It’s a bargain!

Every once in a while this topic gets brought up again in my mind, and I just feel the need to put some of it down.

It is no surprise that, as a photographer, I notice the countless people who want to get some kind of reduced rate on photographic services – and because [...]

Personal god

I am, if nothing else, a fan of perspective. One of the greatest benefits of critical thinking is that it can often encourage people to take stock of a situation, compare it against other experiences, and most especially, to see where a common attitude can lead us to fall for unwarranted assumptions or misleading values. So I’m slightly irked in that I never really noticed this post topic until recently, but at the very least it appears I’m not alone (is there a good reason to take comfort in that?) In the time that I’ve had it in draft form, I’ve come up with numerous aspects to add to it, and will likely discover more now after I’ve published it, but this is enough of a start.

I’ll be blunt: I am astounded at how incredibly selfish most religion is. It is a near-constant litany of how any individual’s status is determined and maintained, frequently at the expense of others, and it is incredibly anti-social. There, now that I put every religious person firmly on the defensive, they won’t be reading any further, and I can put anything I want from here on in. Yet I’m perfectly serious, so if you’re curious (or up to the challenge,) keep reading.
Continue reading “Personal god”

But that’s different!

To everyone reading this right now, kindly send me your Social Security number. I am a taxpayer, and I help pay to support this program, so you need to send it to me so that I may confirm that your own contributions are in order. I have no intention of carrying more than my [...]

Save the kilobytes!

xkcd speaks to me this morning (click for original): And this time, don’t think about pocketable, or not having to carry extra lenses, or that big LCD on the back.

I cover this with my students, first thing, so I might as well hit it here too: The first and foremost cause of bad [...]

You keep using that word…

…I do not think it means what you think it means.

Okay, it would seem that even simple things go above people’s heads sometimes. Let’s try and make it even simpler.

In the US, we have this thing that sets up what the government is supposed to do, we call it the Constitution. Among [...]

But it’s not Snow White

It’s not particularly hard to find news stories where the excesses of religious belief have led to something objectionable, damaging, and even fatal. Actually, this can be done almost daily, and quite often doesn’t even have to extend outside of our own country – this is what the New/Gnu/Nv/Nouveaux Atheists refer to when pointing [...]

I’m glad somebody said it

I had originally started a post on largely this topic when the news was full of the epic awesome wonderfulness of Steve Jobs, the man who, according to the media hype, was the most amazing businessman on the planet. When these died out rather quickly, I let the post go, but now The New [...]

But is it art?

It’s funny, now that I think about it, that I haven’t tackled this subject here before. I mean, what’s a blog for?

The photographer part of me has this little hate-affair with the “art world.” While opinions vary a great deal, it isn’t hard to find the prejudice that photography is not art, and [...]

So much for being nice

Atheists are often accused of not being nice, for a variety of reasons. One is, we have no outside moral guidance such as scripture, so we obviously have no morals – like morality is this unintuitive concept (hey, some people assume you are as godawful stupid as they are.) Mostly, however, it’s from the [...]

Cultural blind spot

People who pride themselves on skepticism and critical thinking sometimes get accused of being as guilty as anyone else of bias, and of favoring their existing viewpoint when examining the facts, with arguments such as, “atheism requires just as much faith as religion.” Such accusations are occasionally true (not as often as they’re used, [...]