Blog Stats
- 2,896,742 readers since June 2008
Recent Comments
- Anonymous on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Carol Dickinson on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Bradley on Bonobo Liberals? Chimp Conservatives?
- Bill on Shakespeare, James Joyce, and the Dirty Encoding in Britney Spears’s “If U Seek Amy”
- godisreal2017 on “Male and Female Created He Them!”: Was Adam a Hermaphrodite? And Does That Explain How Eve Could Be Taken from Adam’s Body?
- godisreal2017 on “Male and Female Created He Them!”: Was Adam a Hermaphrodite? And Does That Explain How Eve Could Be Taken from Adam’s Body?
- godisreal2017 on “Male and Female Created He Them!”: Was Adam a Hermaphrodite? And Does That Explain How Eve Could Be Taken from Adam’s Body?
- godisreal2017 on “Male and Female Created He Them!”: Was Adam a Hermaphrodite? And Does That Explain How Eve Could Be Taken from Adam’s Body?
- godisreal2017 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 Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- twilighto on Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- ANSWER THE QUESTIONS - Essay Classes on Feminism for Beginners
- What does Lee Smolin mean when he says that the most fundamental theory can have no symmetries? – GrindSkills on Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn: Physics, Evolution, Atheism, and Buddhism
- Anon on Hanger 18: 1950s Military Clerk-Typist, June Crane, Claims That There Were Alien Bodies Stored at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio
- ra on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
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?
- Ludwig Wittgenstein for Beginners
- Walt Whitman: "To be indeed a God!"
- What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Charles Sanders Peirce on the Method of Tenacity
- Kerouac's Inspiration
- A Suffering and Resurrected Messiah---Before Jesus?: Israel Knohl's 2002 Book Anticipated the 2008 Qumran Stone Tablet Discovery
- 13.7 Billion Years Divided By 365: 40 Million Years Is A Day; A Day, 40 Million Years
- "Assassins of the Mind": Christopher Hitchens's Essay on Muslim Fundamentalist Violence, and Threats of Violence, Toward Authors and Publishers, Is a Must Read
-
Recent Posts
Recent Haiku Tweets
- @abrahampiper Yahweh as a frustrated deity, much to be pitied! Abraham Piper's insight here, if thought about as a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 year ago
- RT @tbonier: More than 80M votes cast and we're not done yet. Thoughts: - It's too late for an "October surprise" to have a significant imp… 1 year ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: 1. Want to thank @DanielNewman for using his HUGE platform for this work. I want to clarify what this is. In the voter… 2 years ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Tell me again about how old and feeble Joe Biden is??? twitter.com/ProjectLincoln… 2 years ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Remember when you had a chance to choose country over party and you chose party @SenatorCollins? Well, @ProjectLincol… 2 years ago
-
Monthly Archives: November 2014
What’s God’s Sufficient Reason for the Evil in the World? And If You Can’t Think of Any, Should You Still Believe in God?
The principle of sufficient reason (PSR). God must have a sufficient reason for withdrawing and withholding his protection from the descendants of Adam for so tortuously long; for allowing them to encounter the full force of a psychopath’s or nature’s … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, critical thinking, God, philosophy, the problem of evil
1 Comment
Foxy Sex vs. Hedgehog Sex: Free Will, Edward Feser, and Evolution
Thomist philosopher Edward Feser has a curious way of defining free will and what it’s for, writing in a recent blog post the following: “[O]n the conception of free will as ‘freedom for excellence,’ which is endorsed by Aquinas, the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged edward feser, Emily Dickinson, evolution, gay marriage, philosophy, sex, Thomas Aquinas
Leave a comment
Arguing about Gay Marriage with Thomists: Love vs. Reproduction
The premises underlying Thomistic arguments against gay marriage are four: sex’s goal should be directed ultimately to reproduction; marriage is for the rearing of children and the union of man and woman; marriage is naturally a social institution for promoting … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, Catholicism, gay equality, gay marriage, God, Jesus, love, thomism, women's rights
3 Comments
What’s a Penis, and What’s It for? Thomas Aquinas vs. Ludwig Wittgenstein
What’s better: to see a thing as having both essential and accidental features, and placing it in a genus-species hierarchy (Thomas Aquinas’ view), or to drop hierarchy and essentialism in definition altogether, and just see a thing as sharing “family … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, Nietzsche, philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, thomism, Wittgenstein
Leave a comment
Potency, Act, and the Withdrawal of Grace: Thomas Aquinas on Original Sin
Here’s Thomas Aquinas in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, ch. 52: “[We Christians] affirm that man was, from the beginning, so fashioned that as long as his reason was subject to God, not only would his lower powers serve him without … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Christianity, God, hell, monsters, philosophy, psychology, sin, Thomas Aquinas
Leave a comment
The Aztec Sun God and Jesus the Son of God Bled for You. Feel Guilty? Ready to Sacrifice Your Life to Them? Then the Stories Worked!
The Aztec worship of their sun god was rather barbaric because humans were sacrificed to the god. The rationale for this sacrifice had to do with Aztec myth, which held that the sun god sacrificed his very own blood to … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, Aztecs, God, Jesus, life, psychology, religion, thanksgiving
1 Comment
David Berlinski defends God’s role in the Holocaust: “God did not protect his chosen people…[but] did…smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.”
Here’s David Berlinski defending God’s role in the Holocaust (from page 31 of his book, The Devil’s Delusion): “[T]he thousand year Reich…lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens,…[I]f God did not protect his chosen people precisely … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, atheism, david berlinski, God, philosophy, Sam Harris, the Holocaust, theodicy
4 Comments
Charles Darwin vs. Thomas Aquinas: What Follows from Our Nature?
At his blog recently, Thomist philosopher Edward Feser wrote the following: “For Aquinas, what is good for us is necessarily good for us because it follows from our nature. As such, even God couldn’t change it, any more than he … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged art, Charles Darwin, evolution, philosophy, poetry, science, Thomas Aquinas
Leave a comment
If God is Rational, Whence the Holocaust and Competing Goods (Such as the Pursuit of Beauty over Ethics)?
Thomist philosopher Edward Feser prefers intellectualism (reason leading the will) to voluntarism (the will leading reason). He thinks that neither desire nor imagination should lead our wills, and claims that God, as the supremely rational being, ought to be our example: … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, edward feser, God, philosophy, the Holocaust, the moon, theodicy, theology
Leave a comment
Whatever Works: Pierce’s Abduction, Darwin’s Evolution, Entropy, Bayes’ Rule, and Rorty’s Pragmatism
I’ve recently been struck by the similarity between Charles Sanders Pierce’s notion of abduction (reasoning to the best hypothesis; “may the best hypothesis win”), Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (survival of the fittest; “may the best organism win”), entropy (what … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged contingency, critical thinking, entropy, evolution, philosophy, probability, psychology
3 Comments
What Does It Mean To Be An Agnostic?
I’m an agnostic, which for me means the following: I take it that there is only one way the cosmos actually is, and I don’t know what that one way is. There are a gazillion logically possible ways it could … Continue reading
Thomas Aquinas on Exterminating Heretics
In the Summa, Thomas Aquinas says that you can reason with someone who holds a different doctrine from yours so long as that person is open and searching. On the other hand, if the person persists in his view, and does … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged aquinas, atheism, Catholicism, fundamentalism, God, heretics, religion
3 Comments
The Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Holocaust
Here’s the problem concerning the principle of sufficient reason. If one posits that God has a good and sufficient reason for having allowed the Holocaust, the follow-up question obviously becomes, “Well, what is it?” Any particular answer proves woefully inadequate, ludicrous … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, atheism, God, philosophy, Shoah, the Holocaust
22 Comments
Who Is William Blake, Really?
William Blake is a poet, not a metaphysician. When someone writes with aphorism, irony, and wild and flamboyant system building (as Blake and Nietzsche did), they are mocking essentialism; they’re showing that language is infinite; that there are a gazillion … Continue reading
What are Sex Organs “For”? Thomism vs. Evolution
We know that evolution high-jacks organs all the time to different purposes depending on context. The first tongue may have had the singular purpose of tasting, then it got used by the cat for cleaning the pelt, then by humans … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
What Love Is (A Definition)
What is love? I’d basically put it among the very broad family of “the better angels of our nature,” and in the genus of “seeking connection, harmony, and cooperation in a non-zero sum way.” As to the species of this … Continue reading
Thomistic Essentialism and Sex in the Real World
Virtually every healthy human adult on the planet has a sex life of some sort, and the effect of Thomistic sexual ideology (use sex organs for procreation only), were it to be seriously followed everywhere, would be the generation of … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Catholicism, gay marriage, philosophy, religion, sex, thomism, women's equality
4 Comments
Sex, Thomistic Essentialism, and the Demographic Maintenance of the Catholic Church
With regard to sex, Thomism is a question-begging exercise that puts a veneer of essentialist metaphysics over the question, “Why is God upset if humans don’t make use of their sex organs in accord with their primary and essential function?” … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Catholicism, demographics, gay marriage, philosophy, sex, thomism
1 Comment
Prometheus Unbound 