Animal Pain

This is a terrifically interesting and well done video responding to the contention that animals can't feel pain.  I'll make some comments below.




1:08 The video starts in a shaky way, speculating that sea mammals may be aware of the feelings of the humans they interact with. Well, maybe. Fortunately that's just the entry point into the main question: do animals feel pain?  Wish I could refer

Are atheist accommodationists hypocritical?

Jerry Coyne finds philosophers very, very, very vexing when they try to reconcile science and religion.  He suspects it's always "political"--

In my estimation, all atheist philosophers who try to reconcile religion
and science are doing so for political reasons—as are organizations
like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for
Science Education that engage in the same

Faith

Michael Kelly's article about his daughter's marriage in the NYT Style section yesterday was a thing of beauty--try reading it without crying!  He starts with the horror of his daughter's rape 10 years ago and ends with this, on her abiding faith--



Ten years ago, bleeding and alone in the field where she had been left
to die at 24, my daughter got up and stumbled to a house in the dead of

Religious Circumcision

picture from www.brityy.org


I am against infant circumcision. That said, I hasten to add that I don't think circumcising boys is the world's greatest crime.  Many circumcised boys have lived to tell the story.  They are not enormously deprived.  Circumcising boys is nothing like "circumcising" girls.  Still--I think the practice is wrong and should stop.



But what if you're Jewish? Don't

The American Atheists' Harassment Policy

While we all wait to find out what the Supremes think of the Affordable Care Act, let's have a look at the Harassment Policy hammered out by American Atheists in the wake of the recent online brouhaha about such things.  Here's the core of the policy--


That all sounds exactly right. [Update10:10 am:  Is there stuff to quibble with? I just read this, and maybe so, but it strikes me as being

Coyne on Evolution and Religion

Jerry Coyne has a new article out on how religiosity gets in the way of Americans accepting evolution.  I'm surprised he continues a pattern of reasoning that was widely criticized over a year ago.  First he dismisses religious scientists as "proof" of religion-science compatibility--




Some argue that the mere existence of religious scientists proves this compatibility,
but that is specious.

Religion for Atheists

When Alain De Botton gets done building his temple for atheists, I'd like to be appointed the music director.  Let's definitely have a lot of Bjork.  Why?   Because her music creates the sort of experience religious people get to have, and De Botton thinks the godless should have as well.  Or perhaps more like it -- a successor experience. Something grand, emotional, and full of wonder, but

Ethics minus religion = thin gruel?

Didn't see this until now -- "Room for Debate" at the New York Times, with Rhys Southan weighing in interestingly (as usual).

Elsewhere in vegan-world, Gary Francione has an interesting, long essay about moral realism and "new atheism".  It bothers him, as it does me, that new atheists often accept the following equation:  ETHICS minus RELIGION = THIN GRUEL.  In academic ethics, that equation is

The Geography of Faith

Here's a reason to be a skeptic that holds up at first, but crumbles on reflection:  religious beliefs depend on where a person lives.  Via Jerry Coyne, here are two amusing maps:






If having a belief depends on where you live, the suspicion is that the belief is shaped by non-rational forces instead of being a consequence of the way the world is.  We shouldn't take these kinds of beliefs too

Who to Trust?

I've been watching the debate between Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier with fascination.  I'm a fan of Bart Ehrman's, based on reading two of his books--Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium and one correcting errors in The DaVinci Code.  Richard Carrier is someone I've noticed over the years peripherally, without paying direct attention to him. People seemed to think he was

Martha Nussbaum on Religious Intolerance

She talks about her latest book The New Religious Intolerance here.  I think she goes too far in the direction of "can't we all just get along?"  What she says about martyrdom made me especially queasy.  People who let themselves be killed during the Holocaust, in solidarity with Jews, have no connection with suicide bombers who blow up other people in the service of "jihad".  And no, we don't

Coyne v. Haidt

I thought it was not so nice of Jerry Coyne to dismiss Jonathan Haidt as "a bit of a woo-ish self-help guru". In fact, both unnice and not reality-based. Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis is extremely interesting and well-written, and no less valuable because it does have a self-help element (I use it in a course I teach). And that's saying nothing about his extensive and influential research

The Value of Prayer

Julian Baggini acknowledges the value of prayer, despite being a non-believer:

I do think that prayer, like many rituals, is something that the
religious get some real benefits from that are just lost to us heathens.
One reason is that many of these rituals are performed communally, as
part of a regular meeting or worship. This means there is social
reinforcement. But the main one is that

God Talk

In honor of the Plantinga article in the NYT today, I'm republishing a post I wrote when he visited SMU last year (2/4/10).  I think the talk covered some of the same ground as his new book.

***

No, God didn't talk at SMU yesterday, but Alvin Plantinga did.  He gave a talk called "Science and Religion: Where the Conflict Really Lies."   


From that title, you'd expect to hear Plantinga

Free Will and Divine Foreknowledge -- Mental Masturbation?

These days philosophers who accept Templeton money can expect to be mocked by the atheist community--by which I mean folks other than the 70% of philosophers who are atheists.  Now, I can see that the money itself is just a little dirty -- I can understand objections on that level.  But what's really odd is the way non-philosophers presume to be able to judge the research that gets funded. The

What about the Cherubim?

Jerry Coyne tells a nice story [more here] about Christopher Hitchens' appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston.  I thought pretty hard about going - Houston is just 4 hours down the road - but the timing wasn't good, since yesterday was Yom Kippur. We Jewish atheists have a lot on our plates.

**

While sitting in services yesterday I read the first couple of chapters of

Truth, Metaphor, or Something Else?

I've always wondered about the state of mind of the authors of the bible.  What were they thinking when they told the story of Adam and Eve, stories about 900 year old people and whatshername who got transformed into the pillar of salt and ... all that.  Jerry Coyne's been having a debate with Mark Shea, Ross Douthat, and Andrew Sullivan that's (partly) about that question.

So what have we got?

The Essential Skeptic

This article in Moment magazine reveals there are a lot of Jewish atheists, and many even belong to synagogues--like I do.  I was thinking about this at Rosh Hashanah services on Thursday, for the billionth time. Why am I so comfortable in that setting, despite being a non-believer? Well, I like the music (that's critical), the history and ancient texts, the shared liberalism, the beauty of the