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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Moral Actions, Moral Sentiments, Moral Motives, and Moral Justifications: More On The Nun Excommunicated For Approving A Life-Saving Abortion

In reply to my post on the story of Sister Margaret McBride whom the Catholic Church “automatically excommunicated” for helping to give the go-ahead to an abortion claimed necessary for saving the life of an 11 week pregnant mother, I have already received two interesting replies.  The first challenged the medical argument for the necessity of [...]

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Last summer I wrote a number of posts through which I sought to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith and in the process distinguish the various virtuous ethical and epistemic practices for which faith is typically confused by means of ambiguous equivocations.  I attempted to distinguish the virtues of hope, loyalty, trust, intuitional [...]

Is Reason My “God” 3: What It Means To Be A Rational Being

Late last night Grant challenged my insistence that reason is not my “god” in whom I have faith.  I have already replied to his attempt to lump in reliance upon science with reliance upon religion as equivalent strategies for avoiding facing the fact of uncertainty and inexplicability.  In this post I consider the next portion [...]

Camels With Hammers Philosophy

After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.”  This post will [...]

Dennett On Evolution

This is a terrific video in which Dennett and Dawkins get further into the weeds discussing the dynamics of evolution, responsibility, how you can make living things out of dead stuff and conscious ones out of unconscious ones, the wonder of natural processes, the idea that we have souls—but they’re made of neurons, and many [...]

Jon Stewart Against Dogma and Extremism But Not “Religion”

Jon Stewart: Religion makes sense to me. I have trouble with dogma more than I have trouble with religion. I think the best thing religion does is give people a sense of place, purpose, and compassion. My quibble with it is when it’s described as the only way to have those things instilled. You can [...]

How Faith Is Not Like Other (Revisable) Reflexive Assumptions

(It should not be necessary for understanding this post, but for the full backstory to this debate see my series on Objections to Religious Moderates and Intellectuals, parts 1, 2, 3, & 4 and my post “On Teleology and Intellectual Virtues and Vices”) Shane writes in reply to my post “On Teleology and Intellectual Virtues [...]

On Teleology and Intellectual Virtues and Vices

Below I quote Shane’s reply to part 4 of my series, “Objections to Religious Moderates and Intellectuals” (for further background to this debate, check out parts 1, 2 & 3) and reply to him.  The topic has evolved into questions of teleology and the “point” of life, so little background in previous installments should be [...]