Okay, forget what I previous wrote about Bertrand Russell. In fact, forget everything I’ve written here about religion. One of the best responses I’ve read to evangelicals and their tactics and arguments is this one I came across on Facebook today by a fellow named Conrad Hudson. Below is his post: Deceptive Campus Leafleteers Was feeling feisty [...]
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Freethinking, and atheism itself, is as old as ancient Greece and Rome with Epicurus, Seneca, Emperor Marcus Aurelius. . . . But there are few comprehensive essays critiquing the idea of a creator omni-god, Yahweh and Jesus in particular, that’s as thorough and reasoned as Bertrand Russell’s 1927 essay, “Why I Am Not a Christian.” [...]
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This has, without a doubt, been an absolutely terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. Probably the worst one, evah! (The only, and I mean only, bright spot was I finally got my Masters Degree in English . . . and even that’s pending until next year when I pay for and turn in super-expensive [...]
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(This is the 9th edition of my Alpha Course reaction. For the first and all past posts, see the Alpha Page.) After last week’s monster of a post, you’ll be glad to hear that this week’s will be shorter than usual. But first, a couple of semi-related things I’d meant to refer to in earlier [...]
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(This is part 6 of my, a non-believer’s, reaction to The Alpha Course, an introductory course into Christianity. The beginning is here, and the previous entry, part 5, is here.) I’m going to try something new this time and write my reaction less than 5 days after the event. Like, the next day, maybe. Well, [...]
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Greta Christina has a fascinating article over on AlterNet: “Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative (Liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree about specific issues — we disagree about core ethical values. Can a case be made that liberal values really are better?)” “When asked a series of questions about different ethical situations, [...]
READ MORE »I’m going to keep this short, because I want to mainly present this potentially interesting documentary in the works: “Skipping Sunday School“: I’m amused and annoyed by the old and ridiculous canard of Pascal’s Wager used at the end of the clip. Spoken by the guy who throughly didn’t believe that a person could be good without the indoctrination [...]
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Cory Doctorow, (writer, electronic freedom activist, and Walt Disney World aficionado), Tweeted a message earlier today that I took great interest in: “This woman writes smarter, better stuff about #Disney parks than anyone I’ve ever read: http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/“. I read the latest post, History and the Haunted Mansion, and was blown away! It’s a perfect mix of serious and [...]
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“Can science provide a morality to change the world? NO.” This is from a recent blog post by biologist and outspoken atheist, PZ Myers in the posting: A priest, a scientist, and a Communist discuss morality. It’s a really interesting post about a talk he spoke at (with the aforementioned priest and Communist) on the [...]
READ MORE »In honor of Guy Fawkes Day this Nov. 5th (Wiki link)* are a couple of links for light reading: A recent musing of mine on anarchy and democracy: link An excellent (and scary-sad) collection from Classically Liberal of examples of police state abuse and misconduct. * Like most things in postmodern culture, this topic is [...]
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The Tyranny of the Majority: If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority [...]
READ MORE »So my iPhone is in the process of updating to the latest software, 3.0. It failed the first time because I’m doing it through a Windows XP install within a Linux virtualbox, and I wasn’t paying attention to the USB status. So it had to restore and now I’m anticipating my application data will be [...]
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(OK, only a couple more of blog posts in this surge.) BoingBoing has an article: “Marx was right!” in which the author discusses his move from being a dot-com capitalist to a return to a respect for Marx’s criticism of capitalism. (His wife, who said of his return to Marxist studies that it’s “worse than [...]
READ MORE »For Xmas, my wife got me Paul Kurtz’s book _Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Secularism_ (I’m on my iPhone, can’t copy links–look it up *grin*) even though she’s more of a religious humanist, herself. What an incredibly thoughtful and giving gift. I love my wife.
READ MORE »If you know me you know that I have a love/hate relationship with conspiracy theories. On the one hand, they’re really entertaining! They make for great “X-Files” plotlines, and extra bonus points if they can work in The Illuminati! (And keep a straight face.) fnord But on the other hand, they’re almost always complete bunk. [...]
READ MORE »I came upon the subject through a blog entry on Skepchick: Creationist Comeuppance on YouTube I started watching the video apology the creationist is “forced” to give for unethically and possibly illegally invoking DMCA to try to extort a critic of his to remove his critical videos. I got bored and stopped watching it. While [...]
READ MORE »“Devilstower” has a fantastically complete and detailed explanation of how three of the largest events/scandals to undermine the U.S. economy in the last 25 years have had the involvement of persons like, oh, John McCain, his financial adviser Phil Gramm, and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan: Three Times is Enemy Action Alan Greespan is often lauded, [...]
READ MORE »Yesterday I posted a super-bloated overlong post: The failure of conservatism. (That’s what happens when I allow myself to write unedited in stream-of-consciousness–which is every time, really.) I railed against the ideas of free market capitalism and libertarian, objectivist anarchy in the modern world. I briefly mentioned public education as part of “the commons,” a [...]
READ MORE »A quickie: Here’s a great and even amusing post by Harry McCall in which he uses his experience with guitar salesmen, vacuum tubes, and personal biases to explain how people see “truth” as relative and its criticism often off-limits to those “not a part of it” Truth: Absolute or Relative? I’ve had some heated discussions [...]
READ MORE »Glenn Beck is a tool. He recently wrote an op-ed printed on CNN.com: Commentary: T-shirt depicts ‘pathetic and brutal legacy’ He seems to find much humor in the idea that, supposedly, part of the reason the people who portrayed a terrorist group was able to deceive the FARC group that they were “bad guys” (and [...]
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