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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Loveliness is Rare
August 5, 2011 – 6:55 pmOrder, complexity, regularity, patterning, are all examples of features that I’ll just refer to as lovely. It’s a term of art, and it’s a lovely term. Within many familiar systems, loveliness is very very rare. It’s very rare within the models of simple physical theories and even more rare within the models of complex physical [...]
Evolutionary Metaphysics is not Faith
August 1, 2011 – 9:46 pmI’ve advanced this thesis in some previous posts: every question that used to be answered by appealing to God can be answered better by appealing to some form of evolution. It’s hard for me to understand why that slogan would be a matter of faith. The fact that some thesis is speculative or metaphysical doesn’t [...]
The Singularity as Religion
April 11, 2011 – 1:34 pmI think much of the culture and discourse around the singularity is religious. I say this based in part on my reading of David Noble’s book The Religion of Technology and my reading of Robert Geraci’s Apocalyptic AI. Both are fantastic books. And I’ve compiled a long list of articles and books on technology and [...]
The Secret Agreement between Atheists and Theists
February 27, 2011 – 4:10 pmAtheists and theists have a strange secret agreement. You can see it if you look at the way they treat the arguments for God, like the cosmological argument. The theists say: (1) If the reasoning in the cosmological argument is correct, then God exists. (2) The reasoning in the cosmological argument is correct. (3) Therefore, [...]
Creepiest. Commercial. Ever.
February 23, 2011 – 1:49 amI’m speechless: Thanks to Chrissy for the find. I think. Your Thoughts?
English’s Beautiful Specificity
January 11, 2011 – 5:40 pmI love that English has a specific word just for someone wearing glasses, bespectacled. Saves us several words on a regular basis. Someone else just suggested to me another one, “defenestrate”, a word for throwing things out of windows. That’s right, throwing things out of windows gets its own word in English. What other highly [...]
Who Cares About Atheists?
January 5, 2011 – 5:00 pmThere 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 [...]
Shep Smith Lambasts Senators For Filibustering 9/11 First Responders Bill
December 19, 2010 – 12:33 amBelow Shepard Smith, explicitly following Jon Stewart’s passionate lead, excoriates the Republicans in the Senate who are filibustering the Zadroga bill, which is a bill designed to assist the many 9/11 first responders who are suffering illnesses related to their service at Ground Zero: Jon Stewart spent his entire show Thursday night discussing this disgrace, including [...]
Sam Harris vs. Robert Wright
October 12, 2010 – 2:25 pmThe author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values meets the author of The Evolution of God:
Is Homosexuality In The Islamic World
October 11, 2010 – 4:58 pmMichael T. Luongo argues that there is more homosexuality in the Islamic world than is admitted or than is even acknowledged to be homosexuality even though it fits what we would describe as gay. Your Thoughts?
Duck Or Rabbit?
October 10, 2010 – 1:01 pmThis classically ambiguous drawing meant to illustrate the role that gestalt perception plays in dictating how we interpret the particulars of what we see in things gets recreated in taxidermical form. Via Boing Boing, who have the Joseph Jastrow drawing upon which it is based, for purposes of comparison. Your Thoughts?
Purging The Discourse Of The Weakest Arguments
September 27, 2010 – 7:40 pmSometimes I think that smart people actually spend too little time responding to the dumbest forms of arguments. It takes a certain kind of hubris to think that I’m going to persuade people who adhere to strong arguments that they’re mistaken. By contrast, I really do think I can persuade people that their bad arguments [...]
Regrieving
September 11, 2010 – 6:36 amThe Boston Globe has a heartbreaking article on the processes by which the young children of 9/11 victims take years just to grasp what happened to their parents and how at each stage of understanding they experience a new kind of pain: For many of these young people, this ninth anniversary of the attacks brings [...]
If You Look Up “God Complex” On Wikipedia
August 23, 2010 – 3:57 amLook whose name you’ll find! It’s been edited out already. (via Sendai Anonymous) Your Thoughts?
This Blog Is Not In Philadelphia
August 22, 2010 – 9:38 pmI just want to be perfectly clear on that point just in case certain people in Philadelphia are wondering. It’s also worth noting this blog is not a lemonade stand. Just in case similar kinds of people wonder. Your Thoughts?
Persuasion
August 1, 2010 – 9:01 pmWhen the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that [...]
Your Thoughts?
July 27, 2010 – 3:53 pmI apologize for the sparse original writing the last two weeks. Between going on a brief vacation to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival and now getting mired in all the details and grunt work involved in packing and moving from the Bronx to Manhattan, the all important rhythm which enables my usual rapid fire [...]
A Tale From A Death Bed
July 21, 2010 – 10:42 amClergy Guy presents another poignant slice of a part of life to which clergy have unusual access: It was one of those late night vigils where the family was trying to find the resolve to turn off the machinery that kept the man breathing. His wife was hysterical, refusing to believe his brain was gone. [...]
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The Most Effective Rhetorical Strategies For Arguments
Megan McArdle offered some of her blog’s most loyal and esteemed commenters the opportunity to write posts for Christmas. Rob Lyman seized the opportunity to write some spectacular explanations of the most effective rhetorical strategies for winning arguments online (or, I think, anywhere that you are arguing with others watching). Read his helpful (and often [...]