My two recent posts on relationships (with loved ones – God included, and with the Yale Chaplain’s office) have both gotten responses I’d like to draw to your attention. First off, JT fired back after I disputed the idea that Mass-goers were having time stolen from them by religion. Here’s an excerpt: But that doesn’t respond to what I said. I bolded the important part. [If you’d rather be at home cuddling someone who means the world to you than... Read more
My alma mater is turning up in religious news stories this week. It turns out that the Yale Humanists have asked to join the consortium at Yale Religious Ministries, and have been turned down [further discussion at Friendly Atheist]. The organization in the ministry are “dedicated to the spiritual, ethical, intellectual, social, and physical welfare of students, faculty, and staff,” which, for the most part, sounds like a decent match for the Humanists. I can come up with a couple reasons they... Read more
Well, I agreed with the majority of J.T. Eberhard’s recent post “Joy for Joy’s Sake.” I, too, like visiting RenFaires, and I enjoyed scrolling through the pictures of him and his fiancée frolicking amid the anachronisms. But then I got up to this conclusion: Meaning is realizing we’re very lucky to have the time we have and not wasting a minute of it by letting others dictate how we spend these precious minutes. If you’d rather be at home cuddling someone... Read more
— 1 — This week’s link theme is art, so I’d like to start by highlighting a fundraising drive being run by the branch of the Dominicans I knew in DC. They’re publishing a hymnal of the Gregorian chant they use when they pray the Liturgy of the Hours. You can order one yourself or sponsor one (or more) for a friar. I’ve ordered one for myself, so now I’ll need to bother the brothers next time I visit to... Read more
Because I got vaccinated against the flu yesterday! I also get to high-five the elderly, pregnant women, and people who are immunocompromised. In fairness, I can’t spot the last category by eye, so maybe I can look up the prevalence statistics and high-five the appropriate proportion of passersby. These are all categories of people who are at higher risk from the flu and may not be able to be inoculated themselves. They depend on herd immunity, enough people like me... Read more
During the debate over the proper response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, I kept waiting for articles to quote Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and, eventually, I decided to write one myself. I’m over at The Huffington Post today talking about why we find chemical weapons uniquely horrifying, and whether more types of warfare should provoke that same kind of visceral revulsion. Death by IED or drone has perhaps not yet found its poet. How do we... Read more
You may want to keep this year’s answer key and list of entries in the atheist round handy while you read the results. Atheists earned their reputations as skeptics in this round, as their scores were much lower than the Christians gave in their round. By the crudest metric — percent of entries with more than a 50% pass (Very Likely Atheist + Likely Atheist) — only six entries out of eleven hit the mark among the atheists. For the Christians, only... Read more
— 1 — Sometimes it’s really hard to remember quite how far in the future we live. Or how much fun it is to take advantage of our ability to ethically take advantage of our hardwired capacity to recognize patterns and intuit things about our surroundings. Nothing in the video is CGI, it’s just your brain applying the rules it knows to art designed to exploit it. Wheee! — 2 — And for a much older kind of art, that’s still fun to... Read more
Today is the 30th anniversary of Petrov Day. What’s Petrov day, you ask? Well, as described on LessWrong: The story begins on September 1st, 1983, when Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner after the aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and then, for reasons still unknown, failed to respond to radio hails. 269 passengers and crew died, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald. Ronald Reagan called it “barbarism”, “inhuman brutality”, “a crime against humanity that must never... Read more
Because my computer has shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible, the Atheist round results from the Turing Test will probably run Friday or Saturday, once I’ve got a replacement. Over at Fare Forward, I’ve taken a crack at reviewing Gary Wills’s book Why Priests? A Failed Tradition and, if you want a very quick glimpse of how I felt about it, here’s how the review kicks off: The first priest that Garry Wills... Read more
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Unequally Yoked
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