-
Blog Stats
- 1,157,330 readers since June 2008
-
Recent Comments
- Matt on “Oh, Wow! Oh, Wow! Oh, Wow!”: When Singularities Come Nigh
- Santi Tafarella on Mao Luther King?
- Santi Tafarella on The Speech: Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ SOTU Retort
- David Yates on Mao Luther King?
- Longtooth on President Barack Obama’s Long Game
- ruth1940 on MIT Physicist Ian Hutchinson Calls Gnu Atheists “Militant” and Wants Greater “Respect” Directed Toward Religion and Faith
- susie on Recommended Books & Films
- Santi Tafarella on Contemporary Iconoclasm: Jesus Statue Beheaded in Boston
- Apuleius Platonicus on Contemporary Iconoclasm: Jesus Statue Beheaded in Boston
- Paradigm on President Barack Obama’s Long Game
- eartha on Question of the Day: What is the Origin of the Yellow “Star of David” That the Nazis Required Jews to Wear at the Time of the Holocaust?
- Santi Tafarella on The Other 1%
- Paradigm on The Other 1%
- Santi Tafarella on The Other 1%
- Santi Tafarella on Atheist David Silverman to Tim Tebow: Read Matthew 6:5
-
Top Posts
- 55%: The Number of Americans Who Say That a Guardian Angel Has Protected Them from Harm (Source: USA Today)
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Woman in an American Field Hospital in Czechoslavakia, May 1945
- How Many People Could the Ancient Colosseum in Rome Hold?
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Anne Frank and Margo Frank in a Purim Holiday Photo with Other Jewish Children, February, 1934, and an Image from Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Where Anne and Margo Died
- Near Death Experience (NDE) Watch: Waiting for Dr. Sam Parnia
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Children Lined up with Heads Shaved in a Croatian Concentration Camp
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Stacked Corpses
- Negative Capability Defined: Walking in Mysteries---and the Shoes of Others---with Keats, Shakespeare, Whitman---and Barack Obama!
- In Evolution We Trust?: England Puts Charles Darwin on the Back of Its Ten Pound Bank Note
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Image from the Concentration Camp at Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, 1945
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Children Experimented upon at Auschwitz
-
Recent Posts
Monthly Archives: February 2011
“A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged henry wadsworth longfellow, hope, life, poem, poetry, psalm
Leave a comment
God: The Ghost Writer Who Isn’t There?
At Slate this month, Jesse Bering reflects on the human inclination to project mental properties (such as beliefs and purposes), not only onto people, but animals, inanimate objects, and God: When others violate our expectations for normalcy or stump us with … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, authors, authorship, critical theory, God, Islam, Jesus, mind, Mohammad, philosophy, psychology
Leave a comment
The Global Financial Crisis 101
Perhaps the most honest, clear, and perceptive take on the international financial crisis to date:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged bankers, comedy, economics, finance, fraud, Great Depression 2.0, humor, life
Leave a comment
A Bit of Happy News for the Weekend
Willem Buiter is Citgroup’s chief economist, and here’s CNBC today reporting his forecast for the global economy over the next 40 years: “We expect strong growth in the world economy until 2050, with average real GDP growth rates of 4.6 percent … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged 2012, armageddon, economics, End Times, good news, happiness, life, optimism, pessimism, reason, the future, weekends
4 Comments
Rick Santorum Cheers the Crusades
Politico reports this week that, in a recent speech, Rick Santorum, a Republican presidential hopeful, defended the Crusades. Yep, those Crusades. Seriously. Here’s Politico: “The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Christianity, fundamentalism, God, Islam, Jesus, Muslims, rick santorum, the crusades
13 Comments
A Christian Dialogues with Two Atheists
I think that the below dialogue between a Christian and two atheists is informative. How would you answer the atheists’ questions (if you are a religious believer)?
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, atheism, atheist, faith, God, hell, Jesus, philosophy, psychology, reason, religion, the Bible
13 Comments
Heart of Darkness: Kill Them All?
I find the following recent comments of reporter Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times jarring: [I]t is just plain heartbreaking to be in modern, moderate Bahrain today and watch as a critical American ally uses tanks, troops, guns and clubs to … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged evil paradises, freedom, Heart of Darkness, human rights, Islam, Joseph Conrad, protest, the middle east, Thomas Jefferson
1 Comment
Stanley Fish on What Distinguishes Us from Computers
At the New York Times this week, Stanley Fish offers the following as a key distinction between himself and a computer: [I]ts procedures do not track my practice. I am not self-consciously generating a pattern of statistical frequencies. I am … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged artificial intelligence, calculation, computers, consciousness, life, mind, robots, stanley fish, the soul, turing test
Leave a comment
What’s an undergraduate education for?
I like the way Tim Lee, a CATO Institute scholar, thinks about undergraduate education: [T]he primary function of an undergraduate education is to allow the student to join a scholarly community, and in the process to soak up the values and attitudes … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged college, critical thinking, education, liberal, life, philosophy, reason, the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson
5 Comments
Was Keats Right? Surfer-Physicist Garrett Lisi’s TED Talk
The poet John Keats famously wrote, at the end of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the following: Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. I’m not sure this … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged beauty, Garrett Lisi, John Keats, philosophy, physics, poetry, truth
Leave a comment
John Boehner: If jobs are lost “so be it.”
The Los Angeles Times reports that the Repubican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, made the following retort to job losses from recently proposed federal budget cuts: “so be it.” Here’s the Los Angeles Times: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) dismissed concerns that the spending cuts … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged America, charles dickens, economics, john boehner, john maynard keynes, milton friedman, philosophy, Politics, scrooge, the economy, the united states
10 Comments
YEC Watch: Are Albert Mohler’s YEC Views “Thought Crimes” Or Crimes Against Thought?
Albert Mohler, the man Time magazine once (weirdly) called America’s “reigning intellectual in the evangelical movement”, is a young earth creationist. And in a recent blog post he offered the following complaint against those who have concluded that the earth is old and plants and … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged albert mohler, apologetics, atheism, evangelicalism, evolution, fundamentalism, God, Jesus, John Macarthur, science, the Bible, young earth creationism
Leave a comment
The Berlin-Auschwitz Question: Could You Be Happy in Heaven if You Knew What was Going on in Hell?
I don’t think I could. (Or at least I’d like to think that I couldn’t.) But there are a lot of people who say they believe in hell—that it exists—and yet they are also happy to imagine themselves enjoying heaven. How … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, Auschwitz, Berlin, Biblical literalism, fundamentalism, God, hell, Islam, Jesus, punishment, the Bible, torture
21 Comments
Richard Spiegel on Alvin Plantinga’s Sensus Divinitatis v. Richard Dawkins’s Sensus Bullshititatis
At the Christianity Today website recently, a philosopher by the name of Jim Spiegel (who writes well, I must say) makes the following claim: [There are] moral and psychological dimensions to atheism, ones we cannot ignore. No argument there. And Spiegel … Continue reading
Do Atheists Suffer from Diseases of Perception? Philosopher Jim Spiegel Says Yes. Is He Right?
At Christianity Today this past week, the following explanation was offered by philosopher Jim Spiegel for why atheists are atheists: According to Scripture, the evidence for God is overwhelming. The apostle Paul says that “God has made it plain” that he … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, atheism, atheist, Christianity, critical thinking, God, Jesus, jim spiegel, philosophy, psychology
5 Comments
