In light of the two most recent posts (on atheism’s weakness as philosophical movement and my inability to rebut a Ross Douthat thought experiment), it’s about time I got around to discussing the keynote at the DC Center for Inquiry fundraiser I attended a few weeks back. The featured speaker was Greta Christina and she spoke on the similarities between New Atheism and the LGBT movement. I’m sure you can think of plenty of them already: both distrusted groups that... Read more
In a response to a lot of the debate that followed Jennifer Fulwiler’s conversion story at Why I’m Catholic, NYT columnist Ross Douthat posed a question to atheists that I find hard to answer. Jennifer wrote that she abandoned atheism because she thought she was required to be a nihilist in a world without God, and, of the three propositions: God is not real Atheism logically requires nihilism Nihilism sucks so bad it can’t be true She thought she was... Read more
R. Joseph Hoffman, a professor at the New England Conservatory and blogger at The New Oxonian has some harsh words for the New Atheists in a recent essay “Atheism’s Little Idea.” I mention Skepticon because to my mind the meeting is further evidence of the crisis that besets atheism. It cannot quite embrace humanism at the margins, the solution to which for certain ecumenical atheists is to fiddle with the definition of humanism by rolling out the dough ever thinner.... Read more
Bonus content: Orion Magazine is running a feature essay on Turkey Pardons. Here’s a preview: The tradition of the presidential turkey pardon has continued to evolve in surprising ways. In the early years the exonerated gobblers were sent to Kidwell Farm, a petting zoo in northern Virginia where, as turkey rock stars, they lived a life featuring excessive drug use and media attention but only the brief fame their overbred and steroid-addled condition would allow. Since 2005, however, the... Read more
Today, I’m returning to Edward Feser’s typology of atheism. Monday, I took a look at ways atheists approach religious philosophy, today the focus is on responses to religious practice. Here’s how Feser splits up atheists: A. Religious practice is mostly or entirely contemptible and something we would all be well rid of. The ritual side of religion is just crude and pointless superstition. Religious morality, where it differs from secular morality, is sheer bigotry. Even where certain moral principles associated... Read more
Edward Feser, a professor at Pasadena City College has set out to create a typology of ways atheists feel about religion or particular religious traditions. It’s a two-dimensional description of attitudes, categorizing atheists by how they respond to religious metaphysics and religious practice. I’ll take a look at the metaphysics spectrum he proposes today and take a crack at the religion-in-practice one tomorrow. I found Feser’s system helpful in clarifying my own stand on Christianity generally and Catholicism in particular.... Read more
— 1 — If you’re only going to read one link I put in the Quick Takes, make it this one on the way an over-reliance on mice may be screwing up our understanding of human disease. Mark Mattson knows a lot about mice and rats. He’s fed them; he’s bred them; he’s cut their heads open with a scalpel… Still, he never quite noticed how fat they were—how bloated and sedentary and sickly—until a Tuesday afternoon in February 2007.... Read more
I’m in transit today. It’s the weekend of the Harvard-Yale football game, and I’m headed up early to see the campus production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. So while I navigate wind and rain and buses and trains, you can check out the paper I wrote on Sweeney’s moral code for my Sondheim seminar last year. I’ve uploaded the document “If Only Angels Could Prevail: The Moral Tragedy of Sweeney Todd” to Scribd. To be honest,... Read more
So after kicking around the idea of sin-eating — trying to take on the burden of someone else’s evil, I still think it might theoretically be a moral act, but I’ve come around to recommending that nobody do it. It seems to fit neatly into the type of ethical injunctions Eliezer Yudkowsky recommended for computers (and people): “You should never, ever murder an innocent person who’s helped you, even if it’s the right thing to do; because it’s far more... Read more
If someone has made up their mind to do something evil, is there any benefit to them if someone else prevents them from carrying out their intended action? The hypothetical doesn’t need to be as extreme as the examples of the last few days, where someone else commits the evil act preemptively to prevent you from managing it. Imagine instead someone swapping out PZ Myers’s consecrated wafer with an unconsecrated wafer before he desecrated it, or just stealing it back... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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