Blog Stats
- 2,776,931 readers since June 2008
Recent Comments
- barneybettyhill on Carl Sagan Looks Like an Alien and Wants Us to Believe That There are No Aliens Visiting Earth. Shouldn’t That Tell You Something?
- Glenn Hall on “We Rule You, We Fool You”: Classic 1911 Poster Depicting Capitalism Titled “Pyramid of Capitalist System”
- The Journey Starts Now: How To Discover What Motivates Us - Yellow Parachute Learning Partners on Human Beings are “Purpose Maximizers, Not Profit Maximizers”
- Anonymous on Walt Whitman: “To be indeed a God!”
- Commercial Project 1 from start to finish – Meg Dobson-Armstrong Art on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Learning Plan – Meg Dobson-Armstrong Art on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Commercial project: House of illustration competition – Meg Dobson-Armstrong Art on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Dennis Gannon on “Male and Female Created He Them!”: Was Adam a Hermaphrodite? And Does That Explain How Eve Could Be Taken from Adam’s Body?
- Anonymous on UFOs, Aliens, and Religious Art
- Janet on Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Children Lined up with Heads Shaved in a Croatian Concentration Camp
- Jim Loving on Robert Wright on Osiris, Jesus, Dives, and Lazarus
- longviewhypnosis on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- frauposaune on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Andre Fruge on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Dave on Barack Obama: The Leopard in the Book of Daniel?
Top Posts
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: A German Jewish Girl Who Was Part of the Kindertransport (1939)
- What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- "The Vision of Christ That Thou Dost See": William Blake on the Many Faces of Jesus
- UFOs, Aliens, and Religious Art
- Does Time Exist? Einstein, Julian Barbour, Lee Smolin, Some Greek Philosophers--And The New Data From The NASA Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
- Dissipation-Driven Adaptive Organization: Is Jeremy England The Next Charles Darwin?
- John Wayne Cast as Hamlet: A Great Joke About the Plays and Language of Shakespeare
- James Wood: Literature Complexifies the Atheist-Theist Debate
-
Recent Posts
Recent Haiku Tweets
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Remember when you had a chance to choose country over party and you chose party @SenatorCollins? Well, @ProjectLincol… 4 days ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Trump cares more about dead traitors than live patriots. RT this @votevets ad & tell your followers https://t.co/OD5Z… 1 week ago
- RT @ltgrusselhonore: Make a note, We need to forbid police and federal agents from using military uniforms . The camo uniforms are meant to… 2 weeks ago
- RT @MittRomney: Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying t… 3 weeks ago
- RT @MeidasTouch: Hey @EricTrump, you know what they say, #BirdsofaFeather. Retweet to remind Eric that his dad is a sicko. https://t.co/Yb… 1 month ago
Monthly Archives: October 2010
David Chalmers on Hard v. Soft Emergence with Regard to Consciousness
David Chalmers discusses hard v. soft emergence and why consciousness falls into the former category:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, brain, cognitive science, david chalmers, dualism, emergence, God, materialism, mind, philosophy, qualia
1 Comment
Spectres of Reality or the Reality of Spectres?
Shane McCorristine’s new book on ghosts titled Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920 (Cambridge 2010) receives a good review from Jonathan Barnes in The Times of London: What interests McCorristine about these alleged outbreaks of the paranormal is … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheists, books, consciousness, david chalmers, ghosts, God, mind, psychology, spectres, spirit
Leave a comment
The Heart of Dante Alighieri
If you’ve never read Dante Alighieri, the following is written as an enticement for you to consider doing so. A Key Dante Biographical Data Point Dante was born in Florence in 1265, but he did not die there. In fact, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged beauty, Blake, dante, hell, Keats, life, love, poetry, Sophocles, The Divine Comedy, the inferno
2 Comments
A Good Jerry Brown Ad
I love California. I love Jerry Brown.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged America, California, economy, green jobs, jerry brown, meg whitman, Politics, yes we can
7 Comments
A God Delusion: Josh Timonen v. Richard Dawkins
One sad aspect of the lawsuit recently filed against Josh Timonen by Richard Dawkins is the way that it has inadvertently played out the atheist script generally: reduce an ontological mystery (a mystery of being) to a mere problem or function for rational … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, delusion, God, josh timonen, love, materialism, psychology, qualia, reductionism, Richard Dawkins
9 Comments
Qualia Defined
Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), admirably explains what philosophers and neuroscientists mean when they talk about qualia:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged brain, cognition, color, consciousness, love, perception, philosophy, psychology, qualia, self
1 Comment
Agnosticism and Marketing
At Marginal Revolution today, economist Tyler Cowen was asked about whether there are some especially good economic ideas out there that are hard to popularize, and his answer led to a brief digression on complexity and agnosticism: [I]t is hard to popularize … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnostic, agnosticism, economics, green, marketing, memes, money, psychology, rhetoric
1 Comment
Dr. David Jeremiah’s El Cajon, California
This morning I heard on the radio a megachurch pastor by the name of Dr. David Jeremiah say some really wild things (even by fundamentalist standards). A description of what I heard him say in his sermon is here. Anyway, his megachurch is … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged California, Christianity, david jeremiah, el cajon, fundamentalism, Jesus, megachurches, suburbia, towns, UFOs
Leave a comment
A Stomp is Not an Argument: Rand Paul Supporters Tear a Wig off a Woman, Drag Her to the Ground, Then One of The Crowd Stomps on Her Head
Rand Paul supporters show their respect for Western liberal democracy, freedom of expression, and a woman’s right to approach Rand Paul: Message: Total message control. Don’t ever, ever approach Rand Paul. Ever. ——————- UPDATE: Here’s the unedited AP clip of the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged a gun is not an argument, Ayn Rand, conservatives, freedom of speech, kentucky, liberals, libertarianism, mobs, objectivism, rand paul, wigs, women's rights
8 Comments
The God Conclusion v. The God Delusion: Keith Ward Tries to Tackle Richard Dawkins
Philosopher Keith Ward has probably written the best book attempting to counter the antitheist claims in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin 2008). Ward’s book is titled Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Lion 2008), and on page 11 … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, God, Islam, Jesus, Judaism, materialism, matter, mind, philosophy, psychology, religion, Richard Dawkins
3 Comments
For the Trapped Chilean Miners, Maria Campillay Heeded an Inner Call
In the Los Angeles Times last weekend, a worker at Camp Hope was profiled. Her name is Maria Campillay: Maria Campillay? She’s a social worker in the neighboring town of Caldera who took an indefinite and unpaid leave from her government … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged belief, chilean miners, Dante's Inferno, hell, love, Maria Campillay, psychology, solidarity
11 Comments
Adam and Eve and White Racism
When white Evangelicals and fundamentalists show picture books to their children depicting Adam and Eve and all the early humans (such as Noah) as white, it is no different from Afrocentrists teaching their kids that all great Egyptians were black, and … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged africa, afrocentrism, apologetics, God, history, Jesus, John Macarthur, Mesopotamia, psychology, racism, san bushmen
17 Comments
William Dembski: Noah’s Flood May Have Been Global
At Panda’s Thumb Jack Krebs has an interesting post on the famous IDer, William Dembski, and his apparent drift towards belief in young earth creationism, including the idea that Noah’s Flood was a global historical event. Krebs, for example, quotes William Dembski recently … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, evolution, fundamentalism, Genesis, geology, intelligent design, noah's flood, religion, science, william dembski
2 Comments
Total Message Control Solution #1: Just Handcuff Any Journalist Who Asks Questions That You Don’t Want to Answer
Total message control (that is, the Palin model) was on disturbing display on Sunday in Alaska. This from Glenn Greenwald: [P]rivate “guards” working for GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller forcibly detained and handcuffed a journalist as he tried to ask the candidate questions … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Alaska, authoritarianism, conservatism, free speech, journalism, Politics, rush limbaugh, tea partiers, tony hopfinger
Leave a comment
Once a University Lecturer and Atheist, Father Lazarus El Anthony Talks about Being an Anchorite
Lazarus El Anthony was a university lecturer in literature and philosophy in Australia, an atheist of 40 years and a Marxist. Then his mother died. And he entered the desert. And:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged anchorites, atheism, atheist, Egypt, God, Jesus, life, mothers, philosophy, psychology, the desert, thoreau
8 Comments
Why Do Super Brainiacs Drink More Alcohol Than the Rest of Us?
It appears that super smart people tend to be bigger consumers of alcohol than average and dull people, and Andrew Sullivan has an armchair theory for why this is the case: It’s what Oakeshott called “the ordeal of consciousness.” When you have … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged alcohol, atheism, Ayn Rand, brains, critical thinking, hypotheses, hypothesis testing, intelligence, IQ, Karl Marx, orson welles, wine
14 Comments
The Source of the Moral Life
Love. A righteous outrage at encountering something ugly and unjust or a response to something beautiful that captures the heart. An epiphany. Like this:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, God, life, love, morality, religion
Leave a comment
Damon Linker Owns the New Atheists
Damon Linker, a contributor to the New Republic, is, to my mind, one of the more insightful writers on religion and irreligion writing in the United States today. In a recent interview with The Economist, Linker offers what I can only describe … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheists, Camus, damon linker, freedom, jerry coyne, new atheism, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Socrates, Voltaire
17 Comments
