Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
Pride has traditionally been disparaged by Christianity as not only a vice but as the chief vice and gone so far as to recommend humility as one of the highest virtues for a human being. The theological reasons for this begin with the way that traditional Christianity understands human beings primarily relationally, as in an [...]
A good video from Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, who recently wrote a book on justice for a popular audience, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and who last year released on YouTube high production value videos encapsulating his lectures for his standard introductory level ethics class at Harvard. You can start watching those videos here. [...]
Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency. Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s [...]
In reply to my post on the story of Sister Margaret McBride whom the Catholic Church “automatically excommunicated” for helping to give the go-ahead to an abortion claimed necessary for saving the life of an 11 week pregnant mother, I have already received two interesting replies. The first challenged the medical argument for the necessity of [...]
Last summer I wrote a number of posts through which I sought to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith and in the process distinguish the various virtuous ethical and epistemic practices for which faith is typically confused by means of ambiguous equivocations. I attempted to distinguish the virtues of hope, loyalty, trust, intuitional [...]
In ethics there is an interesting question as to whether there are any such things as supererogatory deeds, meaning whether we should consider certain moral deeds which require great courage or sacrifice to be obligatory upon everyone or whether they are too demanding to be minimally necessary for everyone and therefore extraordinarily special and signs [...]
Nietzsche’s writings on morality are famously provocative and controversial. His criticisms of morality in both theory and practice are so extensive and rhetorically scathing that many philosophers assume that he can offer little or nothing constructive to moral philosophy. Additionally, his glorification of the will to power sounds prima facie like a celebration of excessively [...]
On Bloggingheads, philosophers Simon Keller and Niko Kolodny dissect love. If you don’t have the hour to watch the whole thing or if you are only interested in one of the subtopics they discuss, below is the set of topics. The time listed next to each topic indicates how long that portion of video runs. [...]
Late last night Grant challenged my insistence that reason is not my “god” in whom I have faith. I have already replied to his attempt to lump in reliance upon science with reliance upon religion as equivalent strategies for avoiding facing the fact of uncertainty and inexplicability. In this post I consider the next portion [...]
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 [...]
So last night, Kanye proved once and for all that he has no class through a single action which demonstrated an unbelievable lack of grace. Taylor Swift looked so demoralized and her speech had been all about feelings of being surprised to be accepted by this particular voting bloc, when he insulted her by implying [...]
May your strength give us strength, may your faith give us faith, may your hope give us hope, may your love give us love. In recent weeks I have distinguished and criticized numerous distinct belief formation and justification practices which go by the name of “faith.” I have argued that it is neither rational nor [...]
In reply to this post from the other day and subsequent discussion in the comments section about the ways that religious belie can interfere with both reason and love, George writes, For the past year I have been trolling blogs and websites trying to wrap my brain around religion in general and evolution denial in [...]
Yesterday I began my series of posts attempting first to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith, to explore how the various practices referred to under this one word’s umbrella all relate to each other and how they can be ethically and epistemologically assessed, both as they occur individually and in various combinations with [...]
The word faith is an ambiguous one and its various connotations get hopelessly confused with each other in ways that muddle many arguments about the ethical and epistemological justifications for holding beliefs on faith. Because of this, I want to write several posts here which disambiguate faith’s various senses and evaluate the worth of each [...]
In a previous post I discussed part of my thought process in leaving Christianity and then contrasted my experience in Christianity, spent desperately trying to rationalize what were apparent falsehoods, with my experience of thinking free of faith ever since: it took me (and is taking me) years to painstakingly develop my own constructive conception [...]
Over at Unreasonable Faith, guest contributor Custador thinks he is a bigoted atheist: The knowledge that my cousin is a creationist has actually made me dislike him. I wonder now if I’m any better than any other prejudiced person — a racist or a sexist or a homophobe — because I pre-judge a group of [...]
Earlier today I posted Brendan Palla’s reply to my posts on unconditional love and love in general. In what follows, I have interspersed my replies to him within the stream of his argument. I want to open with a bit of a critique. I don’t think you’ve captured very well the notion of unconditional love [...]
A week ago I posted twice on the theme of love, spending the first post on what I saw to be conceptual problems for the ideal of unconditional love and then focusing the second post on a constructive attempt to characterize love and then locating unconditional love within that new framework. The next day, Brendan [...]
I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong. Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people [...]
In the first part of this series, I explored the reasons for rejecting “unconditional” love as a candidate for the ideal essence of love since as a concept it is riddled with numerous problems as a recommendation for human psychology it is hopelessly unrealistic. In this part of the series, I sketch out a theory [...]
The ideal of unconditional love strikes many as the purest, most ideal way to define the essence of love. It is easy to see why this characterization of the essence of love is appealing. Unconditional love is an undiluted love—if I love only the good in you but do not love the bad in you, [...]
James Garvey has some thoughts about an astute observation from Pascal: ‘Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.’ I tripped over that from Pascal after breakfast and had to think about it all morning. There’s a lot written about moral luck — a philosophical industry owed [...]
An excellent question posed by a Scot, a reader at The Friendly Atheist. While Richard gives a fine answer supposing belief in a supernatural version of Karma, I find several of the comments interesting and more akin to the way I’ve used the term. Gary says: Actually, the word “karma” is sanskrit and simply means [...]