The holidays are approaching fast, and the first snows are coming over the United States. The ever-expanding day of Christmas will truly be here soon. And all around the world, both preachers and even some scientists will be talking about a perennial subject: the Star of Bethlehem and what it could have been
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Myself and author James A. Lindsay were both involved in contributing chapters to John Loftus’s recent excellent addition to his growing number of titles.
What follows is a guest post by a woman named Heather over in Australia. She is involved in something called microfinance through an organisation called Kiva. Kiva is something I got involved in since one of the Skepticule podcast hosts mentioned it in a discussion on morality following one of my Pearced Off segments.
As you will read, microfinance is way of doing charity through loaning out to worthy causes and then receiving the money back to loan out again. This empowers those borrowing to better their lives off their own backs, and gives them the leg up they often need.
As I have said before, Holidays are coming, holidays are coming… It’s that time of year, you know, the interminable…
Here is a broad selection of claims and quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia article “The Nature and Attributes of God” compiled by my friend Julian Haydon:
God is infinitely perfect
He is infinitely good, intelligent, wise, just, holy, etc
no Theist of average intelligence ever thinks of understanding literally the metaphors he applies, or hears applied by others, to God
Thus God is said to see or hear, as if He had physical organs, or to be angry or sorry, as if subject to human passions
In moving house I had to clear a lot of stuff up, throw a lot away and generally reassess what is important to me, and what I need to keep hold of.
In my loft was a few boxes of memorabilia: letters (remember them?) sent to me from girls (I was at boarding school) throughout my adolescence; gig tickets; trophies; trinkets; bits and pieces from travelling
Before I get stuck in, I want to emphasise how I am a liberal commentator and am happy to be shown where I am wrong; I do not want to level accusations at Islam which are wrong and which have developed out of a biased media caricature of what Islam is. It is easy to fire from the emotional hip and to rely on emotional social identity theory of ‘us and them’ such that I present an attack on Islam which is either straw man or unwarranted.
Moreover, there is an issue here with the while notion of causality, something which I have looked at in the post “Have I ever killed someone?” I will not so much deal with that in huge depth here as I want to look at the two ideas in unison in the next post on this matter.
From i09:
All together now: Fucking fuck.
Senator Inhofe, who is poised to become the most powerful senator on the environment, is the same man who has compared the scientific consensus over manmade global warming to Adolf Hitler’s conception of the Jewish conspiracy.
From the BHA: A new survey published today has revealed that most of the British public does not think that…
From Think Progress: Atheists Score Major Win In Federal Court A federal district court in Oregon has declared Secular Humanism…
As part of my introductory series which has looked at different philosophers and the philosophical questions from the 2009 philpapers survey, I am going to look at qualia, as asked by a friend on facebook.
This post will be split into two parts due to its length. This will allow any posters to be able to interact with certain points as we go. Regards, Andreas Schüler.
Can science and religion coexist in harmony ?
A favorite phrase of sophisticated theologians™ is – science tells us how and religion tells us why. But it is not only theologians who claim that there can be no conflict between properly understood science and religion because they deal with different questions. Many scientists, and not only religious ones, support this view as well.
Or a least, so it looks in my hands. I have a chapter in John Loftus’ voluminous anthology which looks…
Last night, an alien came down to Earth and forqwibexed me. I mean, he really did. Who knew!
This short post will be concerned with the idea that moral value systems such as Divine Command Theories or intrinsic value theories such as deonotological theories are problematic.
I am flying back home now from the amazing conference on the Star of Bethlehem at the University of Groningen. It was quite the success of collecting experts and scheduling events, including a trip to the oldest working planetarium in the world. This was also my first academic conference in the area of history and biblical studies, and I was surrounded by scholars in Iranian studies, Jewish astrology, Latin literature, ancient science, and of course New Testament studies. And it looks like I did well among this august group. Heck, after my talk a few whispered to me that it seemed like I already answered all the questions about the subject!
John Loftus’ third anthology in the series, Christianity Is Not Great: How Faith Fails, is out now, available in various formats for your delectation. It’s shaping up to be a great contribution to the counter-apologetics movement. Here is the list of chapters, where you will see mine towards the end in Part V:
The Malcontent’s Gambit podcast has recently hosted an interview of author James A. Lindsay who authored God, God, God: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly (a book which I myself edited). The late Vic Stenger kindly wrote the foreword, and James talks much about infinity, God, and Voc Stenger too in this really interesting interview.
Check out fellow SINner Russell Blackford’s talk from TAM 2013: Just watching it now, but if it is…
Holidays are coming, holidays are coming…
It’s that time of year, you know, the interminable run-up to Christmas when big corporations vie for your hard-earned cash in an attempt to exploit the seasonal goodwill brought on by the imaginary birth of a godmanspirit.
With the conference season now over and done with, the British Humanist Association has declared it a successful season with…