Blog Stats
- 2,835,588 readers since June 2008
Recent Comments
- Joshx45 on Feminism for Beginners
- Roger lynn mason on Blogging UFOs: What Do You Make of Professor Robert Jacobs’s Bizarre UFO Testimony?
- geoenergymath on On the Far Right, Ann Coulter and Mitt Romney Are Not Conservative Enough!
- John Mack on Would Friedrich Nietzsche have admired Ayn Rand?
- Can We Learn From History? – Critical News Autoblog on Howard Nemerov and Learning from History
- Mathilde on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Manly Man Joe on Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Robert Stewart on 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.”
- David on Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- Philosophers on Evolutionary Psychology - Assignment Ninjas on Feminism for Beginners
- Vincent on Trump’s New Cancel Culture: Cancelling Black Voters
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- Green on What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
Top Posts
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Walt Whitman: "To be indeed a God!"
- Clit Rubbing Bonobos: A Clue to the Evolutionary Origin of Human Homosexuality?
- What, Exactly, Is Wrong With Bestiality?
- "The Vision of Christ That Thou Dost See": William Blake on the Many Faces of Jesus
- What is a Human, Really? Thinking about Definition via Aristotle
- Adam Smith and Capitalism for Beginners
- Christopher Hitchens Recites From Memory Wilfred Owen's Great Anti-War Poem, "Dulce et Decorum est"
- Irony in a Good Poem: Christina Rossetti's "Dirge"
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: A German Jewish Girl Who Was Part of the Kindertransport (1939)
-
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… 5 months 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… 10 months 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… 1 year ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Tell me again about how old and feeble Joe Biden is??? twitter.com/ProjectLincoln… 1 year ago
- RT @RachelBitecofer: Remember when you had a chance to choose country over party and you chose party @SenatorCollins? Well, @ProjectLincol… 1 year ago
Tag Archives: John Gray
My “Candide” Retort to Margaret MacMillan
It’s 2014. A hundred years ago, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand initiated a series of calamitous events that brought on World War I. And the way WWI ended (with the Versailles Treaty) led to yet another series … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged China, John Gray, nationalism, optimism, pessimism, philosophy, psychology, religion
Leave a comment
Increasing Knowledge Does Not Increase The Peace
That, at any rate, is John Gray’s thesis, and he has a new book out. In a recent interview at The Spectator, he had this to say: [K]nowledge can never eradicate the conflicts of the human world, or produce harmony where … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnosticism, apologetics, atheism, atheist, books, God, John Gray, optimism, pessimism, philosophy
2 Comments
John Gray Skewers Slavoj Zizek
In the New York Review of Books, John Gray’s review of Slavoj Zizek’s career and most recent book, Less Than Nothing, is damning. At bottom, Gray pegs Zizek as an armchair revolutionary lending intellectual and moral support to terrorism and … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged capitalism, Communism, John Gray, Karl Marx, Marxism, philosophy, zizek
4 Comments
Gray on Pink(er): Because of Our Evolution, the Irrational We’ll Always Have With Us
John Gray thinks Steven Pinker’s thesis in his new book—in which Pinker argues that the world is progressing toward an ever less violent future—is deluded. In the Jacob-wrestle between Enlightenment rationality and our evolution-formed imperatives, Gray is betting that our … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged critical thinking, evolution, John Gray, optimism, pessimism, progress, reason, steven pinker, the Enlightenment
5 Comments
The Humanist Delusion?
In his book, Straw Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), professor of European thought, John Gray, argues that the humanist belief in progress is deluded in part because our experience of “consciousness, selfhood, and free will” are uneven at best (p. 38): Our lives … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, Christianity, critical thinking, humanism, John Gray, Nietzsche, pessimism, philosophy, reason
3 Comments
A delicious deconstruction of John Gray by A.C. Grayling
Of John Gray’s Black Mass, A.C. Grayling writes that the book: tells us that the world is in a bad way and that there is nothing we can do about it. Perhaps we can infer from this that his aim … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged a.c. grayling, atheism, Christianity, Hitler, John Gray, progress, reason, science, secular humanism, stalin, the myth of progress
6 Comments
Enlightenment pessimist John Gray v. Enlightenment optimist A.C. Grayling
John Gray is a very, very tart-tongued skeptic of Enlightenment triumphalism of the Bertrand Russell variety, and he recently wrote a rather biting essay attacking A.C. Grayling for taking up, in the 21st century, Russell’s supposedly naive mantle: Russell fell victim … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged a.c. grayling, apologetics, atheism, atheist, Christianity, God, humanism, isaiah berlin, Jesus, John Gray, the Enlightenment
4 Comments
Gap gods and pot holes: are Richard Dawkins’s materialist atheism and Rush Limbaugh’s anti-environmentalism akin to one another?
Why are so many people resistant to Richard Dawkins’s totally materialist explanation of the universe (that is, atoms and void are all that really exist, and they are eternal or came into existence out of nothing)? And it occurred to me this morning that … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnosticism, apologetics, atheism, atheist, environmentalism, evolution, God, John Gray, joseph campbell, Richard Dawkins, rush limbaugh
18 Comments
John Gray’s Phrase for Missionary Atheism: “Enlightenment Fundamentalism”
With all the “hoo-haw” back and forth on the Internet about whether there is such a thing as “fundamentalist atheism,” I noticed that the philosopher John Gray today used a curious phrase in an essay for New Statesman: Enlightenment fundamentalism. Below … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, enlightenment, enlightenment fundamentalism, fundamentalism, ideology, John Gray, Kant, philosophy, psychology, religion
Leave a comment
Whence Nietzsche in Contemporary Atheist Reflection?
Philosopher John Gray sees it only in Michel Onfray: Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism [titled in its U.S. edition as … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged existentialism, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Gray, michel onfray, philosophy, propaganda, psychology, public relations, sales
2 Comments
God is Coke? Is the American Model of God Marketing Spreading Globally?
If religion (as Marx said) is the opiate of the people, then that means that, like Coca-Cola, it can be packaged and marketed to targeted audiences, doesn’t it? John Gray, in a review of a new book (God is Back by … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnostic, America, atheist, Christianity, coke, God, Hinduism, Islam, John Gray, opium, religion
2 Comments
