Beth

Appreciate it, PopeBeanie….I just rhyme what the evidence taught.
Gift of the gab, not the gift of God……
Critical thinking’s my creed, skepticism my sport.

Once you no longer reserve a hidden compartment in your reasoning for “maybe there’s a divine exception,” the entire field of view opens up. You stop having to protect contradictions, and patterns that were once blurred by reverence or taboo become visible. I don’t carry a residual conceptual veto. When you remove that invisible constraint of ma…[Read more]

Thanks, Reg!

Have a great week!

Thanks Jake, I was mostly thinking about Ireland when I wrote that :-).

The Enlightenment was about freeing thought from authority, be that authority religious, royal, or dogmatic. Now the new authorities are hashtags and outrage algorithms. The problem is not just ideological, it’s epistemic. Both the ‘Lunatic Left and Rancid Right’ have abandoned Enlightenment principles like reason, evidence, and open debate in fa…[Read more]

The idea of America; self-determination, free inquiry, equality before the law, is extraordinary. The execution of it has always been messy, compromised, and full of contradictions. Please don’t see my criticism as anti-American. I hope it is seen as pro-Enlightenment. I have no tribal attachment, and I can separate the myth from the machinery. T…[Read more]

@Jakelafort – I agree with the sentiment, but I am more optimistic (or naïve!) about the future. The pace of scientific and technological progress has far outstripped the average person’s ability or willingness to keep up intellectually with these advances. It is not so much that there is a growth in ignorance and stupidity but rather that it now…[Read more]

@Enco – It could be that Tucker Carlson made a balls of his testosterone booster with too much testicle tanning?

Good Website here.

Simon – I moved your update here so it does not disappear down the list.

I have been studying morality for about 16 years, and now I feel I have it all figured out. I can give a full and comprehensive answer for what justifies our moral beliefs: the question that is on every moral philosopher’s lips, and is the reason for the mistaken belief in m…[Read more]

@Simon –

Simon, the problem with JD Vance isn’t that he “respects” his wife’s atheism — it’s that he doesn’t respect her Hinduism. He’s implying she’s an atheist simply because she isn’t a Christian, which is a rather offensive way to erase a faith practiced by hundreds of millions in India. It’s disingenuous. What he’s really doing is getting…[Read more]

Thanks Reg!

Have a great week!

@Jake – your mention of Utopia touches a long-standing thought I have.  How do those Utopia Warriors behave, if they finally achieve Utopia on Earth?  What do they do?  They’re fighters, not bakers. What do the ‘Freedom Fighters’ imagine their role would be, in the Utopia they seem to be fighting for?

I’m afraid the situation is worse than most of you realize. Here’s a “what if” for you: Forget rigging the election by all the ways people are discussing. What if he declares a national emergency and simply refuses to leave office? He already ignores the law and is on the verge of defying court orders, and all the means of enforcement come under…[Read more]

Simon, you are still redefining “faith” to make it appear intellectually respectable. You are using the religious version, which explicitly praises belief without evidence, and you are stretching it to also mean rational expectations grounded in observation. That doesn’t create unity between religion and science. In a debate it confuses the point…[Read more]

Thank you for your kind words Jake. I happen to be thinking in this line of thought all week…..from the piece I wrote for the previous week’s Sunday School post. We atheists should spend more of our time enjoying the fruits of freethinking.  Just Think Atheist and be in the Zone. 🙂