Blog Stats
- 2,836,124 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?
- Ludwig Wittgenstein for Beginners
- Adam Smith and Capitalism for Beginners
- Mesopotamia's Hillary Clinton: Bold and Cunning Ninsun, Gilgamesh's Strong-Willed Mother, Argued with Her God, Manipulated Enkidu, Protected Her Son in His Going to War, and Got What She Wanted
- Astronaut Gordon Cooper on UFOs
- Charles Sanders Peirce on the Method of Tenacity
- Waiting for Coyne
-
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: materialism
The Old In and Outputs: Neuroscientist Tom Chivers Doesn’t Think We Have Free Will. Is He Right?
A stunning tidbit from an interview, in The Telegraph, with neuroscientist Tom Chivers: [I]f we are part of the universe, and obey its laws, it’s hard to see where free will comes into it. What we think of as freedom, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged apologetics, atheism, epiphenomena, epiphenomenon, free will, God, materialism, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology
8 Comments
Global Debt Slavery Watch: Economic Anthropologist David Graeber Thinks Slavery and Debt Slavery May Be a Distinction Without Much of a Difference
At Naked Capitalism, Dublin-based journalist Philip Pilkington asks economic anthropologist David Graeber an intriguing question: We know that in many Western countries over the past few years households have been running up enormous debts, from credit card debts to mortgages … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged class warfare, david graeber, debt, debt forgiveness, economics, globalism, jubilee, materialism, mind, philosophy, social psychology
Leave a comment
In the Free Will Debate, Does the Truth Matter?
According to the New York Times this morning, researchers have discovered a curious correlation between belief (or disbelief) in free will and behavior: [W]hen people doubt free will, they do worse at their jobs and are less honest. This raises … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged arthur schopenhauer, atheism, critical thinking, determinism, free will, God, materialism, philosophy, pragmatism, psychology, truth
6 Comments
Free Will Objectivism Fail: Two Mathematicians Demonstrate that Ayn Rand’s Philosophy is Incoherent
At ScienceNews.org is a troubling piece reporting that two highly acclaimed Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, have mathematically demonstrated the following: if humans can actually choose what to observe (or not observe) in a particular sort of physics experiment involving particle spin, then the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, Ayn Rand, consciousness, determinism, free will, idealism, materialism, math, philosophy, physics, science, T.S. Eliot
15 Comments
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
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
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
What is amor fati?
What Friedrich Nietzsche took from Charles Darwin is the idea of radical contingency, and so Nietzsche’s amor fati (love of fate) is an embrace of all of life’s contingencies. Do you have the courage to embrace your existential situation (what Sartre called … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, contingency, Darwin, death, evolution, heaven, idealism, life, materialism, Nietzsche, philosophy, Platonism
1 Comment
Quote of the Day
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in Volume 1 of his The Nature and Destiny of Man (1964 edition, pg. 43), critiques Freudianism and, by extension, naturalism generally: The whole of Freudian psychology, not in what it declares but in what it … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, Freud, materialism, naturalism, philosophy, psychology, Reinhold Niebuhr, religion, Richard Dawkins, theology
Leave a comment
Would the Ante-Nicene Fathers call contemporary American Protestants Christians (followers of Jesus)?
Early Orthodox (or proto-Orthodox) Christians writing after the apostolic period but before western Christendom’s adoption of the Nicene Creed (325 CE) are sometimes called the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and there is a fascinating (and rather thick) book I’m reading that catalogues quotes from … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged ante-Nicene fathers, authoritarianism, Christianity, consumerism, fundamentalism, God, islamic fundamentalism, Jesus, materialism, psychology, religion, the Bible
1 Comment
The Hundredth Cricket Phenomenon?: Pregnant Crickets Forewarn Their Young Before Birth! An Opportunity for Natural and Supernatural Speculation?
And that would also mean that baby crickets have prebirth “memories” (either somatic or mental), doesn’t it? There must be a mechanism responsible for this, but what could it possibly be? This today in the New York Times: Researchers from the University … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, biology, crickets, evolution, experiments, God, hundredth monkey, materialism, naturalism, science, supernatural
3 Comments
Slipping Off the Atheist Dude Ranch?: Strict Naturalism and Atheist Philosopher Thomas Nagel
Before philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote this in the most current edition of the Times Literary Supplement about Stephen Meyer’s new book (ticking off a lot of atheists), he wrote this, in the New Republic, in late 2006, concerning philosophical naturalism’s reductionist project: I … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnostic, apologetics, atheism, atheist, God, jerry coyne, materialism, philosophy, reductionism, religion, strict naturalism, thomas nagel
5 Comments
Symphonic Harmony and the Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist?
Richard Dawkins has famously said, and on more than one occasion, that Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for him to be, not just an atheist, but “an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But what, exactly, does it mean to be … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Albert Camus, apologetics, atheism, atheist, God, immanence, imminent, materialism, philosophy, religion, Richard Dawkins, science
Leave a comment
Promissory Materialism and Second Coming Messianism?
This struck me as a provocative way to frame materialism v. dualism. It comes from a 2003 paper in NeuroQuantology, and it was written by Donald Watson and Bernard Wilson: The “psychophysical identity” proposition is today’s most popular model for … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, brain, dualism, God, materialism, mind, mind-body problem, near-death experiences, science, second coming, sir john eccles
Leave a comment
This Near Death Experiencer Says We Should Not Fear Death
She shared her experience at the 3rd Spiritual Retreat for Near Death Experiencers, St Louis, May 2008: What weight do you suppose we should give near death experiencer testimony? At one level, it’s akin to a person in Italy in … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheist, death, fear, Jesus, life, love, materialism, meaning, philosophy, psi, purpose, ufo abductees
Leave a comment
Urizen the Bearer of Circumfrences
A biographer of William Blake discusses Blake’s take on materialist reduction and the nature of mind:
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnosticism, atheism, life, materialism, mind, poetry, urizen, William Blake
Leave a comment
Carl Jung on the Reduction of Mind to Matter
Carl Jung, as quoted in The Conscious Universe (1997, 324-25) by Dean Radin: It is almost an absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical. As a matter of fact, the only form of existence of which we have … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnosticism, atheism, atheist, epistemology, life, materialism, matter, mind, paranormal
2 Comments
Dean Radin, Speaking at Google, on Psychic Phenomena
Oops. I see that this talk does not embed. See on YouTube here.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged dean radin, materialism, mind, philosophy, psi, psi phenomena, psychic phenomena, reason, science, skeptic
Leave a comment
Confusion in the Atheist Universe! We Are the Paranormal Phenomenon That We Have Been Waiting for!
Remember how, during the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama said that we are the change we have been waiting for? Well, I was thinking about this in terms of paranormal phenomenon. So many people are looking beyond themselves, out into the world, for evidence … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged atheism, atheist, atheist universe, biology, materialism, mind, paranormal, philosophy, Richard Dawkins, science, UFOs
12 Comments
John Searle Wants Us to Reject Both Materialism and Dualism with Regard to the Mind
John Searle splits the difference by saying that consciousness is, in relation to matter, “ontologically irreducible but causally reducible.” Here’s parts 1 and 2 of a longer talk. If you don’t want to hear the biographical introduction to Searle, you … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnostic, atheist, consciousness, dualism, free will, john searle, materialism, mind, philosophy, reductionism, science, self
1 Comment
