I am reposting this in response to the terror attacks in France last night, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred people. As ever, the internet is awash with right-wing shouts to “kill all Muslims” and refugees, to the left-wing shouts that it is the Imperial West to blame and not Islam or Muslims. Neither of these positions are correct. It is obviously thoroughly complex, indeed involving international politics. However, to deny the Qu’ran, Muhammad and the Hadith causal responsibility in these atrocities is to deny the self-determination of those very terrorists who claim that they are doing these actions in the name of Islam and their god.
H/T to the thinker: http://youtu.be/XA64SX_52m8 And Morgan and Maher on guns, gay rights and marijuans: http://youtu.be/izSx3sOHO-M and an interesting…
Say what you like about Brand, when he gets going, there ain’t no stopping him. (Rather unspecified) Revolution! http://youtu.be/lLYcn3PuTTk
Author Gregg Caruso, who has written some really useful academic books on free will has a new project ont he go which looks fascinating. Check it out. Here is the email he sent me:
Aaron Adair, contributor of skeptically themed posts to this here blog, has written an awesome book called The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View. The book has received some great reviews which I will tell you about in another post. I edited this book and it is released by my own imprint, Onus Books.
Watch the above video. (Then watch it again.) And then read the (unedited and uncorrected) description of this footage written by the organizers of this Muslim “peace conference”:
Here is another piece, this time on the atonement and sin, from a friend who supplies adverts and what have you to the Free Inquiry magazine amongst others. He has a special interest in the fascinating life of Robert Ingersoll.
Frank Turner is an alternative folk musician who is fairly famous over here in the UK. If you want to read a cracking interview with him, I interviewed him about a year ago on his politics and religion.
A friend of mine on facebook, George Ortega, who runs the causalconsciousness website, alerted me to the website categorisation project known as…
I got into a nice little conversation with quality fellow bloggers James East and Counter Apologist today, and we were talking about what grounds our beliefs. I explained that either we had an infinite regress of reasons for claiming something, or there was an axiom (or, indeed, assertion as could be analogised).
So tonight I am attending a Tippling Philosophers get-together in Fareham, UK. We are discussing transhumanism. For those who don;t know, this is the idea (or movement for the idea) that we can adapt our bodies and cognitive abilities using technology to prolong our lives, choose our babies genotype and phenotype etc etc – the harnessing of technology to change and progress what we might (erroneously?) define as our humanity, biological or otherwise.
An online friend of mine whom has a real interest in the concept of free will, and all the problematic baggage it brings with it. He has a proclivity for producing adverts for newspapers and publications like Free Inquiry that concern themselves with this erroneous philosophical belief. Here is one such piece from the Free Inquiry which does a good job of summing up the issues with an account of libertarian free will, and how that works in the context of Christianity. Let me know what you think.
My book on the nativity accounts of Jesus, The Nativity: A Critical Examination, seems to have found itself amongst company of…
What a sad story showing the dangers of a misguided belief system. From the Mirror:
A 12-year-old girl was found hanged in her bedroom with a note saying she wanted to be with her dad in heaven.
This is the sort of stuff I talk about in my book The Nativity: A Critical Examination, available from the sidebar over there on your right!
From Bart Ehrman’s blog: – Christianity In Antiquity (behind a members only wall):
This is essentially the point, I believe, which has come out of, or driven, much of the conversation over the last few days between labreuer, Andy Schueler and myself on another thread. We popped down many rabbit holes, including free will, slavery, epistemology, history, the problem of evil and oughts. The conversation was quick and frenetic, so I decided to move it here, and start not afresh but with a streamlined trajectory. Here is what I think was labreuer’s core gist (his own comment):
Russell Blackford, one of the many superb writers we have here at SIN (over at The Hellfire Club) is going through a prolific writing period, a right purple patch. One of his recent titles just hitting the bookshelves and online retail listings is 50 Great Myths of Atheism.
Here is the book description from the back cover:
The Vatican has suspended a senior German Church leader dubbed the “bishop of bling” by the media over his alleged lavish spending.
Bishop of Limburg Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst is accused of spending more than 31m euros (£26m; $42m) on renovating his official residence.
So I have written a number of times about Gove and his penchant for free market economics in school and his libertarian approach to education. And how it totally sucks. Well, his Free School initiative is terrible and is faltering as the days go by. Between Free Schools and Academies, he is doing a fine job of dismantling education.
A moment of Schadenfreude: David Marshall recently debated Phil Zuckerman on the issue “What provides a better foundation for civil society: Christianity or Secular Humanism?” and Marshall apparently got creamed. The debate was recorded and the church that organized it planned to upload it. But after their guy lost, they changed their mind on that. Zuckerman asked them when they will finally keep their word and upload the video material of the debate, this is the reply he got:
Tristan Vick (Advocatus Atheist) and myself are editing a book of deconversion anthologies entitled Beyond an Absence of Faith. It has been, unfortunately, on the backburner for a whole since our workloads have been phenomenal. There are a potential couple of exciting additions to the anthologies of such accounts to add, and then we are there. This is the Foreword that I have pencilled in. Let me know what you think: