This is some powerfully hateful hypocritical harassment and stupidity right here. It creeps me out to see the American flag, which I love in a deep way, look like a fascist symbol in these nativistic, jingoistic, authoritarian, theocratically Christian Americans’ hands: The YouTube description sums up the context of the above: (ANAHEIM, CA, 3/2/11) — [...]
In an e-mail to me, Caroline proposes thought provoking reasons for non-believers to encourage (or at least to not actively discourage) religious beliefs: It would also be nice if people would carry out actions in good conscience of just being decent human beings rather than in fear of reprisal in the afterlife, but as there [...]
Watching this video, I’m starting to fear those who have seemingly no belief in either the intrinsic value or potential effectiveness of democracy as much as I fear Islamism: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Your Thoughts?
Nathan Brown is a political science professor at George Washington University and director of the school’s Institute for Middle East Studies. He gives an overview of the Muslim Brotherhood’s evolution from their found through to today, explains how their renunciation of violent means came to pass decades ago, why al-Qaeda sees them as sell outs, [...]
Last week a heinous, conscience-shocking injustice occurred when the brave, openly gay, Ugandan gay rights campaigner David Kato (pictured above) was murdered shortly after a Ugandan newspaper featured him on the cover with the headline: “100 PIctures of Uganda’s Top Homos Leak” and the words “Hang Them” next to it. The AP photo of the newspaper [...]
Jon Stewart’s remarks about Tucson two nights ago were poignant, conciliatory, honest, humble, and insightful: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Arizona Shootings Reaction www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook Here he hits the nail on the head: I do [...]
On Christmas, the Pope Benedict XVI tried, pathetically, to minimize the Church’s responsibility for the pedophilia scandals: Victims of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict’s claim yesterday that paedophilia wasn’t considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s. In his traditional Christmas address yesterday to cardinals and officials working in Rome, [...]
Gary Bauer thinks Christians aren’t treated as well as Muslims in America because there are greater quantities of art works which use Christian symbols in ways that offend Bauer’s sensibilities than there are ones that use Muslim symbols in ways that would offend Muslim sensibilities: in a variety of contexts, American Muslims are treated better [...]
Glenn Greenwald offers a mirror for those of us who worry about the elements of theocratic expansionism which are enough a part of the Koran and early Islamic history to be considered potentially dangerous forms of the religion itself on its own terms (and not just of its appropriation by political agents): I’m always amazed [...]
Many a religious person defending her own religious beliefs will argue that a given politically, morally, or intellectually unflattering interpretation of her faith is simply not a true representation of her faith. While the question of who has the right or the adequate means to decisively determine with any rational clarity which competing interpretation of any [...]
Recently, United States bishops petitioned Congress to not protect gays from being fired for their sexual orientation. Andrew Sullivan already precisely attacked the bishops’ immoral political calculation by which they explicitly committed themselves to a perverse moral contradiction whereby they simultaneously concede that homosexuality is to a significant extent not a choice and argue that [...]
Glenn Greenwald summarizes an atrocity of institutionalized injustice, whereby the executive branch of the United States has the power to abduct and torture innocent people with impunity: The Supreme Court today denied a petition of review from Maher Arar, the Canadian and Syrian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. Government at a stopover at JFK Airport when returning [...]
Retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney: I can’t put my own view any better than David Brooks and Glenn Greenwald already have. Greenwald: The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and [...]
Johann Hari has two exquisitely written and detailed pieces on Rand, one from 2005 and one from this past week. I have to admit that she is held with so much contempt by philosophers that I have never bothered to read her, even if only to understand the influence of her infamously crude appropriation of [...]
Robtish has another great video, this one on the most offensive Republican Congresspeople and some of their most outrageous remarks and legislative proposals: Thanks again to Gaytheists. Your Thoughts?
In a series of posts this semester, I am blogging all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts primarily explicates the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices (such as my [...]
After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.” This post will [...]
Evgeny Morozov discusses how repressive regimes use the internet to spread propaganda, finding it is a more powerful tool than censorship. Your Thoughts?
Over the past few days we’ve been discussing creationists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron’s plan to freely disseminate 50,000 copies of a new version of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species which they are putting out and which contains a deceptive, creationist introduction filled with bad science and false history. RichardDawkins.net and Pharyngula have encouraged people not only to [...]
This laughable awfulness would be qualify as funny if the theocratic attitudes it expressed were not so serious and were the forum for this nonsense was not a presidential debate. Rachel Maddow had a great report last night on this year’s meeting of the same group that sponsored this. The footage of the astoundingly self-absorbed [...]
Recently Karen Armstrong is coming out with a book arguing for an extremely apophatic conception of God that rejects all manner of biblical literalism but still insists on some important reference to God and is critical of the New Atheists. Recently she and Richard Dawkins both responded to a Wall Street Journal solicitation for their [...]
via Jerry Coyne come remarks from Oxford’s Lord Robert May, president of the British Science Festival and former chief scientific adviser to the British government, expressing views which I think are in keeping with (while further developing) the broader philosophical pictures that I lay out here, here, here, here, here, and, most of all, here. Lord [...]
In April of last year, Richard Dawkins wrote this letter (which should be read in full) to someone duped by the slander that Darwinian atheism led to Hitler’s ideals and goals: His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many [...]
Last night on Real Time With Bill Maher, Jeff Sharlet, the profiler of The Family:
In reply to this post I wrote about an archbishop of the Anglican church’s claims that those Christians who accept homosexuality do not share the same faith as him and that such people are being rolled over by “cultural trends,” came this passionate defense of Christian leaders’ right to discriminate against gays in the comments [...]