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 [...]

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 [...]

Lord Mayor Bans Lord Mayor Bans “Intrusive And Outdated” Christian Prayers Before Council Meetings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

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

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] [...]

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 [...]

Workshop To Teach Public School Teachers How To Proselytize In School

Because no legal or moral principles matter more to some fundamentalists than their drive to evangelize: “Every day, 55 million American children and their teachers show up for school. For the nearly 90% who attend a public school, the ACLU and other anti-Christian organizations have systematically stripped almost every vestige of Christianity from their schools. [...]

Judge This: Cop Responds To Push With Punch

The YouTube description provides the following context: It all started when a cop stopped a man for jaywalking. Things escalated quickly from there as voices were raised and a crowd gathered. When two young women intervened an onlooker pulled out his camera phone and started to roll tape. The altercation took place yesterday on Martin Luther [...]

Multicultural Human Rights

Johann Hari makes the argument that we have the right to stand up for the rights of those in other cultures without fear that we are not “multicultural” enough: Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don’t know, who have a different culture or colour [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

YouTube’s Margaret Stewart Explains Their Approach To Copyright

Margaret Stewart explains how rights identification is allows copyrighted videos uploaded by users to be accepted or rejected by the rights owners and makes the pitch to rights holders to let their material get uploaded onto YouTube: Your Thoughts?

Bad Science In The Gulf

Rachel Maddow warns that the Obama Administration is ignoring scientific opinion about the way to rebuild the Gulf: Your Thoughts?

Follow The Closing Arguments Of The Proposition 8 Trial Today

And you can follow them as they are live-blogged on the Proposition 8 Trial Tracker website, which was an invaluable resource during testimony, filled with fascinating in-depth accounts of the arguments everyday.  They’ve also started rolling already today on their Twitter feed and on their Facebook page. Here is the schedule for the arguments, all [...]

North Carolinian Congressman Bob Etheridge Pushes Around Student

This is nuts: Your Thoughts?

Olbermann And Matthews Rip Obama’s Oval Office Speech

Thanks to Terri Lee for the heads up. Your Thoughts?

The Rise Of Islamo-Erotica

(Image: “God Is Great” by Makan Emadi) Betwa Shermer has a really interesting piece about Muslim artists in America who incorporate nudes into their art.  Defenses of nudity in art as permissible by Islamic standards: The Lebanese-born artist, who now lives in New York, insists that the taboo stems from a conservative society and not [...]

Nigerian Oil Spill Victims Fight Foreign Oil Companies

1.5 million tons of oil spilled in Nigeria over the last 50 years, with no accountability from foreign oil companies: Your Thoughts?

Is Shari’a Law “Inevitable” For UK Muslims?

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims it is: Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4′s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social [...]

Cults Of Inerrant Leaders

Glenn Greenwald summarizes an atrocity of institutionalized injustice, whereby the executive branch of the United States has the power to abduct and torture innocent people with impunity: The Supreme Court today denied a petition of review from Maher Arar, the Canadian and Syrian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. Government at a stopover at JFK Airport when returning [...]

How Science Inspired Democracy In The Modern World

Summary of the video and the contents of the whole lecture: Timothy Ferris, Former Editor of Rolling Stone and Professor Emeritus at U.C. Berkeley, makes the case that science inspired the spread of democracy. Just as the scientific revolution rescued billions from poverty, fear, hunger and disease, Ferris argues that the Enlightenment values it inspired [...]

Say The Pledge Of Allegiance With Porky Pig

Without any reference to God. In honor of Flag Day in America, here is a clip from “Old Glory”, a 1939 Porky Pig cartoon which features a godless pledge in both print and recitation: Of course, Porky was not an atheist activist trying to prove a point, he just lived in that pre-1954 America that [...]