Fans de Waal is a crucial figure in the research into morality, fairness, reciprocal altruism and suchlike within the realm…
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
Geoff Barton, headteacher of King Edward VI School in Suffolk, writes:
I drove in to work this morning listening to Radio 4’s Today programme. I wasn’t quick enough to avoid its regular Thought for the Day segment. But in a way I’m glad. Because straight afterwards education secretary Nicky Morgan came on, trying to defend the proposed expansion of the government’s “free schools” initiative.
From Thought for the Day to Platitude of the Day. Truly, the education secretary left no cliché unturned.
The BHA has released this: During a speech detailing Conservative plans to open 500 new free schools by 2020, David…
I can’t believe I had forgotten this, or perhaps it never passed my radar. Apparently UKIP aren’t a racist party, even though theor supporters and members are empirically more racist and intolerant than all other main parties, even though it seems that a councillor activist puts their foot in their mouth on a daily basis, and even though their leader was labelled as a “racist”, “fascist” and “neo-fascist” when he was at school. He sang Hitler youth songs, for crying out loud! Here is a Channel 4 News article from September 2013. You MUST read the letter sent by one of the teachers to request Farage not be considered for prefect. It is amazing:
The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years.
But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes.
As has been all over the news recently, there is an alleged scrap of the first written Gospel from the Bible, the Gospel of Mark, as found inside of a papier-mache mummy. This has the potential to be a boon for New Testament studies, but there has been significant controversy about how this discovery has been revealed and how it was done. Even the mummy mask that is the source for this scrap of papyrus looks uncomfortable with how things are going.
God is supposed to be omnipotent. You know, all powerful, almighty. The great-making characteristics of such a god are the paragon of abilities. He could achieve anything at the metaphorical click of his fingers.
So what the hell is Satan still doing hanging around? Well, of course, he doesn’t exist either. But supposing you believe that both God and Satan are real entities. Well, then, you’d be making no sense at all.
How many times do we hear Christians claiming that they have had direct experience of God as a self-authenticating inner witness? It is pretty common as a debate closer. William Lane Craig famously uses it, as in here:
Attackers in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka have hacked to death a US-Bangladeshi blogger whose writings on religion angered Islamist hardliners.
Avijit Roy, an atheist who advocated secularism, was attacked as he walked back from a book fair with his wife, who was also hurt in the attack.
I actually felt sick watching this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RMPJPjtlNg Motherfuckers. Video description: Mosul, the biggest city in the Islamic State group’s self-declared…
A new piece of research has come out which looks to take the landmark Milgram experiments to the next level…
Another little piece from my friend Julian Haydon. This one succinctly documents the issue that God seems to have entirely…
There is a group called Christians Against Dinosaurs. They are clearly nuts. This article is taken from Addicting Info. It makes for disturbing reading:
Most Christians are warm, loving people. Some use their chosen holy book to spew hatred and bigotry. Others…are just insane.
One of my published works, The Little Book Of Unholy Questions, is a romp through the cumulative case against God set out as 501 leading questions, supported by commentary introducing and closing each section. After my section on Hell, I look briefly at the idea of Satan, who is nothing more than a middle management executive working on behalf of God.
I was having a conversation earlier today and was levied with a claim which went something like this:
“we should respect the beliefs of others”
and I must say, I was a little annoyed.
I admittedly don’t know an awful lot about the incident at Chapel Hill whereby an atheist gunned down three Muslims. As a skeptic, questions automatically come to mind, such as, given the notion that a lack of belief in a deity isn’t really enough content as a proposition to cause any action other than disbelief, then what really were the extra causal factors and motives behind the killings? There are many similar questions and discussions to be had.
I wrote a post some time back which detailed my plans on writing a zombie fiction book which should hopefully include a good deal of philosophy. Well, here is a rough prologue to the book (called Survival of the Fittest – Metamorphosis) which I posted some time ago. I am now 70,000 words through the project, which will likely finish between 90,000 and 100,000 words.
This chap (to whom the series was directed), Scotty M, has replied to some of my points in the series on Free Market Economics. Unfortunately, he would rather rabidly bash away at You Tube than bring a civil discussion here.
The most common issue that Scotty faces is his predilection for straw manning positions by either misunderstanding them or wilfully employing some kind of bait and switch or intended mischaracterisation to fight against an imaginary foe.
The Scientific American reports on the dodginess of eyewitness testimony. This is interesting in light of Gospel apologetics which claim that either the disciples were eyewitnesses or that eyewitnesses in general are reliable.
IN 1984 KIRK BLOODSWORTH was convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to the gas chamber—an outcome that rested largely on the testimony of five eyewitnesses.