to shed light on the various contortions that “color blind” racists go through in an incoherent attempt to evade their racism while expressing their views.   First, I document how whites avoid direct racial language while expressing their racial views. [...]

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The Predictive Power Of Game Theory

September 29, 2009 By 1 Comment

In this clip from The Daily Show, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discusses predicting world affairs using models based on game theory to an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy (twice that of the CIA by their own estimation). It’s really exciting stuff: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Bruce Bueno [...]

Filed Under: Hilarious, Moral Psychology, Philosophy, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Videos, World Affairs Tagged With: , , , , , 1 Comment

On Failing To Grasp How Competition Can Be Cooperative And How Cooperation Can Be Counter-Productive

September 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

Robin Hanson responds to work such as Frans de Waal’s which emphasizes the invaluable role that empathy and cooperation played in natural selection of humans by stressing that as good as cooperation might be, we are prone to making serious errors about what genuinely helpful cooperation entails in specific instances: The unstated moral behind most [...]

Filed Under: Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Philosophical Ethics, Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociobiology Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments

On Fulfilling Religious Impulses Both Within And Without Religion

September 5, 2009 By 2 Comments

Peaceful Atheist is a richly written blog by a Wheaton grad who deconverted from Christianity while a student at the devoutly Evangelical school.  Here are provocative thoughts which she formulated through the process of reviewing biological-anthropologist Barbara King’s Evolving God: In this broadest definition of religion, King includes the transcendent awareness that can be stimulated [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Featured, Psychology, Religion, Secularism, Social Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Character As Fate And Environment As Variability

August 21, 2009 By 8 Comments

In reply to this post from late last night in which I took a first pass at trying to sketch out my views on fate, George writes: Dan, Again I find myself thanking you for this blog. Good blogging is all for naught without good readers (and especially without good readers who contribute excellently and [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Featured, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Social Psychology, Why I Am Not A Christian Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments