This is a post for keeping track of everything I’ve written as part of my “beta testing a book project.” It will be updated whenever I add a post to the series. Bullet points under the link to a chapter are excerpts from the chapter in blog post form.
Angry Atheists?: Why the Backlash Against Dawkins, Harris, and the Rest Is Silly (Contents)
May 25, 2012 By 10 Comments
Beta testing a book: In Defense of Arguing About Religion
May 23, 2012 By 6 Comments
This chapter is a work in progress, but I promised to post it today and I think the first few sections are solid. Again, this chapter is very weird to write, because I’m going on at length about things that feel very basic to me, please at least one person read it and tell me [...]
The Big Bad Dawkins Quote
May 23, 2012 By 13 Comments
It occurred to me that I could spin off small sections from the book I’m writing into blog posts. Giving people 6,000 words to read at once is kind of a burden, so it’s really in my interest to break things down into more digestible pieces. Also, in this particular case, taken from chapter 2, [...]
Jason Rosenhouse on philosophical turf guarding
May 22, 2012 By 1 Comment
Much of the silliness of philosophers is confined to the ivory tower, but Jason Rosenhouse has a very good summary of one of the main ways philosophers manage to be annoying when trying to bring their “philosophical expertise” to public debates:
Moral theory isn’t as helpful as many people think
May 22, 2012 By 12 Comments
I actually have some nice things to say about moral theory, but I’m saving them for another post because I’ve been kept up late doing other things, and a purely negative post is easier to dash off late at night. Let me begin by quoting a great bit from Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Beta testing a book: The many gods I don’t believe in (yours included)
May 16, 2012 By 13 Comments
This chapter, titled “The many gods I don’t believe in (yours included),” is not quite finished. No “in this chapter,” only just started adding subheadings, and the endnotes aren’t done. Not much of a conclusion either. I could have spent more time on it, but I just got sick of writing it after awhile. The [...]
What I want as an atheist
May 15, 2012 By 3 Comments
I’m slowly cleaning out my list of “things I’m meaning to respond to” from when I was sick. One of them was a post by Andrew Sullivan titled “What Do Atheists Want?”, which links to and quotes from this longer post by Anthony Pinn at Religion Dispatches. Here’s the part Sullivan highlighted:
Greta Christina tears into Edwina Rogers
May 14, 2012 By 3 Comments
A lot of people have been unhappy about the Edwina Rogers fiasco (which I wrote about here), but Greta has the harshest take yet. I agree with everything she says. I especially like the fact that she emphasizes the mere fact that, yes, having a former Republican operative as Executive Director of the SCA is [...]
Follow up to the “what is Dawkins wrong about?” discussion
May 11, 2012 By 8 Comments
Now I’ve had a chance to read the whole of the “what is Dawkins wrong about?” discussion, here are my comments on some of the main points raised. First, let me say that I was absolutely wrong about the abuse thing. As JustKat said:
On Edwina Rogers, the new Republican head of Secular Coalition for America
May 10, 2012 By 5 Comments
So you may have heard the Secular Coalition for America’s new executive director Edwina Rogers. I initially wasn’t sure I was going to blog about this, because the interview she gave with Greta Christina (transcript here) was so incoherent that I wasn’t sure what to say about it, except what I said in a tweet [...]
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