February 23, 2010 – 11:39 pm
In a post over at VFR, Lawrence Auster comments on an essay by Stanley Fish in which Professor Fish remarks on the inability of pure “secular” reason, bereft of normative bedrock in the Divine, to provide any “oughts”. This is catnip to Mr. Auster, who is, despite having various admirable qualities, a crusading anti-Darwinist.
The argument [...]
February 20, 2010 – 9:54 pm
A week from tomorrow begins the Jewish festival of Purim, which celebrates the success of the Jews living under the ancient Persian Empire in reversing a plot to annihilate them.
The tale is told in the Book of Esther, also known as the Megillah. Summing up briefly:
During a feast, a drunken King Ahasuerus [likely Xerxes] commands [...]
January 24, 2010 – 12:47 am
It’s been a busy Saturday, and what time I’ve had for writing today I have spent commenting here and elsewhere, rather than on the gestation of new posts. So, it being late, and with my computer on the fritz (a new one is on the way), I’ll just leave you with this amusing recent story [...]
December 29, 2009 – 12:07 am
There was an article in yesterday’s Times about friction between European Muslims and their host culture. In it we find the following:
Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims and [...]
October 21, 2009 – 1:02 pm
Over at CNN today we learn that the Coalition of Reason, an association of godless heathens, has purchased some advertising space in Gotham’s subway system. Their ads will point out the plain empirical fact that it is possible for people to be good without religion.
What’s telling about this is not the story itself, but [...]
October 5, 2009 – 12:02 am
Over at Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella cites, with apparent approbation, an essay by the atheist author Julian Baggini that criticizes the agenda of “New Atheism”, exemplified by the “Four Horsemen” Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, as misbegotten and counterproductive. What Bill does not link to is a piquant response, at the same website, by the [...]
October 1, 2009 – 11:24 pm
Anybody who had the patience to wade through yesterday’s far too long-winded post (do forgive me for having such a low-rent editorial staff) knows that I have religion on my mind lately. In that post I mentioned, as I have often done in the past, the magnificent defensive arsenal of highly evolved religions. I ran [...]
September 14, 2009 – 10:32 pm
Lawrence Auster is a very smart fellow, and I admire his formidable presence on the ramparts of Western culture. But he has curious blind spots, for one so intelligent, and one of them has to do with Darwinism.
Have a look at this exchange with a reader, one who patiently tries to explain, as I have [...]
Recently President Obama, in what he must have known would be a controversial choice, selected the geneticist Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is an eminent scientist, and a capable administrator — indeed, his professional qualifications for the post are unimpeachable — [...]
An engaging item in today’s Physorg Newsletter reported on a recent study, published in Nature Geoscience, that examined the Earth’s carbon chemistry during a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM. During this torrid interval, which took place about 55 million years ago, the Earth’s average temperature shot up by 7° C. over [...]
Today we offer a heaping helping of heresy, cooked up by some of our hardest-hitting, highest-profile heathens. First, as a little amuse-bouche, we have a recent editorial by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, in which the author argues that, despite conciliatory efforts to get “militant” atheists to stop being such party-poopers, the fact is that religion [...]
Readers will have noticed that output has fallen off drastically here lately; the demands of the workplace have continued to press heavily upon me. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, and in fact I am actually spending this weekend doing things other than writing and debugging program code [...]
We’ve been on the road for the past two days, and have just got home late on this Sunday evening. There’s been no time for keeping up with events, or for the brooding and rumination necessary for the germination of a serious post.
So here’s another pungent item plucked from the ether by our reader [...]
I am working late once again, and have as yet been unable to return to normal operations around here. So for tonight here’s a little item about physicsists and mysticism.
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I’ve finally had a chance to read President Obama’s speech to the Ummah. Mr. Obama is a remarkable orator, who knows very well that these early days of his presidency are a historically unique opportunity — and although there was much that I might quibble about, I will say that he rose to [...]
As has been the case for over thirteen centuries, East and West are still glowering darkly at one another across a deep cultural divide. One hopes always for harmony and rapprochement — themes that Mr. Obama will, I am sure, focus on in his upcoming speech from Cairo — and [...]
From commenter JK comes a link to a story about a young girl with juvenile diabetes who died because her parents, besotted by delusional religious fantasies, saw fit only to pray for her, rather than seek simple and effective medical treatment. We read:
Last Easter Sunday, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin, lay motionless on her [...]
In what may be an enormously important piece of scientific work, chemist John D. Sutherland of the University of Manchester has discovered a reaction path by which RNA nucleotides can have been assembled from molecules likely to have been present in the Earth’s early environment.
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An item in the news today informs us that the celebrated and photogenic Catholic priest known as “Father Oprah” (whose actual name is — you just can’t make this stuff up — the Rev. Alberto Cutie) has admitted having had an affair of the flesh. This is always awkward for Catholic [...]
Over at CNN today we learn that a Saudi judge has ruled that it makes perfectly good sense, when wives spend more than they ought to on the accoutrements of their oppression, for their husbands to slap them around a bit. We read:
Arab News, a Saudi English-language daily newspaper based in Riyadh, reported that Judge [...]
There was a brief item in the Times today about a court ruling against one James Corbett, a California schoolteacher who, it was ruled, violated the Establishment Clause by dismissing creationism in class as “religious, superstitious nonsense”. This offended the sensibilities of a student of his, Chad Farnan, who sought legal remedy, and got it [...]
April 26, 2009 – 11:05 pm
Today’s conversation piece at CNN is this comical item, in which an Idaho man seeks a pigeon credulous enough to pay U.S currency for an approximately hand-shaped arrangement of rocks. According to the vendor, one Paul Grayhek, what makes this such a desirable item is that it is a calling-card left in his Coeur d’Alene [...]
Diligently doing its part to undermine America’s intellectual respectability and competitiveness, the Texas Board of Education is taking up an amendment this week that seeks to smuggle religious myths, such as the transparent Creationist fraud known as “Intelligent Design”, into the science classroom in the name of “academic freedom”. Were this dispute taking place only [...]
March 11, 2009 – 11:38 pm
In his latest post, Jeffery Hodges has brought to our attention, and commented upon, a very interesting article by Roger Scruton about some of the fundamental distinctions between Islam and the West. I do hope you will go and read it.
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From the AP comes a fine example of the moral rectitude of Islamic law. A woman from Iran was attacked with acid by a suitor she rejected (which seems, by the way, to be an increasingly popular way to brutalize Muslim females these days, and I expect Middle-Eastern acid merchants are doing well even in [...]
February 22, 2009 – 11:36 pm
If I told you that I knew there were invisible beings directing the flow of traffic on the highway, or that I had just seen someone rise from the dead and ascend into the sky, you’d want some proof — and if I had none to offer, you’d begin to doubt my sanity, [...]
January 4, 2009 – 11:20 pm
I have said often in these pages that it seems likely that the human propensity for religion is a cognitive adaptation that has flourished because it tends to improve the cohesion of social groups, thereby increasing the fitness of those groups in competition against others. As David Sloan Wilson argues in his book Darwin’s Cathedral: [...]
December 28, 2008 – 10:52 pm
The debate continues at Mangan’s; the issue is whether one can genuinely be interested in conserving the virtues of Western society while at the same time publicly questioning the truth of the central claims of Christianity. The Christians in the conversation would, unsurprisingly, like us to agree that Western civilization is essentially and inextricably bound [...]
December 26, 2008 – 11:42 pm
In a comment to a recent post, reader Greg Estren raised a question that has been implicit here for quite some time. Should we encourage religious belief, even if we think religion’s claims are false? We asked this same question, regarding the notion of objective moral truths, back in September: are these beliefs genuinely necessary [...]
December 24, 2008 – 12:10 am
If you have gone to look at the post and comment thread about Christianity over at Dennis Mangan’s, you will have seen that Dennis, an unbeliever who considers himself a conservative, must confront the assertion put to him by Lawrence Auster: that it is simply not consistent to be both a conservative defender of Western [...]
December 21, 2008 – 6:10 pm
The thread has lengthened over at Dennis Mangan’s since I linked to his recent post about religion, and again I urge you all to go and read it. He has been engaged primarily with the conservative writer Lawrence Auster, who has been defending his Christianity against Mr. Mangan’s skeptical atheism. No, that is wrong: Mr. [...]
December 18, 2008 – 12:00 am
You should all drop in on Dennis Mangan, who has been having a conversation about God. It seems his views are nearly, if perhaps not entirely, congruent with my own.
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December 6, 2008 – 9:18 pm
There was a news item a day or two ago about some advertising put up in several cities by an association of Godless heathens. The ads suggested that folks should reconsider their belief in a supernatural deity; one went so far as to make the direct assertion that there is no God at all. The [...]
November 30, 2008 – 11:09 pm
I do hope readers will forgive me for rather a rambling post yesterday. (My editorial staff was off for the holidays.) I think some clarification is in order.
The post was written as part of an ongoing discussion of the appropriate limits of tolerance. I have been upbraided on occasion for discussing certain topics, particularly those [...]
November 29, 2008 – 5:02 pm
In a challenging and thoughtful comment on our recent post about tolerance, our reader Addofio chides me for the disdainful tone I have taken in some of my criticism of religion. She recommends that we discuss ideas, however preposterously absurd, in emotionally neutral terms, as a gesture of respect for the people who hold them. [...]
November 22, 2008 – 6:59 pm
As I mentioned last night, there’s a discussion underway about interreligious dialogue at Kevin Kim’s place. The thread began with Kevin’s link to an article about Karen Armstrong’s call for worldwide interreligious harmony. I’ve been taking fire for my flint-hearted remarks, and would like to comment further here.
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November 22, 2008 – 12:04 am
Nothing here tonight, I’m afraid; I’ve spent my spare time this evening in a discussion about interreligious dialogue over at Kevin Kim’s. It’s an interesting conversation, which I will probably follow up with a post of my own. But for now, read the post and thread here.
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November 15, 2008 – 10:04 pm
I recently began a careful re-reading of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, a book I had not looked at closely in decades. The work is primarily an argument for Pascal’s Jansenist Christian beliefs, but prepares the soil with a searching review of Man’s transience and wretchedness.
The genius Pascal, in his cruelly foreshortened life, acquired wisdom far [...]
November 6, 2008 – 11:54 pm
A thirteen-year-old girl, walking to visit her grandmother, is accosted and raped. She reports the assault to the local authorities, whose response is swift: they take her to a stadium, bury her up to her neck, and, with a large crowd watching, stone her to death as she begs for mercy. The men who raped [...]
October 23, 2008 – 11:24 pm
A while back we offered a link to videos of a conference called Beyond Belief. It featured talks by an outstanding panel of thinkers — most of them Godless heathens — about the growing scientific understanding of religion as a biological and anthropological phenomenon, and about the alarming role still played [...]
October 5, 2008 – 11:39 pm
According to today’s news, Pope Benedict XVI is concerned that “modern culture” is to blame for a rising tide of irreligion. People are “brushing God aside”, he laments, and nothing good will come of it.
Well, certainly nothing good is going to come of it for folks in his line of work, so it’s understandable that [...]
September 23, 2008 – 11:35 pm
Speaking this afternoon just a few short blocks from my Park Avenue office, Iran’s president Ahmadinejad informed us that the despicable American Empire is circling the drain, along with the suzerainty of our evil Zionist puppets over their innocent Palestinian victims. As you can probably imagine, I was downright chopfallen to hear such distressing news. [...]
September 15, 2008 – 10:24 pm
After a century and a half, it appears the Anglican Church may finally have got round to apologizing to Charles Darwin for its sneering reception of The Origin of Species.
Better late than never, I suppose, though at this point it hardly matters; the approval of this archaic institution hardly seems relevant any longer.
Story here.
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September 7, 2008 – 12:06 am
In a comment to a recent post, reader David Brightly asked if I was worried that naturalistic accounts of morality “might lead to less good and more harm being done.” It’s a good question, and I am not sure about the answer.
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September 1, 2008 – 10:51 pm
There is an organization, which I expect most of you have heard of by now, called “the The Brights“. It is dedicated to the promotion of what it calls a “naturalistic worldview”, which it defines as being free of “supernatural and mystical elements”. The name, I think, is exceedingly unfortunate; it seems smug and pollyanna-ish, [...]
A couple of weeks ago I posted an essay in response to a post of Bill Vallicella’s on whether life might have an objective meaning. In his piece Bill argued that any attempt to offer a purely subjective interpretation must lead to an infinite regress, and therefore must be false. I responded, drawing on work [...]
Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is back in harness after a month-long layoff from blogging. I’m glad he’s back on the job: he is as interesting and provocative as always. I’d like to weigh in on this post in particular, in which he argues that meaning, in particular the meaning of life, must either [...]
From my friend Wayne Krantz comes a link to a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times: apparently some of Barack Obama’s younger and more enthusiastic supporters, having noticed that his middle name — Hussein — has been a heavy cross to bear, have decided to make it their [...]
From reader JK comes a link to an article about a growing tension in the Persian Gulf. No, it isn’t between the Sunnis and the Shi’a, or between US diplomats and the Iraqi parliament, but between Islamic fundamentalists and those in the region who, having attracted enormous foreign investment, and having used it to build [...]
With a hat tip to our friend Jess, here is a link to a post at the science blog Gene Expression that reports a result which, if true, is hardly a surprise.
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