Yesterday, I posted an adaptation of a speech I gave at Yale and promised to use it as a lens on why some Christian metaphysics is a good match for my ethics. Here goes. Questions welcome. The first, and most obvious problem in the essay and in my views is that I have a pretty bad grounding for my virtue ethics. It’s hard to explain why exactly it is important that people not desire to harm others rather than we just... Read more
When people read my “Testing the Truth-Telling Thing” post in my Chesterton series, the first question everyone asked was: Which ethical beliefs do you have that fit better into a Christian context? As luck would have it I recently gave a speech for my debating group that drew heavily on Christian ideas (even though I scrubbed them from the speech). The speech is up at the Huffington Post, and if you go check it out, I’ll be back this afternoon... Read more
It’s not Friday, but I wanted to share a round-up of my love songs for Valentine’s Day. The trouble is that all my favorites are by Stephen Sondheim, so they tend to be too snarky, self-aware, or sad to actually sing to someone in a romantic context, so I’m sharing them with you instead. –1– To give you an idea of the problem, let’s start with a song from Passion, the only musical Stephen Sondheim says he wrote entirely without irony.... Read more
You may think no one’s mentioned transhumanism on the blog lately, but then you haven’t been keeping a close eye on the comments thread for “Time for a Few Facts,” my attempt to clarify some of the factual disputes driving the fight about appropriate uses of sacrilege. You’re also probably not looking for any excuse to bring up transhumanism (unlike me!), so dbp’s analogy about the Eucharist and replacement knee joints may have passed you by. I don’t want to address the... Read more
I’ve been writing a series of posts on the intellectual attraction I’ve felt to G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and some Christian theology generally. There will be a major update in that series tomorrow, but, in the meantime, here’s an overview of my biggest problem with Chesterton. In my life as a debater, there’s a particular rhetorical trick that I live in fear of. Picture this: Armed with knowledge of your opponent’s principles, you construct a reductio ad absurdum argument. Careful to... Read more
Ok. I’ve been reading through the swiftly growing comment threads about Catholic doctrine relating to the Eucharist (part of this series on P.Z. Myers and sacrilege) and plenty of points have been settled to my satisfaction. It’s been clear that plenty of atheists don’t understand the theology of transubstantiation in detail (understandable, since it’s not that relevant to our lives), but I think anyone who advocates sacrilege should do a little due diligence on the ideas they’re blaspheming. This post is a quick sum-up of the... Read more
Ok. There’s been a controversy brewing on the “Is it so hard not to desecrate the Eucharist” post (part of the ongoing discussion of when, if ever, sacrilege is an appropriate form of protest). March Hare has been making the case that P.Z. Myers’s desecration of a consecrated wafer was meant to debunk the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. March Hare wrote: Should Catholics not be called out on the fact their faith decrees that a cracker becomes human flesh by a... Read more
Prompted by a post by atheist blogger and agent provocateur P.Z. Myers, I started a conversation on this blog about the appropriate definition of atheism. Since the conversation had started with P.Z. Myers, sooner or later it wound around to his public desecration of a consecrated wafer in 2008. I still think his actions were immoral and highly inappropriate, but many of the atheist commenters here disagreed. You can read through all posts on this topic below, and be sure... Read more
More responses to my claim that atheists ought not desecrate the Eucharist a la P.Z. Myers, Let’s start with one quick clarification: NFQ took issue with me analogizing P.Z. Myer’s destruction of a consecrated wafer to the desecration of cremated ashes saying: I think there’s a tricky aspect about your analogy to cremated remains. You can just buy a package of communion wafers. They mass-produce them in factories. I think it would certainly be rude to break into a church, steal... Read more
I’m reprinting a comment Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism made on my post criticizing P.Z. Myers in full here. I thought it needed a response so I’m treating it as a semi-guest post. Ebonmuse’s comments are in the blockquote, my response appears below: To understand fully why PZ did what he did, you have to be aware of the context. In this case, the context was that a Florida college student, Webster Cook, who was raised Catholic, attended a Catholic mass... Read more
Unequally Yoked
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