In a recent discussion about religion, someone told me that I had to be fair and consider all the good that religion does along with the bad, far from the first time I’ve heard this directive. It sounds innocent, and in fact, praiseworthy on the face of it, but it’s almost offensive in its nature it all depends on the circumstances, and is a great example of
Category: Critical Thinking
But how? Part 12: So mean
I find that I’ve managed to limit myself by choosing the “But how?” classification for posts of this nature, because not everything that I want to address fits into that question format very well. So just chalk it up to poetic license (or poor planning) when I fudge the structure a little bit, like now, when we examine How come atheists are so mean?
The biggest question, of course,
Perpetually confusing
Infinity is this curious concept, wide open for misinterpretation, but even in its refined sense, it often suffers from one of the biggest problems of philosophy: we believe that since we’ve put a lot of effort into it, it must be important.
To explain the most misunderstood aspect of it, I’m going to steal brazenly from an article in Science ’82, a now-defunct magazine
The hurdle
With this entry I thee wed tie with 2011 for number of posts made in a year, and everything past this will be bonus content. Or something. It’s nonsense, really – I just vowed to try and do more posts, vaguely motivated by those who can apparently do seven a day (not looking in Jerry Coyne’s direction when I say this, no no.) But
Give the gift of sense
It is that season, and despite watching virtually no television at all, I still peripherally see many of the advertisements that spring up in vast numbers this time of year. One type in particular goes beyond annoying into the realm of criminally reprehensible, and if you think I’m being overly dramatic, read on.
No buildup here: I’m talking about diamonds. It still isn’t
A (supposedly) fictional conversation
[The location: A dark room somewhere deep in officialdom, drifting smoke obscuring the light from a single table lamp because, if you’re going to do something like this, you have to do it right.]
Shadowy Figure #1: You know something? This president is really a pain in the ass!
Shadowy Figure #2: Boy, you said it! It would be so much better with him out of the way, because he’s
Bully for you!
I have a list of topics to address in posts someday, and within them is one about the difference between bullying and criticism. I was reminded of it with a recent interchange between Jerry Coyne and Deepak Chopra, and so…
Deepak Chopra is the shining god of the pseudoscience, new age, mystical reality, mushrooms-lead-to-higher-consciousness crowd, a guy who trades on his MD to try and convince
That’s just your science
An article over at Wired talks in detail about the overblown reputation and fears of the notorious brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa) and, as is so typical of any attempt to impart some needed perspective to the general public, it crashes like a wave against the rock
Seeing is believing. But not necessarily true
Perspective, in the usage of considering some topic from a different standpoint than originally, is a great thing, and something I play with a lot on this blog. In the usage of how things appear to us visually, based on our position, it’s a useful thing to play with in photography as well. But sometimes, it’s hard to override our mental perspective to recognize the visual one.
Crepuscular
So, why should we bother?
In a previous post detailing the difficulties and uncertainties of tracing our hominid ancestors, I kind of led up to a question, expressed now in this post: Why should we bother? It’s a lot of effort to determine something that happened in the past, which is highly unlikely to have much