‘Rationality is useless if it is not sound. This is what Martin Luther meant when he called reason a “whore”. Pick the wrong premises, and rationality is utterly screwed. Therefore, merely that someone is “rational” means absolutely nothing about whether that person is well-connected to reality.’
This, from the Telegraph: Headmaster sacked from Catholic school over marriage split A top Catholic school retracted its job…
Some of you may have heard news reports like this one from Yahoo News about a church being ‘knocked down by the Communists’. This is how they report it:
Gregg Caruso, an author on free will, is now editor-in-chief of a nascent open source journal which is well worth perusing: Science, Religion & Culture.
It’s aims are as follows:
Causality. It is a funny thing. Or not so funny.
A few years back, I took my class, as a teacher, on a class trip to the Historic Dockyard in the naval city of Portsmouth, UK. My school is some 45 minutes walk and a short ferry ride from there. With the cost of coaches, it is important to be able to walk to such places to keep the costs down for parents.
Had to add this one, as it is a point I often make:
This is really interesting, and whilst it doesn’t prove anything particularly in and of itself, it does hint at a connection between more ‘out there’ irrational beliefs and free will, which, in my opinion, is equally irrational.
Astounding. H/T Russ Rogers
This article is taken from the excellent podcast Reasonable Doubts which itself borrows from source material and commentary from Tom Rees’ superb…
Here is a quote that I posted on the Daily Telegraph (eek) in the UK which was reporting the letter it had received denouncing PM Cameron’s claim that we should be proud that we are a Christian nation. I will first post the comment I reacted to:
Some fellow tippling philosophers and myself are having an email exchange about psychology. It started with one of us writing an email lauding Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow (the bold is where he is quoting someone else).
Tee hee [H/T Paul Jenkins] http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3066#comic
This is truly chilling stuff. The Second World War had some pretty terrible moments (a huge understatement), but the lead up to the Jewish Holocaust and how it was organised and delivered, especially with knowledge of the consequences as we now have, was spectacularly scary to the point where you think something like that would have no chance of ever happening again. Perhaps we too easily forget our history.
Thanks again to Andy Schueler for finding this. Good way of showing that those oft-used analogies to describe the Trinity…
I posted one of my SIN posts over at Debunking Christianity recently, and this comment was posted which I found pretty insightful:
“And, of course, such suffering, in light of an all-loving God, must be seen as necessary for some greater good.”
Andy Schueler came across this little piece. Although I would be cautious over the definition of oligarchy (“meaning profoundly corrupt” rather than “a small group of people having control of a country or organization.”), this could make for interesting reading:
The other day I posted a piece refuting the notion that Christianity is somehow causally responsible for the development of science and the scientific method. I would like to continue with a short piece looking at another couple of points which I have had heard raised.
The government are continuing to look into the Islamification of certain schools in the Birmingham area as I reported (from the BBC) before. Here, the anti-terrorism unit has got involved. This is close to my teaching and secular heart (from the BBC again):
The room was heaving in Conway Hall last night as British Humanist Association (BHA) President, physicist and broadcaster Professor Jim Al-Khalili gave this year’s Voltaire Lecture on the theme of ‘Lessons from the past: science and rationalism in medieval Islam.’ The lecture was chaired by his predecessor as President, and current BHA Vice President, the journalist Polly Toynbee.
Tihs has come up in conversation elsewhere, so I thought I would resurrect this old post from my old, old…
The other day, the CEO for Mozilla had to step down. This was due to influence from social media – a sort of power to the people. Basically, Mr Elch has held private views on gay marriage which have subsequently become public.