Courtesy, once again, of Why Evolution Is True, comes another article in the New York Times, this one about a bible-belt pastor that left religion behind. Despite the fact that the author, like many journalists, has only a superficial understanding
Category: Reference
Too smart to be intelligent
You know, I try to let philosophy prove its worth to me. I constantly recognize that, if so many people believe it’s useful, that maybe I’m the one that’s missing something. I don’t dismiss the contemporary philosophers without hearing what they have to say. Yet every time, this proves to be almost totally wasted effort. This latest example has demonstrated
Animal ethics
This one’s been kicking around in my head for a while now, so I finally sat down to order some of the thoughts – put my ducklings in a row, so to speak. For the sake of easier writing, I will be using the term “animal” to simply mean “not human,” even though I am well aware that humans are animals too.
Animal rights, and the ethical treatment of animals, is obviously
Fixed it!
The car was having a lot of issues, so I took it down to Craig’s Garage and gave them my list of problems: leaking oil seal, transmission getting stuck in second gear, bad alignment on the left front wheel, the heater not working, gas gauge intermittent, electric window on passenger side stuck down, a bad rattle at higher speeds, and ratty wiper blades. Many hours later, the
Curiosity
As I sit here watching, more or less live, all the guys at JPL as the Mars Science Laboratory (otherwise known as “Curiosity”) prepares to land on Mars, I’m wandering off in speculation about humans as a species and our own curiosity, the trait that makes us do things exactly like this.
[The vehicle is being drawn by Mars gravity and is on its way up to 5.9 kilometers per second,
Excuses, excuses
Some time back, I posted about an article published in Skeptic magazine regarding religion and violence. As I gave some indication then, discussions about the topic tend to be very superficial, and in a lot of cases deal with popular misconceptions and gross misrepresentations. Yet it’s
Free if you can get it to work
Unlike too many posts that I’ve seen in the past couple of years, there’s actually a good article on the idea of free will over at the Richard Dawkins Foundation site right now. Zeuglodon does a pretty good job of hashing out the various aspects of it, though
What’s super about it?
While I’ve touched on this subject briefly before, I think it stands a better examination. The process of writing some of these posts has led to the contemplation of some of our cultural assumptions, and what’s become an interesting lesson from this is how useful it might be to contemplate words and ideas that we’ve taken for granted in this case, it’s the
Nothing lives forever
This is actually a combination of two post ideas I had, because I realized that the perspective discussed in one had direct bearing on the other. And then, while this was in draft form, another related item came up. Bear with me as we wend through it all.
Every once in a while I hear something about a culture dying out, or a language on the verge of disappearing because only three people speak it,
But how? Part seven: Filling the hole
Walkabout podcast – But how? Part 7
I’m going to make a slight departure from the format of the previous ‘But How?‘ posts. So far, all of them dealt with how different concepts worked just fine without religion as an explanation, but this one will