Dan Fincke, blogger and philosopher over at the Patheos atheist channel at Camels With Hammers is always producing great content. With his permission, I am reblogging a really good piece on the term “objective” which gets bandied around with wild abandon. I am not a fan of it since, as a conceptual nominalist, mind independent abstract ideas beg for a Platonic realm of sorts, such that objective rather begs the question.
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The Guardian reports this extremely interesting set of British attitudinal survey results. Check the ones on religion out: Religion Which…
The flagship BBC religion, ethics and politics show, The Big Questions, this week featured a whole hour on free will. I was asked to attend ass a front row guest on the subject in York for the pre-recorded show last Sunday. Here are my thoughts on the actual content of what was discussed.
I have been having a long-standing argument with a relative newcomer to our pub philosophy group (The Tippling Philosophers) over free will. He believes in libertarian free will, though it does appear to be largely based on an argument from wishful thinking and being unwilling to confront the ramifications of not having it, rather than a robust understanding of the philosophical debate.
Fellow Feather is an atheist (whom I converse with over email) who has posted a series of adverts directly and confrontationally aimed at and asking questions of Christians. The adverts have been in different publications of varying sizes, but have always been fascinating, as this one was which I post before. FF has now compiled these into an almost coffee table-sized book which feels and looks great.
It finally came to pass as the producers liked the cut of my jib when they phoned me to ask me about my views on free will; a sort of a test run to see if I sounded OK. I passed.
As a determinist who believes that free will is an illusion, the argument over whether we have libertarian free will or not is somewhat passé. The interesting debates happen over whether we have moral responsibility or not, what any ramifications of this would be, and what approaches we should have to crime and punishment.
Having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions meant. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.
Urghhh. This was so painful to watch. They should be had up in court for misinforming and mischaracterising. This is…
Being that time of year, let me remind you of some things that I have written on the Resurrection (and…
This was exactly what I espoused here in my piece “Why do normal people believe ridiculous things?” Except way way…
Here is another account in my series of real-life deconversion stories. They are often painful, psychological affairs, as you can…
The Skeptic Ink Network are running a little series on death, so keep your eyes peeled for some articles across the network from a few contributors (see our previous series on moral panics). To start the ball rolling, here is something that I have to offer on the subject:
I’m hopefully not going anywhere soon, but if I do, I would like to be prepared. Sometimes death just pops up and hits you, leaving you thinking, “I wasn’t ready for that!”…
This is a guest post by Little Fire who submitted through a friend. An interesting little twist on the idea of God’s love:
WHY?
Why Is God’s Love Conditional? Love is different for everyone because we all put different conditions or expectations on the ones we love — consciously and unconsciously.
This will be part of a short series looking at UKIP in the context of the upcoming election, including expressing my views on immigration since that appears to be UKIP’s main serious concern. This is a long piece, so get yourself a nice cuppa and settle into it.
So to the uninitiated (and to those foreign readers) who are UKIP?
…or at least not wholly right.
For those across the pond who are not familiar with the Hillsborough disaster, it was a a grim day in Sheffield in 1989 when 96 Liverpool Football Club fans died (with 766 injuries), being crushed to death in surging crowds in the old terrace-style ground enclosures.
With John posting about Bruce Gerencser’s deconversion account the other day, I thought it would be opportune to mention that his full story is published in a great book I edited called Beyond An Absence Of Faith: Stories About the Loss of Faith and the Discovery of Self which documents some sixteen deconversion accounts from different religions and denominations. Let me tell you about a few of them.
The Friendly Atheist has an excellent short piece which utterly destroys liberal and moderate Muslims in their case for Islam being a religion of peace. It is not that, as I have shown here, and due mainly to this. The problem stems from the core text, the Qu’ran. And you can’t really be a Muslim and drop the Qu’ran – they are inseparable.
Bad skeptics suck. The BBC reports: A German biologist who offered €100,000 (£71,350; $106,300) to anyone who could prove that…
Here is another great review for the anthology of deconversion accounts that myself and Tristan Vick compiled and edited. The accounts cover different religions and there is a fair gender split of accounts. It’s a great book and we are well pleased with the results. Here is a review from Amazon in the UK from the last couple of d