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 […]

Rate this:

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. […]

Rate this:

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 […]

Rate this:

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 […]

Rate this:

Daniel Dennett: Can We Know Our Own Minds?

Daniel Dennett explains various limitations on our introspective understanding of our own consciousness. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Christopher Hitchens Vs. Laura Ingraham & Doug Wilson

They start talking after an opening minute of some Gospel Bob Dylan: Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

The Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Known Maker

Strictly deriving belief in the Christian God logically from the problem of where everything comes from: It’s amazing how the problem of how something comes from nothing leads to so many obvious and unavoidable truths, isn’t it? Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Some Suspicions About The Superiority Of Liberal Moral Values

Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.  If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of […]

Rate this:

Louisiana To Require Ultrasounds Before Abortions

It was a unanimous 79-0 vote: Women seeking abortions in Louisiana will be required to get an ultrasound first, even if they are a victim of rape or incest, under a bill that received final legislative passage Wednesday. The bill by Democratic state Sen. Sharon Broome of Baton Rouge was sent to the governor’s desk […]

Rate this:

Are Liberal Values Objectively Better Than Conservative Ones?

In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate.  He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking […]

Rate this:

Emotional Rollercoaster Relationships Harder On Young Men Than Young Women

A study of 1,000 men and women ages 18-23, “Nonmarital Romantic Relationships and Mental Health in Early Adulthood” by Robin Simon and Anne Barrett, finds that young men benefit more from a romantic relationship going well and suffer worse from the strain of a bad one, whereas young women benefit more from simply being in […]

Rate this:

David Chalmers On “The Singularity”

What happens when machines get smarter than humans?  Presumably, they will build machines smarter than themselves which will build machines smarter than themselves and onward towards infinity. Philosophy Bites interviews David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind, about the concept and its possible realization. Thanks to 3QuarksDaily for the heads up. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Michael Shermer On “The Pattern Behind Self-Deception”

Shermer does TED and explains how two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired traits, useful for survival, backfire on us: Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

The Christian Logic Of Power, Pride, Humility, Free Will, Original Sin, And All-Consuming Divine Narcissism

Pride has traditionally been disparaged by Christianity as not only a vice but as the chief vice and gone so far as to recommend humility as one of the highest virtues for a human being. The theological reasons for this begin with the way that traditional Christianity understands human beings primarily relationally, as in an […]

Rate this:

True And False In Adam And Eve

Yesterday I replied to Mary Midgley’s article out this weekend, which claimed that evolutionary theory does not refute Genesis since Genesis was not meant to be a literal description of how God made the world. In reply I revisted remarks and videos that I posted last fall which overviewed the ways that even if we […]

Rate this:

How Genesis Is Not Only Literally False, But Metaphorically False

Mary Midgley argues that only the views of fundamentalist literalists are refuted by the fact of evolution: Appeals to evolution are only damaging to biblical literalism. Certainly the events described inGenesis 1 are not literally compatible with what science (from long before Darwin’s day) tells us about the antiquity of the Earth. But this is not […]

Rate this:

Changing Minds

Steven Pinker compares current worries that the internet is changing how we think and making it more superficial to previous “moral panics” at the arrival of all other new media, from the printing press to newspapers to television.  (And his examples might as well have gone all the way back to Plato’s mistrust of the […]

Rate this:

“Skipping Sunday School”: A Documentary On Parenting Without Religion And Growing Up Godless

(via Atheist Nexus) Learn more about the topic and the film here. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Are Divine Command Theory And Objective Morality Mutually Exclusive Concepts?

Luke Muelhauser confronts William Lane Craig with the inconsistency between his divine command interpretation of morality, according to which things are moral or immoral as solely determined by God’s calling them as such, on the one hand, and his insistence that in this way God is the source of “objective morality”: But let us say […]

Rate this:

Michael Sandel On “The Lost Art Of Democratic Debate”

A good video from Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, who recently wrote a book on justice for a popular audience, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and who last year released on YouTube high production value videos encapsulating his lectures for his standard introductory level ethics class at Harvard. You can start watching those videos here. […]

Rate this:

The Life You Can Save

Peter Singer is turning his famous thought experiment into a charity experiment: The Life You Can Save in website form and The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty in book form. Your Thoughts?

Rate this:

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Yesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods).  Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant […]

Rate this:

Differently Abled Or Simply More Virtuous In One Respect

Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency.  Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s […]

Rate this:

A Little Evidence That Atheists and Theists Don’t “Simply Think Differently”

In order to respond to certain misunderstandings based on this post’s original, provocative title (Do Atheists Just Have Asperger’s?) I have re-edited it and retitled it.  There is now a new opening paragraph and extra concluding paragraphs. It is often suggested that the difference between theists and atheists might simply stem from differences in their naturally given […]

Rate this:

More On Sister Margaret McBride, The Nun Who Approved A Life-Saving Abortion

This is mostly previously reported information, but it does include an appearance by Canon lawyer Kevin O’Rourke, a priest who both sides with Sister McBride and admits that the Church’s policy of automatically excommunicating anyone who permits an abortion but not automatically excommunicating pedophile priests “doesn’t look good”: My views on the ethical issues raised […]

Rate this: