The title question is actually an interesting one; it is hard for me to say how many people ask it, or assume to already know the answer. It bears some examination because of the nature of science, and the way we humans tend to structure our thinking. It can be answered multiple ways, if [...]
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September 1st, 2011 | Tags: alternate explanations, atheism, science and religion, science works bitches, scientific method | Category: Critical Thinking, Reference, Science & Evolution |
 Leave a commentIn working on an earlier post, a particular observation suddenly leapt out at me, making me wonder if skeptics and critical-thinkers need to put a little more emphasis on a different approach. Whether it is sufficient to increase the number of people reached will remain to be seen. Some of us mix it up [...] August 23rd, 2011 | Tags: comparative values, competition, debate, skepticism | Category: Critical Thinking, Reference, Science & Evolution |
Leave a commentThere have been some interesting discussions coming up of late within skeptical circles, largely based on a survey report regarding religiosity in select populations of the US. The critical thinker in me starts asking these sneaky little questions, as usual, but in this case the answers may not be evident without a lot of [...] August 19th, 2011 | Tags: activism, exclusion, Friendly Atheist, Inviting Black Americans to the Secular Table, No This Is How We Get More Black People Involved in the Atheist Movement, outreach, Pew Report, Pew Research Center, racism, US Religious Landscape Survey | Category: Continued from other blogs, Critical Thinking, Reference |
 2 commentsSecular humanism is the concept that, put simply, human beings can be good without god – no religious or scriptural moral guidelines are necessary, since we have the ability to recognize “good” and “bad” without cribsheets. We’re not abject idiots, in other words. Sam Harris makes this point in his current book, The Moral [...] August 10th, 2011 | Tags: conformity, empathy, ethics, humanism, measure morality, morals, nonconformity, secular, sympathy | Category: Critical Thinking, Reference |
Leave a commentIn the wake of several threads regarding the study of theology on other blogs, such as Why Evolution Is True and EvolutionBlog, I feel compelled to weigh in [yes, this post has been in draft form for a little while - not to mention I like to try and break up the long ones.] [...] July 29th, 2011 | Tags: Cosmological Argument, mental masturbation, Ontological Argument, philosophy, theology | Category: Critical Thinking, Reference, Science & Evolution |
Leave a commentA little previously, I’d made an offhand comment in a post about the religious issues with evolution, and since this is something that’s been apparent in the background of countless forum discussions for years, I thought I’d examine it a little closer. It comes as no surprise, I suspect, to say that evolution is [...] July 23rd, 2011 | Tags: but why have brains?, evolution denial, just a theory, lying for jesus, religious bullshit, science works bitches | Category: Critical Thinking, Reference, Science & Evolution |
Leave a commentFor this topic of the series, I’m going out on a limb, because this is largely personal speculation, and I’m the first to admit I have no educational background in any of this. There are writers out there who have examined this in detail, but I have yet to read any of those works, so this is me talking out of my ass. It’s a blog – chill. So with that out of the way, let’s talk about a curious question that crops up from time to time: how come so many people are religious? If we accept the premise that there is no supernatural force guiding our development, now or in the past, then we should by rights have little reason to keep expecting supernatural entities – in other words, from an evolutionary standpoint religion makes no sense, yet a whole lot of people accept it and follow it, well, religiously. There should be a method of explaining this in naturalistic terms in order to be consistent, shouldn’t there? For the next part of this series, we take a look at one of the more interesting aspects of the religion/evolution debate, that of complexity. This one is much more the victim of misunderstanding (and intentional misinformation) than the previous two, which require the effort to see things from a different perspective more than [...] July 1st, 2011 | Tags: complexity, evolution, increase in information, intelligent design | Category: But How?, Critical Thinking, Reference, Science & Evolution |
Leave a commentA few other bloggers have eviscerated this article, and I’ve specifically avoided seeing what they had to say because I wanted to read the article first. Once I did, I found I needed to make my own comments. So while three of my four readers might already have seen those same bloggers, I’m taking [...] June 26th, 2011 | Tags: 5 Myths Atheists Believe about Religion, Be Scofield, missing the point, straw man | Category: Continued from other blogs, Critical Thinking, Reference |
Leave a commentSo, not long after I put up a post about deconstructing arguments, I find an example about arguments that really don’t need it, because they weren’t even constructed in the first place. Over at RichardDawkins.net, we get to see a classic example of what passes for journalism these days, where some nitwit named Giles [...] June 21st, 2011 | Tags: emotions, feelings whoa whoa whoa, soul | Category: Critical Thinking, Reference, Science & Evolution |
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