…which ones would you pick? This is not a hypothetical question. I got into a conversation with religion with my ASL tutor (she’s running a Christian ministry for the Deaf in DC) and I had to do a lot of fingerspelling to explain why I don’t believe in any gods. My teacher suggested that I make a list of words I really need, and she’ll teach them to me next week and we’ll continue the conversation. What words/concepts would you... Read more
— 1 — I bought girl scout cookies from a coworker this week, and now I’m wishing I had sprung for more than two boxes of Thin Mints. You see, the Girl Scouts allowed a biologically male seven year old who identifies as a girl to join up, and now there’s a proposed boycott. Good for them for letting the kid in, and, have you ever heard a sweeter LGBT activism pitch than eat cookies for change? I was a... Read more
I mentioned in a recent post on moral philosophy that, although I understand why Christians think I should switch teams, I’m confused and frustrated by the comments of “Convert already!” I get from my atheist friends. One of my college friends posted a cogent sum-up of the inconsistency he sees (reformatted slightly from facebook): I don’t think anything you’re espousing is incompatible with atheism. I do think you may be using metaphysical backsliding as an excuse for not engaging with... Read more
Atheist blogger Greta Christina is taking D.J. Grothe (president of the James Randi Educational Foundation) to task as part of a discussion about sexism and violent rhetoric in the atheist blogosphere. Like the last time I linked to a Greta Christina post about sexism, I’m not spending whole post rehashing the discussion, so let me quickly get you up to speed. A person targeting Greta on facebook posted a variety of nasty comments that included a desire to “slap the... Read more
— 1 — Tomorrow is Christmas in the Orthodox calendar and it looks like the British Heart Foundation people are aware of that fact and got me an early present! Send this video around. TV has given everyone some really terrible CPR training. — 2 — And speaking of useful and exciting science, check out this one-way tube, designed by Nikola Tesla (yes, that Tesla). The little side spurs in Fig 1 redirect air or liquids back in the only... Read more
There’s a controversy brewing over Staks Rosch’s candidates for Atheist of the Year at the Examiner. There are no women on the five person shortlist and Rosch explained the omission by saying any woman he included would have only been a ‘token woman’ and isn’t that really the worst kind of misogyny? Ophelia Benson already wrote a dead-on takedown of his position, so I’m just linking you there and moving to a new question: What kind of actions should an... Read more
In the recent thread on human-independent morality, Ash had a question for me and Adam Lee: I’m curious if you both consider morality in the way that Harris and Carrier do, as a means to achieve maximum well-being and minimum suffering. Speaking for myself, this is the only way I can see morality being objective. I agree with Harris that there might not be any one single moral “code” that can achieve a given end in this framework, but that... Read more
Adam Lee, author of Daylight Atheism, has just gotten into an argument with Peter Hitchens over Divine Command Theory. Peter Hitchens contends: “For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.” Adam responded in two posts, the first titled “There Is No Non-Human Moral Authority” and a second responding to comments Hitchens made in-thread. I think I... Read more
This review is part of Patheos’s book club for Father James Martin’s Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life. I got the book for free for review purposes. I’d guess I’m not in the target audience for Fr. Martin’s book. Not because I’m not a Christian, but because I didn’t think religion has to be somber all the time in the first place. A fair amount of the book is... Read more
[UPDATE: I’ve just started a hopefully non-boring fight with a couple Dominicans reading Edward Feser’s defense of Aristotle and Aquinas. You can keep track of all posts in that series here: The Last Superstition Index Post] In the comment thread for my Hitchens post, Lukas complained that he found god is Not Great unreadable and linked to a critique from First Things. David Bentley Hart has a number of complaints about Hitchens’s book and a collection of essays titled 50... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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