How The Texas Textbook Standards Got Corrupted

People For The American Way have an analysis of the process by which Texas’s textbook standards became tools for rewriting history according to a contemporary right wing religious political viewpoint.  Here are just a few glimpses of the changes, both those merely proposed and those actually accepted by the school board, which I had not [...]

Jennifer Michael Hecht On The History Of Doubt And Atheism

Here is Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson at Hampshire College in 2007 discussing the the wrote the complicated history of doubt and atheism: Your Thoughts?

How Apologetic Goals Compromise Christian Apologists’ Historical Research

Appealing to insights of the great theologian Paul Tillich, Robert M. Price takes on the corruption of research when it has a defensive agenda. via Your Thoughts?

A Mosque At Ground Zero?

New York City has approved a plan to build a 13 story mosque and community center near the site of the former World Trade Center as part of the area’s proposed revitalization. I decided to group all the most interesting and relevant videos and editorials I could find into one large post in order to [...]

Sarah Palin And Her Naked Theocratic Intentions

I keep wanting to give a thorough response to every bit of ignorance, revisionism, corruption, self-contradiction, condescension, unfounded persecution complex, hypocrisy, and philosophical crudity in this video, coming not only from Sarah Palin but also from Bill O’Reilly, but each line from both of them is so packed with them, that I keep getting overwhelmed [...]

The Story Of Human Rights

A really well made video: The website. Your Thoughts?

Thomas Jefferson vs. Sarah Palin

Keith Olbermann compares the two great American leaders’ views of God and state: Your Thoughts?

President’s Daily Hilarity: George Washington

Happy President’s Day! Your Thoughts?

Judge This: Miep Gies, Heroic Or Merely Dutiful?

In ethics there is an interesting question as to whether there are any such things as supererogatory deeds, meaning whether we should consider certain moral deeds which require great courage or sacrifice to be obligatory upon everyone or whether they are too demanding to be minimally necessary for everyone and therefore extraordinarily special and signs [...]

Christmas Unwrapped–The History of Christmas

From the History Channel and via Too Many Tribbles, comes this fascinating and informative five part special: Your Thoughts?

What Is Halloween?

Really interesting history: Your Fears?

What Motivated Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot?

Non-Stamp Collector is back again with a brand new video: Your Thoughts?

Biblical Slavery, In Context

Does the Bible REALLY endorse slavery, when read in CONTEXT??? Yes, yes it does. Leviticus 25:44-46: ‘As for your male and female slaves whom you may have– you may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you. Then, too, it is out of the sons of the sojourners who live [...]

As It Happened 8 Years Ago Yesterday

The live footage of the second plane hitting the south tower on September 11, 2001 as broadcast on numerous New York television stations and national news outlets and as it looked and sounded in real time footage which was broadcast only later.  It goes without saying that the footage is disturbing.  Here is the official [...]

The Imperial History Of The Middle East In 90 Seconds

A neat interactive map. Your Thoughts?

Christianity And Lithuania

ABC News reported on the discovery of another CIA secret prison that was being used for some period of time between 2001-2005.  This one in Lithuania.  Red explores its long bloody history and one of its recurring themes: Vilnius has a long and bloody history. There are mass graves there containing the remains of tens [...]

Daily Hilarity: Mr. Deity’s Creative Gift For His Chosen People

Brand new Mr. Deity! Your Thoughts?

Dispelling The Myth That Nazism Was An Outgrowth Of Darwinian Atheism

In April of last year, Richard Dawkins wrote this letter (which should be read in full) to someone duped by the slander that Darwinian atheism led to Hitler’s ideals and goals: His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many [...]

The Meaning Of The Parthenon

Camels With Hammers regular (and my former student at Fordham), Evangelos has revived his blog and has a fascinating post which weaves together all the various things that Greece has stood for, both to Greeks and to the rest of the West at various times and places, and which explains how the competing attempts to [...]

Were The 20th Century Wars A Rebuke To Reason?

City of God argues that the New Atheists need to learn from history that reason is no guide to world-improvement If religion had motivated people to die for God and King, surely reason and science had made the dying that much nastier through the innovations of gas, flame-throwers, bomber aircraft, bigger artillery and the like. [...]

Lenin, Mao, and the Enlightenment

Andrew Stuttaford debunks John Gray’s charges that Mao and Lenin were “disciples of an Enlightenment ideology”. First Gray: Equating fundamentalism with terrorism is loose thinking, but the biggest drawback is the loss of historical memory that making the parallel entails. Much of the state terror in the past century was secular, not religious. Lenin and [...]

A Pro-Nazi Museum In Germany?

Well this is disquieting news… Jürgen Rieger, the vice-president of the party that seeks to ban all immigration and sever all ties with the EU, has submitted plans to authorities in Wolfsburg – home to car giant Volkswagen – for the museum intended to “show the people what this organisation did and what it meant”. [...]

On The Various Disciplines’ Resources For Engaging The Enduring Questions

Professor Jude Jones has stopped by to offer an excellent retort to my recent remarks in reply to her. Our topic is whether a new NEH call for grant proposals presumes that non-philosophers can address “the enduring questions” usually considered the domain of philosophy better than philosophers have or equal to how we have.  Here [...]

Anachronistic Narratives and Students’ Attempts To Understand Abolitionism

Via Open Left comes these remarks (worth reading in full) from Clio Bluestocking on the appallingly shallow and badly framed ways that her students are conceiving of the abolitionist movement: For example, in the past few years, I have read essays that refer to the conditions of slavery as a “lifestyle.” I have read essays [...]

Happy Birthday, America

We grow up with both so much mythologization and heroicizing of our founders and, in recent decades, a whole lot of necessary demythologizing and lamentations of our national failures, that is hard to simply appreciate what a novel and brilliant experiment it was to really found and design a nation based on a philosophy—and a [...]