Earlier today, I argued that atheists cannot duck metaethics challenges from theists (or anyone else) and that we should not respond to such challenges with the knee jerk response that we are being bigotedly assumed to be incapable of moral behavior. I wrote: it is not mere prejudice for theists to demand atheists give an [...]
Badger3K objects to my suggestion that rationalists should “take back” spirituality from the peddlers of woo and faith: Spirituality has always been associated with religion, superstition, and woo (including the new age bs). There has never been anything to “take back” – it was always their word to begin with. If you feel awe, say [...]
So Chris Mooney’s article in Playboy about the spirituality of scientists has sparked some interesting debate in the atheist blogosphere. His new post on the subject explicitly interprets his aims and themes in the piece as essentially saying what I interpreted them to be—to defend the idea that you can have completely sufficient spirituality without [...]
There are a lot of anti-atheistic responses to us that get indignant that we try to organize, have community, and make ourselves known as a public presence. A lot of people reflexively and unfairly respond to all of this by feeling it as inherently threatening and inherently rude and intolerant. The most upsetting part of [...]
In my last post, I made clear that I am by no means an “accommodationist” who wants to let religious claims to hegemony over ethics, metaphysics, or epistemology go unchallenged as part of a deal whereby it agrees to either cooperate with or, minimally, not interfere with science education and science-based public policy. In a [...]
Chris Mooney is an accommodationist. In the conflict between science and faith, he is the sort of atheistic science defender who wants to minimize all appearance (and existence) of conflict between religious and scientific ideas because he thinks that vital public policy on matters like climate change hinges on scientists’ abilities to garner trust, cooperation, [...]
Gary Bauer displays a hilarious sense of grievance in his article “If Christians Were Treated Like Muslims”. I want to take a few posts to fully dissect all of its self-absorbed, phony, distorted victimhood. The first three sentences merited a full post themselves, so here we go. Bauer starts out with the following falsehood: Few [...]
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 [...]
Johann Hari does a little pre-mortem dancing on the foreseeable grave of British Christianity: And now congregation, put your hands together and give thanks, for I come bearing Good News. Britain is now the most irreligious country on earth. This island has shed superstition faster and more completely than anywhere else. Some 63 percent of [...]
In a rare occurrence, I am being taken to task for giving religion too much credit and atheists too little! Here are the offending paragraphs I wrote on Friday: I would say that various practices called religious, if stripped of all their dogmatism, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism, can and do certainly coexist with and complement science [...]
In a recent comments section, Gregory Wahl argued to me that religion is so deeply rooted in psychological needs, specifically the longing for immortality, that there is an inherent limitation to the ability of all my philosophical arguments to dissuade the faithful. As this line of reasoning goes, they do not believe for intellectual reasons [...]
Marilynne Robinson is the author of Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures). In the interview below from last night’s Daily Show she gives a standardly awful false choice between thinking scientific methods can answer every question on the one hand and accepting religious explanations of [...]
Michael Antony has an interesting but problematic article in Philosophy Now exploring whether “New Atheism” holds itself to a double standard when it comes to rules of evidence. He argues that New Atheists dismiss religious belief explicitly on “evidentialist” epistemic criteria whereby we must always proportion our belief to evidence, but at the same time, [...]
I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them [...]
BBC Radio 4 analyzes the pope’s catchphrase, “a dictatorship of relativism”, used for describing the secular West. Here’s the program description: The idea that no one has a monopoly on the truth seems to be fixed in the modern Western psyche. But it’s an idea that is under attack. Pope Benedict claims that we are [...]
…Richard Wade of Friendly Atheist, whose ”Ask Richard” column turns one fantastic year old today. It is a column by a retired therapist who gives atheists advice about atheistic parenting, the effects of one’s religious past on one’s present life and the way to go forward constructively in the future as an atheist, and, probably most [...]
So well done: Your Thoughts?
I love what she has to say and do not know why anyone, religious or irreligious, would prefer a faith panderer to this, even if the faithful politician was at least somewhat sincere: She says does not go through religious rituals for the sake of appearance. “I am not going to pretend a faith I [...]
I already highlighted Penn Jillette’s Vanity Fair interview in which he praised Christians for being better at taking criticism than Muslims, but this quote from his new Las Vegas Weekly interview, which I found via Boing Boing and Reddit, conveys his feelings as much as his thoughts, and those feelings are both depressing on the one [...]
Tushnet’s moral choice for herself and for other gays is celibacy or gender reassignment. Of course for some people, specifically some of the transgendered, a sex change is entirely appropriate and preferable to gay sex because from a gender(rather than a sex) perspective, those who are pre-op transgendered and are attracted to members of their [...]
Just Monday morning I was riding along a Florida Highway staring with irritation at a giant billboard looking just like the one below except it had the giant word “GOD” in the middle contributing to three phrases. Atop and to the left of the word God it said “One Nation Under”, on the left [...]
You’re Not Helping responds to my defense of the Freedom From Religion Foundation: Camels with Hammers has posted a bit of commentary on the Do Nothings. First and foremost, they cry foul on us for unjustly misrepresenting the goals of the FFRF Wait, no, first and foremost, I agreed with You’re Not Helping that it is unfair to accuse [...]
Some atheists online have mocked calls for prayer made by Obama and legislators. You’re Not Helping argues that while there is clearly something awful about treating prayer as a substitute for practical action (such as when true believers in “faith healing” forgo actual medical treatment for prayer) not all those who turn to prayer are [...]
From the Telegraph: Colin Hall said religion had no role to play in the conduct of council business. Mr Hall, who has just taken over the mayorship in Leicester, said the “majority” of councillors and city council staff were not practising Christians therefore there was little point in having the prayers, which were introduced in [...]
Secular News Daily reports: As part of his Sunday proclamation, Obama included a reference to “two fathers”: Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian. Tim Wildmon, president of the far-right American Family Association, responded [...]