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|  - 'Good Reasons for 'Believing' in God' by Dan Dennett
- Dennett talks about why it's sensible to profess belief in God. He lives up to his reputation of being a bit fluffier than Dawkins.
(tags: daniel-dennett philosophy religion atheism) - Valerie Tarico: Christian Belief Through The Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 6 of 6
- The final part of Tarico's series, which links to the others. "Despite its boundaries, cognitive science, does offer what is rapidly becoming a sufficient explanation for the supernaturalism that underlies organized religion."
(tags: christianity science religion brain psychology cognitive-bias cognition) - WHY DOES THE UNVIERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES: A Conversation With Sean Carroll
- "Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now. That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else."
(tags: physics cosmology big-bang universe inflation string-theory) - RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - Stack Overflow
- "If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes." Quite right: you should use Beautiful Soup like everyone else does.
(tags: funny programming humour xml parse lovecraft stackoverflow regexp regex html) - The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality
- Alex Rosenberg argues that scientism is a good thing, and puts forward a very reductionist naturalism which he applies to consciousness, morality and a bunch of other stuff philosophers like to worry about. His fellow naturalists disagree in the comments (notably, Richard Carrier and Tom Clark produce good arguments against him).
(tags: naturalism philosophy science reductionism morality consciousness) - Riffs: 11:14:09: Patrol Magazine and Evangelicals Who Won’t “Get Over It”
- "It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers."
(tags: evangelicalism christianity) - I’m Belle de Jour
- Former blogging prostitute Belle de Jour reveals her real identity to the Times. She was an impoverished PhD student.
(tags: culture sex identity anonymous science prostitution) - What Stormtroopers do on Their Day Off
- Funny photos of stormtroopers at play.
(tags: humour funny scifi images starwars toys photo photography) - Valerie Tarico: Speaking Evangelese: Tips for Politicians
- Tarico's article on evangelical jargon phrases and dog whistles. Some of these sound familiar
(tags: evangelicalism christianity politics religion jargon language) - Experimental Theology: Christians and Torture: Part 6, Hell and Torture
- Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology has been doing a series of posts on Christian and torture. His survey said: "Christians who believed in a horrific and never-ending hell were more likely to endorse torture. As God tortures so we torture." Unsurprising, perhaps, but interesting to see it backed up by research. In the comments, Beck notes the correlation is not strong, but is significant.
(tags: hell torture politics religion christianity morality)
- Tags:atheism, christianity, cognitive bias, consciousness, culture, daniel dennett, funny, hell, link blog, morality, philosophy, politics, programming, psychology, religion, science, sex
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| - Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism -- Pitts 59 (4): 675 -- The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
- Paper on whether the Big Bang supports theistic arguments for creation ex nihilo, and particularly the Kalam argument. Notably, the author points out that if the singularity in the past requires a Creator, surely singularities in the future (such as black holes) require a Destroyer.
(tags: science religion creationism kalam bigbang big-bang Singularity philosophy) - August and Everything After (San Francisco, 2004)
- Adam Duritz singing the Counting Crows song whose lyrics are on the album cover of August and Everything After (but which doesn't appear on the album itself). There are a couple of live versions of this: this one's better because the crowd aren't yelling through it.
(tags: counting-crows adam-duritz music) - Gastronomic Realism—A Cautionary Tale
- Loeb's charming paper comparing Moral Realism and Gastronomic Realism (the idea that some foods are simply better than others, independent of individual tastes).
(tags: philosophy morality food realism gastronomic don-loeb system:filetype:pdf system:media:document) - “The Collapse Of Intelligent Design”
- Ken Miller demonstrating why ID is not backed by evidence. Miller's a Catholic, not a neo-sceptical atheist neo-rationalist.
(tags: ken-miller intelligent-design id evolution creationism science biology dna) - Don Loeb – Moral Irrealism
- Philosopher Don Loeb in conversation about moral irrealism, the view that there are no moral facts independent of our beliefs about them. Touches on whether introducing a God would help moral realism: Loeb thinks not.
(tags: philosophy morality atheism don-loeb) - Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis
- "any time anyone's said anything comprehensible about the Trinity the Church has declared it a heresy." - Gareth
(tags: funny video religion christianity trinity mr-deity) - The Non-Expert: IKEA by Matthew Baldwin
- A walkthrough of the various levels of the IKEA game: "As you continue through the main SHOWROOM you will see groups blocking the walkways while chatting and others moving against traffic. These people should be killed immediately."
(tags: funny humour culture parody games ikea furniture shopping) - David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs - opinion - 04 November 2009 - New Scientist
- David Nutt's opinion piece in New Scientist.
(tags: drugs science badscience government law medicine politics david-nutt) - A life changed by evidence
- Series of videos by a former evangelical Christian explaining why he became an atheist. Well produced and informative stuff. The chap makes a palpable effort to show how he was a Christian and how, for much of the time before his deconversion, he thought the things he was learning could be incorporated into Christianity rather than working against it.
(tags: video youtube de-conversion christianity evangelicalism bible morality)
- Tags:atheism, bible, biology, christianity, creationism, culture, evolution, funny, intelligent design, ken miller, law, link blog, morality, music, philosophy, politics, religion, science
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| There's a discussion about that question attached to a posting from the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) toothycats. One of the toothycats (who are a couple with a shared blog) posted an entry about their Christian beliefs, which promptly exploded into religion_wank (why does that community not exist already?) after lark_ascending turned up, and, angered by a toothcat's oppressive action of posting about an interest of theirs on their blog under a cut, started a huge argument (she later experienced drama remorse and deleted fracking everything, but there's an archive of some of the thread here). I'm unable to resist this sort of thing, so I've stuck my oar in here and there. I can see the point of these privilege checklists which circulate on the net. You don't know what it's like to be someone else. If you're someone who has it good, you may assume that everyone has it equally good. Checklists are a reminder that this assumption isn't valid. If you're not careful though, what you can get out of in a discussion of privilege is black and white thinking (if you'll pardon the pun) where you insist that someone must be oppressed because they belong to a group you've identified as under-privileged, regardless of anything that person says about it. This has happened to a couple of LJ friends, but it doesn't happen to me very often, because I'm male, middle-class and white so nobody (except Daily Fail readers) would argue that I'm discriminated against. Nevertheless, I am a non-Christian, and I'm not being oppressed. The situation in the UK isn't like it is in some parts of the USA, so checklists from there aren't portable. The other thing I didn't like about the list that everyone's been doing as a meme on their blogs lately is that some of it effectively asks "do you come from a healthy culture?" and might, if handled badly, cause people who do to feel bad about that. It's no credit to you where you were born, of course, but neither do you want the situation where you can't say that to be from such a culture is a good thing, worth having. A privilege, in fact. | |
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| lisekit has a discussion on novels, religion and relativism in religion. She says that, where religion is concerned, she doesn't like to say that anyone's views are more or less valuable than anyone else's. This set me thinking about the idea of relativism in general (which lisekit isn't advocating, lest I accuse her of it, as she mentions respect and tolerance as moral virtues). I seem to have been brainwashed by Neal Stephenson into believing that strict relativism is undesirable because it does not work. If you cannot say one thing is better than another, the only sin left is hypocrisy (and, perhaps, intolerance :-) In a sense I'm a relativist, since I don't believe in absolutes imposed by a deity, but in another sense, that of refusing to say that one thing is better than another, I am not. In morality, say, I advocate things which I believe will lead to a society which I hope will be a good one for myself and people I care for. In religion, I would like to see well-reasoned disagreement between people who do think their viewpoint is the right one but are prepared to learn from others. Better that than the pop-culture spirituality which accepts everything that feels good (poor Greg Egan's disgust for that sort of thing in Silver Fire makes me think he's forgotten what G.K. Chesterton said happens to people who stop believing in God). Stephenson again:
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools.
In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way.
-- In the Beginning was the Command Line
(The rest of Stephenson's essay is a huge digression on technology and culture, seen through the lens of the Windows/Unix clash: it's well worth reading if you've an hour to spare). I suppose I'm back to morality as enlightened self-interest again: the reason these people are inculcating their children in their particular culture is because those cultures work, and they want their children to be happy, fulfilled and all that stuff. There are cultures which don't, and I'll gladly preach the superiority of those which work over those which don't, as it's in my own interest to do so. | |
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