This man comes up to you and says, “I am Phil, the latest prophet of God.”
And you say, “Really? How do you know that?”
He says, “I have this book that says so. Look.”
And he hands you a folded piece of paper, which you open up, and it says, … Continue reading “The Liar’s Holy Book”
This is the TL;DR summary of Cummins at work. Full details here.
That smacks of intellectual dishonesty to me. Continue reading “Denise Cummins – Would You Trust Her?”
Paul Bloom has been pushing for some time the idea that empathy can be troublesome. I don’t think Bloom says anywhere that empathy is totally bad news. The point he is making is that in many crucial examples it seems empathy overpowers our rationality and leads us to make bad decisions.
Continue reading “Paul Bloom Misrepresented”
Oh, good, another bunch of questions for atheists – as if the believers haven’t been told often enough.
10 Questions For Every Atheist – “Some Questions Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…”
1. How Did You Become an Atheist? Continue reading “Ten Answers To Christian Questions”
Islam is a violent ideology that compels Muslims to violence – just not all the time and against all people, and this is where apparent contradictions come in. They seem like contradictions only if you buy into the sales pitch that Islam is a religion of peace.
The inerrancy of the Quran is explicit and accepted by all Muslims I’ve ever come across and read about – except for reformists. And some sects of Islam, like Ahmadiyya, emphasise peace more than others.
[Updated 4/10/2017]
The question of what is and what is not ‘terrorism’ becomes most contentious when it’s not a Muslim doing the killing.
The reason is that there are clearly plenty of Islamic terror attacks, and far fewer for any other religion or ideology, and Muslims and other apologists for Islam don’t like it that Islamic terrorism gets so much attention. They’d like non-Islamic non-terrorist attacks to be called terrorist attacks, or they’d like the world to make less of the ‘Islamic’ in Islamic terrorism (“Nothing to do with Islam”, “Not a true Muslim”, “Terrorism has no religion”, …). And when the real world doesn’t comply, they make fake claims about ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism’.
Is there a lone killer, that’s crazy (crazier than run of the mill crazy ideologues) and is he unaffiliated with a particular group or acting without sanction from a particular group?
He’s a crazy lone wolf killer.
Is he doing it in the name of his ideological group in order to strike terror into the target?
He’s a lone wolf terrorist.
Continue reading “A Guide To Terrorists For Idiots”These whitewash pieces that excuse Islam from any responsibility for Islamic terrorism are two-a-penny. A regular culprit is Mehdi Hasan. But today we have a half-baked piece from Haroon Moghul: Double standards: The only difference between a Christian gunman and a Muslim terrorist is racism
Marek Sullivan wrote a piece in Counterpunch: Sam Harris’s Quantum Universe (or, How to Say One Thing While Meaning Another)
The title should be Sam Harris’s Quantum Universe (or, How to Say One Thing Harris says and have people like Marek read another)
Continue reading “Marek Sullivan Needs Help”
Some stupidity like this is doing the rounds:
1) Being an atheist is okay. Being an atheist and shaming religions and spirituality as silly and not real is not okay
2) Being a Christian is okay. Being homophobic, misogynistic, racist or otherwise hateful person in the name of Christianity is not okay
3) Being a reindeer is okay. Bullying and excluding another reindeer because it has a shiny red nose is not okay
And here we go with another religious justification for torturing people, from Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
Of course he doesn’t like to torture sick people, or to use his religious belief to justify such torture. I thought, well, if he’s prepared to use ridiculous rhetoric to make his case, I might too. But then I thought again, Continue reading “Justin Welby Likes To Torture Sick People?”
You’re with it by now, right? Lauren Nelson (Lake?) loves Richard Dawkins. She wrote a crappy post, got called out on it, then on her blog told us how we got it wrong, that she loves him but he could do better. It’s all been said, in comments, on twitter, on other blogs, … but … I don’t want to be left out!!!
So, there was this: Richard Dawkins Fails Spectacularly on Feminism and Islam – Lauren Nelson, on Friendly Atheist. Continue reading “Dawkins, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”
A good show from @KyleKulinski on Cenk Uygur getting his panties in a twist over New Atheists (well, Sam Harris really). Kyle’s show is a ‘TheYoungTurks Partner’, and I’ve seen Kyle raise this issue with Cenk before. In an earlier show I thought Kyle had some details wrong and gave Cenk too much benefit of the doubt. So it’s significant that Kyle gets what the problem is with Cenk, though I don’t know he’s aware of the full nature of the problem. Continue reading “Cenk Uygur Is Losing His Grip On Reality?”
James Garvey of TPM has this piece on an interview with Frank Jackson, where Jackson seems to have turned to physicalism, but I still don’t think he gets it yet.
A point to make at the outset: Refuting the Knowledge Argument does not in itself make the case for physicalism. A physicalist point may be used in an explanation of the physicalist understanding of the phenomena the Knowledge Argument is trying to describe, but the refutation of the argument is a logical one, and the physicalist comment only supports that refutation, by offering the physicalist view as an alternative. Continue reading “Frank Jackson, James Garvey, Mary and the Awful Knowledge Argument”
Physicist Sean Carroll indulges one of his physics colleagues in a post Guest Post: Don Page on God and Cosmology. Sean:
Don Page is one of the world’s leading experts on theoretical gravitational physics and cosmology, as well as a previous guest-blogger around these parts. … He is also, somewhat unusually among cosmologists, an Evangelical Christian, and interested in the relationship between cosmology and religious belief.
From here on I’ll address Don on his piece, by picking up only the statements I think are really problematic. I’m basically repeating what I wrote in the comments section, with some minor mods. Continue reading “God Probabilities Are Pointless, Even From Physicists”
This came out of a discussion with Wyrd Smythe in a comment section on Students showing up at college understanding the fact value distinction is a good thing.
It started as a discussion about morals, but this aside developed in the conversation. Continue reading “Abstract Things Don’t Exist”
Michael Nugent tries to grasp and challenge the meaning of the mystical words of Swami Purnananda as the latter explains something or other about his beliefs.
I’ve always been fascinated by how well artists capture moving water. I remember visiting Niagara Falls, and I tried to pick out and follow a pattern in the flow of water as it went over the edge – no sooner had I selected one fast moving ripple to examine its form and it was gone, and the water just kept on coming. Swami Purnananda’s meaningless words just keep on coming, and Michael Nugent has barely a moment to grasp each one and impart some sense onto it. Continue reading “Religious Language Frustrates Michael Nugent”
There’s some serious hypocrisy flying around some quarters of the Free Thought Blogs. Ophelia Benson, PZ Myers and others are fighters for social justice, the feminist cause and the battle against sexual abuse and rape, which can only be applauded, and would be, were it not for their methods. Continue reading “Ophelia Benson’s Medicine”
For a philosopher that likes to point out the nuances of the philosophy he thinks Dawkins misses out on, Gray is awfully sloppy with his own thinking – sloppy or malicious, possibly both.
“The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins – His atheism is its own kind of narrow religion”
In what way is Dawkins close minded? Closed to ideas that lack evidence to support them, Continue reading “John Gray’s Poor Thinking on Dawkins”
Coel has put up a post on one of philosophy’s favourite topics: Brain in a vat (BIV). I’ll try to get to other sources, such as the Massimo Pigliucci post Coel refers to, but for now I’ll respond to Coel’s post only.
So, “[the BIV problem] supposes that we are a brain kept alive in a vat, being fed with a stream of inputs generated by an Evil Genius. Everything that we experience as sense data is not real, but is artificially simulated and fed to us.”
Rape is bad. In similar circumstances the a similar event might be worse for some victims than others. And depending on how it affects the victim what looks superficially like a worse rape, such as by a stranger at knife point, than another rape, such as by a friend on a date, may in fact not be what we expect. One victim might find the date rape far more traumatic than the attack by a stranger, because perhaps the failure of trust between them and the trusted friend might completely fuck up the victim’s capacity to trust and interact with people generally. The victim of a stranger rape might be able to put that into a box, a dreadful box not to be opened again, so that they can get on with their lives. Continue reading “Dawkins v Myers: The Slurs Continue”
Ramblings 