What does “atheism” mean? A brief history.
A state power capable of declaring one variety of Muslim illegitimate is precisely the power capable of criminalizing the person who concludes that none of them is true. This is what happens everywhere when people who fervently believe a God exists acquire governmental machinery with which to enforce what they think he wants.
In India, requiring the state to police why somebody changed religion is dangerous territory. Freedom of conscience isn’t freedom of conscience if the state forces the direction of travel.
In Morocco, atheist Betty Lachgar has now spent a year in prison because Allah does not have better enforcement options than the Moroccan penal system. Blasphemy laws always contain the same epistemological absurdity. They don’t protect an omnipotent deity from injury. They protect believers from encountering speech about their deity that they don’t want to hear.
In the UK, PM Andy Burnham makes an accidental argument for disestablishment. But why is he even appointing Anglican bishops at all? At the same time the “Christian patriotic army” is using religious identity to give nationalist intimidation moral authority.
Nothing earth-shattering here. Normality is itself evidence that Atheists meet, raise children, volunteer, form communities, help strangers and then go home without anybody having to supply a supernatural justification.
Is there really a ‘quiet revival’ of religion among Gen Z?
World of Woo: Pete Hegseth.
Environment: A long-feared feedback loop.
This cave in China just rewrote 120,000 years of Denisovan history.
How 9/11 conspiracy theories are still shaping our world.
Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus. I wonder who would be blamed if 2 Mormons had stopped him on the street?
“Do your own research” often means “do your own searching.” Most people do not know how to do their own ‘scientific research’. What they really do is enter echo chambers and confirm their biases by creating closed epistemic loops.
RFK Jr. mocked vaccinations in Lancaster County. Now two are dead of measles, and Pennsylvania’s outbreak is spreading.
Please upload your passport before you’re allowed to speak anonymously.
I freely choose to believe that my choices were determined. We don’t experience time itself flowing. We experience events, changes, memories and anticipation, and construct the sensation of temporal passage from them. There is no Cartesian executive decision maker in my head saying, “Apparently Reg, you are a compatibilist”.
Sunday Book Club: It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty.
Some photographs taken last week.
While you are waiting for the kettle to boil.
Coffee Break Videos: Take Me To Your Leader: A Conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. The Minority Report. Yeah, atheists need your puny god to do good. Fine-Tuning for God is a terrible argument. Could there ever be a viable test for artificial consciousness?
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