The great comedy character for Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe has a field day with philosophy:
Author Jonathan MS Pearce
These are truly beautiful words from Robert G Ingersoll, as taken from the superb site which has a fine selection…
This is a really good excerpt from the political discourse programme “This Week” on the BBC:
I have a number of talks organised covering a range of topics for the remaining months of the year, one…
This article comes from Think Progress and details some work carried out by Adam Lankford on mass shootings, released four days…
This article is from the National Geographic and should put paid to some Creationists claims that we cannot see evolution in action:
Evolution has been caught in the act, according to scientists who are decoding how a species of Australian lizard is abandoning egg-laying in favor of live birth.
In Jonathan’s post titled, “Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism,” a hypothetical exchange between an atheist and an Xian highlights the morally relativistic nature of a fundamentalist worldview that defends the idea that executing a man for picking up sticks on a Saturday is obligatory at time T, but morally impermissible at T+1. In the exchange, the snarky hypothetical atheist wants to know exactly when T occurred in order to know exactly when people became morally obliged to refrain from executing Sabbath breakers.
Apologist Matthew Flannagan has criticised my points made on the recent post “Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism” which can also be expressed as “Covenantal Moral Relativism” as Justin Schieber has stated it. In this post I declared that the moral obligations being different between the Old Testament (OT) and the New Testament (NT) amounted to moral relativism (MR). Here is what Flannagan had to say:
“I have been the biggest hypocrite ever,” Josh Duggar wrote, in a confessional statement he later took down. Indeed, it has been a tough summer for the former reality TV star and executive director of the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm, now exposed as a former child molester, porn addict, and Ashley Madison-using adulterer.
Evan T made this incisive comment: I wonder when the UN is going to get off their collective asses and…
Further to my post yesterday on Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism, I would like to make a few more points (which I have mentioned before here) on morality concerning God. Divine Command Theory (DCT) is the Christian/theistic ethical system whereby whatever God commands is rendered morally good and right on account of God commanding it. As Franz Kiekeben states in The Truth About God (pp. 133-134):
Theists hate moral relativism. They often accuse atheists and secularists of having it. For them, only the pseudo-moral absolutism of…
The archaeologist who looked after ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria for 40 years is reported to have been killed by Islamic State (IS) militants.
Khaled al-Asaad had been held for about a month by the group, which seized the Unesco World Heritage site in May.
This post is one of my most popular pieces on this blog, and I am revising it slightly to make it even tighter, reacting to previous comments on the last version of this piece. I have tried to be detailed enough for it to be fairly comprehensive, though it could be more detailed; then again, it could be shorter and more digestible. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Of all the myths surrounding abortion, I feel that the assertion that it leads to depression and suicide must rank as the most odious. It is a perennial favourite of anti-abortion groups. Anti-abortion campaigners call it PAS – post-abortion-syndrome, a term coined by Dr Vincent Rue. Rue is a prolific anti-abortion campaigner who testified before the US Congress in 1981 that he had observed post-traumatic stress syndrome in women who had undergone abortions.
On behalf of SIN, your friendly group of skeptical bloggers, I created some time ago a weekly “newspaper” which aggregates…
I haven’t done a post like this for ages. Reading, as I mentioned in a previous post, a book sent to me for review, Franz Kiekeben’s The Truth About God, the author takes a whistle-stop tour through inconsistencies in the Bible (not so much to list them all, as he only mentions a few, but to illustrate the types of defences that Christians typically use). He details the inconsistency which starts the Bible off, namely the six day creation story.
In a statement issued at the weekend, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned the killing of Niloy Neel, the fourth humanist blogger in Bangladesh to be hacked to death by Islamists this year, and called on the Government to do more to prevent further attacks. The British Humanist Association (BHA) has welcomed his call, and reiterated its own similar desire to see further violence prevented.
Skeptical Theism is an approach to the problem of evil that states that we just Index)can’t know the mind of…
I have put together some previous blog writing with a little bit of original stuff to create a hopefully narrative cumulative…