Followup: I’ve started a civil email conversation with Stacy of Accepting Abundance, and I’m hoping the answer to the title of yesterday’s post (“Can I have this fight productively?“) could be yes. But if I end up blogging about our discussion, I’d like to do some civility housekeeping first. So here goes… I am really bad at walking away from a fight. In college, there were several people I had a tendency to end up in long, LONG arguments with and, even... Read more
Before you read the below: I’m writing about the difficulties of arguing online with people with whom you really disagree, so I want to mention a rule I’ve tried to adopt when I read an aggravating post. Try to read something else that person has written (preferably substantial) before you respond to the point that irked you, so you’ve got more accurate sense of their beliefs (the better to engage with productively) and your experience of them isn’t solely confined... Read more
In the aftermath of the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden, reporters uncovered a deeply troubling scheme the CIA used to verify if bin Laden was resident in Abbottabad. CIA operatives organized a sham Hepatitis B vaccination drive as a way to procure DNA samples from residents; they hoped to find DNA of bin Laden’s wives or children. The operation didn’t end up helping the U.S. locate bin Laden, and, even if it had, I would have found the cost... Read more
If you’re not too familiar with ‘privilege’ or usually don’t like when people use it, READ THIS FIRST. After reading my slam on “High Energy Theoretical Ethics,” Christian H of The Thinking Grounds added a much needed caveat to my pitch for virtue ethics. I said: “your time is best spent firming up your will so you can follow through on the choices you know you ought to make” and he added And looking into why we fail, above and... Read more
Joel Marks has written an essay for The New York Times Opinionator page titled “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist.” The title alone was a clue this piece would raise my hackles, and it turned out to be an explanation of why atheism requires rejecting moral imperatives. By an atheist! There’s a lot to take issue with, but today I want to focus on one small point in contention. Marks makes a division between normative ethics, which, he says, focus on the... Read more
If you’re coming here from Conversion Diary, you may be interested in yesterday’s post “Checking My Biases” which is a direct response to Jen’s “First You Must Be Willing To Lose it All” post. –1– I’ve been a little delinquent about posting 7 Quick Takes for the past few weeks, so I’ve picked a topic I know I can get excited about and it’s time to clear out my cache of literature and language related links. And in fun offline... Read more
Atheist to Catholic convert Jenifer Fulwiler has added a new zeroth step (“You Must be Willing to Lose it All”) to her five-part plan for seeking God, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Here’s how Jen summed it up: Here’s a rough analogy: Let’s say that a woman was seeking God, and she came across a belief system that taught that it’s morally wrong to own a car; something about car ownership, they said, was contrary to God’s nature, and... Read more
My last post about American Atheists’s lawsuit over the World Trade Center cross has bifurcated in the comments section. I want to take this post to split of the questions about the legal merits of the case from the question of whether it is wrong for the American Atheists to bring the suit, even if they think the law has been broken. So, a quick disclaimer: this kind of law (and most kinds of law) are not my area of expertise, I’m mostly asking... Read more
Sorry for the delay in Sunday’s Good Book posts! A Song of Ice and Fire is at least partly to blame, but, now that I’m done with A Dance with Dragons, presumably that particular distraction won’t be a problem for–shall we guess–another eight years. I know this is technically going up Monday, but I was gone this weekend seeing my brother at the conclusion of his Shakespeare intensive and it seemed silly to hold the post for a week... Read more
Yesterday, Christian H of The Thinking Grounds posted an outline of how he approaches the Bible (a response to a plea for guest posts). Today, he’s given us a thorough example of what his theory looks like when it’s applied. Many thanks for his contribution. Given how abstract my previous post was, I think that a concrete example is in order. I suggest that you read that previous post if you haven’t already, as I wrote this as a companion to that. I... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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