More On Pascal’s Wager From Qualia Soup and Theramin Trees

Recently I posted a terrific video challenging the value of Pascal’s Wager  from numerous perspectives.  Qualia Soup and Theramin Trees, the creators of that video, have a new video replying to criticisms they received after posting the first video.  Below is first the original video again for those who missed it (or who saw it [...]

Meet The Inhabitants Of Atheistland

Theramin Trees’ avatar, “Wise Monkey” interviews the inhabitants of Atheistland—several of YouTube’s best atheist video makers.  It’s a fun and educational trip for you non-atheists to our homeland which hopefully will clarify a little bit about what we do and do not think and why. The video makers assisting Theramin Trees by contributing to this [...]

Intelligent Design In A Nusthell

One of the most prominent proponents of Intelligent Design, William Dembski, sums up the theory in one minutes worth of clips from one of his speeches: The idea comes from a terrific speech on complexity by PZ Myers (which you should really watch in its entirety) from the Atheist Alliance International meeting last month: Your [...]

A Brief Overview Of My Dissertation

Nietzsche’s writings on morality are famously provocative and controversial.  His criticisms of morality in both theory and practice are so extensive and rhetorically scathing that many philosophers assume that he can offer little or nothing constructive to moral philosophy.  Additionally, his glorification of the will to power sounds prima facie like a celebration of excessively [...]

The Religious Who Cry Offense

Michael Brull exposes exactly the hypocrisy and evasiveness at the core of religious attempts to silence criticism from atheists on the grounds that it’s inherently “offensive”: Facing a new attack with an international audience playing close attention, religions have as little rational argument in their favour as ever. There was a time when they could [...]

Daily Hilarity: Hate Mail

Richard Dawkins reads some hate mail from religious detractors: And ZJ also gives her critics a fair hearing: Your Thoughts?

The Value Of Religious Moderates And The Danger Of Isolating Religious And Political Fundamentalists

Recently Karen Armstrong is coming out with a book arguing for an extremely apophatic conception of God that rejects all manner of biblical literalism but still insists on some important reference to God and is critical of the New Atheists.  Recently she and Richard Dawkins both responded to a Wall Street Journal solicitation for their [...]

Are The New Atheists The New Prophets?

PZ Myers, a prominent “New Atheist” reports on his being designated a prophet: Michael Dowd, the peculiar author of Thank God for Evolution, has a strange podcast up that promotes the New Atheists because they are the new prophets — we’re telling it like it is, and religious folks need more of that. He also urges people [...]

When Should A Scientist’s Faith Disqualify Him From Scientific Institutional Authority?

In reply to this post addressing previous objections that Wandering Internet Commentator made to me, WIC returns volley (sentences in italics are quotes he has taken from my previous post to him): I anticipated creationists figuring in your reply. The problem is, though, I’m not really sure they’re the best example of religion ‘polluting’ the [...]

More Thoughts On Scientists In The Public Square

My previous post today on religious scientists was based on a comment I first made on the blog He Lives in reply to a post there.  Below is a subsequent comment from that blog from “Wandering Internet Commenter” interspersed with my replies to him. Normative arguments are fun and all, but it never hurt to [...]

How Atheists Can Avoid Other Fundamentalisms: By Focusing On Rationalism First And Foremost

I agree with this a whole lot (I most recommend the last link to PZ Myers’s assessment of Hitchens on war): The real-world implications of the “New Atheists” ideas are not insulated from the same dogmatism and intolerance that they decry. To get back to my original point about rationalism, the religious aspect is only [...]

Silence About God

Philosopher Simon Blackburn summarizes Karen Armstrong’s views on religion as more akin to art than science: the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you [...]

Jesus and Mo on “Atheist Fundamentalists”

From June 26, 2009 Via Jerry Coyne