What Are You Doing Here?

Camels With Hammers used to be accessible at both www.camelswithhammers.com and the www.camelswithhammers.wordpress.com address you just used.  But now we are exclusively at www.camelswithhammers.com and camelswithhammers.wordpress.com is now a ghost blog.

The End Of The Camels With Hammers Dark Ages

No new posts today as I have been and will be bogged down with preparations for the blog’s formal move to our new host.  There are a lot of things to take care of before tomorrow. Tomorrow ends the “dark ages” at Camels With Hammers as we abandon our black and orange scheme entirely for [...]

Gay Couple Weds In DC After 60 Years Together

The Advocate reports: After a 60-year romance, a gay couple in their 80s tied the knot in Washington, D.C., June 20. Henry Schalizki and Bob Davis exchanged their vows at the J. W. Marriott in Washington in front of 60 friends and family members, according to The Washington Post. The couple reveals that while Schalizki immediately [...]

Rational Passional Persuasion

Andrew writes: So atheists don’t have emotions which inform them of the truth of something? And their rhetoric is completely dispassionate to the point where logic and reason are not fully objective? I have addressed the proper ways to consult the emotions in looking for truth in the post, Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason, so for [...]

Hammer

VorJack writes: If Atheists have a God, the way many believers insist we have, it isn’t science. The God of atheists is Truth (or Reality, or the Universe, depending on how you want to spin it.) Science, reason and logic are only the means of finding the Truth, but they’re also the only means we’ve [...]

One Nation Indivisible

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 [...]

What Exactly Are We Supposed To Be Doing?

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 [...]

The Gulf Disaster: Prayer And Priorities

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 [...]

Judge This: No Gay Kissing On Modern Family?

I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters.  The controversy centers not [...]

Lord Mayor Bans Lord Mayor Bans “Intrusive And Outdated” Christian Prayers Before Council Meetings

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 [...]

Obama Acknowledges Two Father Families In Father’s Day Proclamation, Christian Right Flips Out

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 [...]

Putting Social Brain Mechanisms To The Task Of Figuring Out Unknown Natural Phenomena

Last fall, Wired reported on a study published last fall (“Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity.” By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, Jordan Grafman. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 4 No. 9, September 28, 2009) which finds religious people have extra activity in the neurological brain regions indispensable for social intelligence: Brain scans [...]

Spanish Senate Votes To Ban The Burqa

The New York Times reports: MADRID — In a significant escalation of Spain’s debate over how to handle radical Islam, the Senate on Wednesday narrowly and unexpectedly approved a motion to ban Muslim women from wearing in public the burqa or other garments that cover the whole body. The vote, 131 to 129, was another setback [...]

Daily Hilarity: BP Putting People To Work! (Scrubbing Pelicans…)

Your Thoughts?

Starvation

This ripped my guts out to watch. Thanks to the “Let’s Lodge A Complaint Against God” Facebook page for the video.  But the takeaway from this video should not be just another reiteration of the problem of evil, it should be refreshed urgency in our thinking about proactively remedying the problem through humane human efforts. [...]

“Dawkins Is Not A Priest”: A Heated Facebook Exchange

Last spring a friend asked me to come over to her Facebook wall where she had posted a Sam Harris video (on his views on science’s ability to answer moral questions, which I will get around to analyzing here some day).  Though not an outspoken atheist herself, she had received a lot of anti-atheist fervor from [...]

“Ex-Gay” Adam Hood Argues That Homosexuality Is A Sin

To understand how this kind of self-loathing is manipulated into being please read A Gay Blogger Undercover At “Love Won Out” and for insight into how it can be overcome, watch Rejecting The Ex-Gay Movement. Your Thoughts?

McChrystal The Torturer

I have never liked General McChrystal being allowed to run our Afghanistan operations.  Long before his current foolish comments in Rolling Stone that have gotten him fired and replaced by General Petraeus, he should have been brought up on charges of war crimes: “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will [the Red Cross] [...]

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

Pride is essentially the personal identification with something admirable.  When I am rightly proud of my traits, I rightly take the traits themselves each to be admirable in one way or another and rightly take myself to be admirable insofar as they are part of me and expressions of me.  When I am rightly proud [...]

The Hard Evidence Against A Literal Adam And Eve

Jerry Coyne explains why the proposed idea of a single pair of original human ancestors is refuted by what we know of our evolutionary ancestry: Over at the Templeton-funded BioLogos website there has been a lot of discussion about the historicity of Adam and Eve. This is a problem because scripture claims these two were [...]

Camels With Hammers Turns 1 Year Old Today

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to all of you who keep reading and who commenting on Camels With Hammers and who keep sharing links with your friends and with all sorts of social media sites.  Running this blog over this past year and watching your support and enthusiasm for the blog grow has been [...]

A Quick, Belated Post For Yesterday’s “Atheist Solidarity Day”

Yesterday was the first annual “Atheist Solidarity Day” but since I was too busy to blog I never got around to doing anything special for it here. So, now I hereby affirm, in honor of “Atheist Solidarity Day”, that I’ve got your back, fellow atheists. Your Solidarity?

Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”)

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand.  Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one [...]

On The “Compassion” In The Catholic Bishops’ Letter To Congress Against Gay Rights

Recently, United States bishops petitioned Congress to not protect gays from being fired for their sexual orientation.  Andrew Sullivan already precisely attacked the bishops’ immoral political calculation by which they explicitly committed themselves to a perverse moral contradiction whereby they simultaneously concede that homosexuality is to a significant extent not a choice and argue that [...]

Daily Hilarity: A New Pope In A Galaxy Far, Far Away

The absurdity of religious ceremonial pretensions are clarified a bit: Thanks to Heather for the link. Your Thoughts?