Reg the Fronkey Farmer

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]

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]

Have a great week!

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. 🙂

Simon, I think you are trying to rescue the word “faith” by redefining it. You are taking a specifically religious term that means believing in something without sufficient evidence and trying to stretch it until it becomes a synonym for “hope” or “general trust in life.” It sounds warm but it is sleight of hand. People can have high life satisf…[Read more]

Have a great week!

If the “Pro-Palestine” demonstrations and outrage were really about humanitarian concerns, they would still be out on the streets for Sudan, Congo, Yemen, and a dozen other places where civilians are dying by the thousands but without the cameras rolling.

The “colonizer” label collapses under even basic historical scrutin…[Read more]

@Reg- Yes, the doctor and priest are dual symbols of institutional authority. It’s strong imagery, but it blurs historical and factual accuracy. Not every State or Nation uses both so it is not a “long-standing custom”. Your symbolism is compelling on the first read but you are rather weak on empirical accuracy.

The doctor’s presence might be leg…[Read more]

@Enco –  I ‘misspoke’ – I usually format the USB drive completely. Type each line, one at a time, from a command prompt in Windows to fully and safely delete data so it can be re-used.

diskpart
select disk 2
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit

As a bit of an aside, have you ever considered how difficult English is to learn vs. most other languages?

Yes. When I am in America I speak Hinglish with my extended family. At home I am currently learning Tamil. Soon I will try to only speak Tamil in my house so it’s now a case of “Hindi theriyathu poda” and I will have to get the t-shirt for t…[Read more]