I think I’d probably be interested in this upcoming discussion if Dawkins was not participating. Even if it’s not being characterized as a debate, it will almost certainly turn into one, and Dawkins is not one to participate often in fair argument.
I stumbled across this post by Daniel Florien discussing David Noise’s post claiming militant atheism does not exist:
In fact, however, while millions of atheists are indeed walking our streets, it would be difficult to find even one who could accurately be described as militant. In all of American history, [...]
C. J.’s mom says if her son is going to hell, then she will, too. My guess is that she’s either she’s not convinced Hell exists, or — if she is — she doesn’t think the god she worships would really send people to hell for tolerating gay people.
Hell — the [...]
I had an evangelical friend tell me today he was concerned that a god I don’t believe would send me to a Hell I don’t believe in. I can understand why a Christian might have that concern, but I have never understood why anyone thinks that’s a effective argument to make to non-believers.
I [...]
So here are some ideas I ran across in Robert Anton Wilson’s work The New Inquisition which I’m finding pretty useful. The New Inquisition is, like C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, also concerned with high ideals and what we can know to be real. But Wilson takes a more restrained view.
Wilson uses the [...]
Just to keep you updated; I read about half of C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity before setting it aside for something else. Since I am only an armchair philosopher I have very limited time to read such things, and I constantly have to evaluate my chances of learning anything interesting. Mere Christianity failed that test [...]
On the Media did an episode a while back on data: collecting it, analyzing it, and using it to predict future events. One example of the danger of this was the “Flash Crash” of 2010, when the stock market fell ten percent and then rebounded in just a few minutes. The crash was caused by [...]
I am reading C. S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity. It’s a short book, but it’s pretty slow going. Just like Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, Lewis is either fundamentally confused about non-Christian religions or he simply chooses to ignore them. There are lots of little leaps in logic which add up [...]
I’ve had a standing lunch meeting with a friend over the last few months. He is a conservative Christian and I am a vaguely-defined pantheist, but we’re able to talk about religion without shouting at each other. So the lunches have been interesting.
During out last couple of lunches we talked about who is [...]
I don’t have much time this morning, but I ran into a couple of interesting quotes the other day in rapid, synchronistic succession. Deb posted this declaration from the Dalai Lama:
The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
And then, a while later and I’m pretty sure independently, a [...]
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Fred I was very briefly a member of a skeptics club back in college, but I stopped going in part because it became immediately clear that... – Feb 22, 5:20 PM
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