Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Speaker Mike Johnson’s closest allies are amplifying his extreme religious views and recasting them as mainstream “truths” that are beyond challenge. These people need to pull themselves together as the persecution complex that has emboldened evangelical culture for decades comes under strain.

Humanists UK are unhappy with the King’s speech which overlooks key humanist campaigns.

Former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced She’s a Christian!  (See also Long Read article below).

Child marriage is still legal in most of the U.S. Here’s why.

There is no virtue in zealotry.

World of Woo:  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. comes home to his antivax roots…again

Environment: Should we retire the climate villain narrative?

Revolutionary ‘Theory of Everything’ connects physics, chemistry, biology and evolution.

16 signs of Evolution we can find in the human body.

Is anything Absolute with Relativity?

Enceladus has all the raw materials for life.

The rise of brain-reading technology.

Consciousness can’t be explained by brain chemistry alone, one philosopher argues.

Long Reads:  Verification vs. Falsification: The birth of the Philosophy of science.  How to catch a scientific fraud.  The last lighthouse keeper in America.  Why I am now a Christian by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  A violent murder, a child on death row.  Dismantling the walls in our heads.

Sunday Book Club:  The Drunken Silenus.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Futureproof Podcast: Can a robot be a person?

Coffee Break video:  Kyle Butt / Michael Shermer Debate | Proposition: The God of The Bible Exists. 2023 Golden Crocoduck award ceremony and WINNER!! All religions explained in 10 minutes. The story of Human Evolution. “This Universe existed before The Big Bang” ft. Roger Penrose.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Damn! That is a big disappointment that someone as smart as Ayasn Hirsi Ali gave up Atheism for Christianity. And what is this doing on a Web Site called UnHerd? Isn’t she just re-herding herself? And for what amounts to a Post Hoc,Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy and a False Dilemma Fallacy!

Just because great things such as The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Green Revolution, or the Space Age and Information Age happened in a majority Christian society does not make any of these great things Christian! In fact, Christians of various sects railed against all of those things and the philosophical and scientific foundations for these great things!

Also, there are–*Whew!*–many other alternatives besides Christianity vs. Communism (which have more in common than many think,) or Christianity vs. Wokeism (again, more in common than thought) or Christianity Vs. Dugin’s and Putin’s Revanchism (the latter of which actually has Russian Orthodox Christisnity as it’s agitprop.)

And how does she know she’s a Christian if, by her own admission, she doesn’t know all about Christianity?

To top it off, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is such a gorgeous lady! She was like the Sade of Atheism! Doesn’t she know with the “Sweetest Taboo” of Atheism and Secularism, there can be the possibility that “every day is Christmas and every night is New Year’s Eve?”

I hope this is just a bad case of “hot flashes” and she wakes up and says: “What the Hell was I thinking?”

Meanwhile, all the Christians are going to be yukking it up and Gish Galloping away on another Forum I frequent. I’m gonna get an intellectual razzing!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spacing

[jakelafortParticipant]

Enco that was my initial reaction. DISAPPOINTMENT

Upon reflection i am guessing she is selling books. Sure, she got some good ideas from her right wing think tank. And then she decided to run with it and capitalize on it. Does not sound like she is even coming out as a true believer.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I only read some of the Unherd article as I was getting annoyed, not with the Sade of Atheism but with the realization that I will be constantly finding articles about how an atheist found Jesus!! Like all the stories about C.S Lewis. FFS!!

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

[UnseenParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

It took me a moment…LOL

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@unseen, do you think we might have solved the problem of Divine Hiddenness ?? 🙂

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Well, now that I think about it, there is some good in the Ayaan Hirsi Ali story:

Neither Atheism as a philosphical position nor any Atheist that I have heard of says that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is going to Hell on account of her mere belief. In fact, no one goes anywhere on account of mere belief.

Also, despite her belief, neither Christianity is true, nor do God and Jesus exist, M’Lady Ali!

*Tips fedora.*

🤠

[DavisModerator]

Yeah that is a colossal bummer about Hirsi. Having said that, she had slowly been becoming a liability to the reputation of atheists. Even for fairly innocuous non-controversial seeming things, she was saying very unhinged shit. Best comment I had read so far was that, going Christian would help bring her more money and more attention to her speaking/publishing causes. Even if that doesn’t explain all, it does explain some.

[StregaModerator]

Thanks Reg!  Could not log in yesterday at all!

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

I only read some of the Unherd article as I was getting annoyed, not with the Sade of Atheism but with the realization that I will be constantly finding articles about how an atheist found Jesus!! Like all the stories about C.S Lewis. FFS!!

It’s already happening on YouTube:

Maybe she’ll discover as she digs deeper into Christianity that Islam cribbed a lot from Christianity and that love of the Abrahamic God is “No Ordinary Love.”

[_Robert_Participant]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been there, lived it and feels atheism is no stalworth against jihad.

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

And yeah, excluding Harris and a few others, many atheists don’t exactly get the big picture.

[UnseenParticipant]

The biggest conversion shock in the history of philosophy came with the conversion of the British philosopher Antony Flew from being a proponent of atheism to a very limited kind of theism. He became a theist in the broadest possible sense.

He felt it was impossible to believe that DNA just happened by accident. That, basically, is the sum total of his theistic position. He became an advocate for the intelligent design theory, and stopped there.

So, he didn’t convert to Christianity or any other religion. In a sense, I suppose, while he was no longer an atheist, one can’t claim he was religious, either, if one uses the standard notion of what a religion is: a set of beliefs and practices accepted by and practiced by a community of believers.

So, one might call him an irreligious theist at the end of his life.

BTW, believers often bring up Antony Flew in arguments surrounding atheism, sometimes referring to him as something like “the leading atheist.” “A leading atheist” would have been less of a stretch. He was a semi-contemporary of the much older Bertrand Russell, who was a far more important atheist at the time.

He was just a garden variety philosophical atheist with interests that included philosophy of religion, epistemology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by  Unseen.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Strega,

Here lately, I’ve found I can only log in at the bottom of the main page but not the top.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Robert,

And yeah, excluding Harris and a few others, many atheists don’t exactly get the big picture.

The problem, of course, is not a God-shaped hole. The problem is that both Believers and Unbelievers can have a brain-shaped hole. Atheism is no guarantor of good sense on any other subject. There has to be a larger respect for Reason and Objective Reality for that to happen.

[Author]

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