Religion & Art
Regular readers might know that one of my pet peeves is the way theists tend to attribute so much of what’s good to gOd and religion while excusing gOd and religion from any responsibility for anything bad.
To quote Oumkheyr once again, “I really believe that France is scared of Muslims, which is the motivation for [...]
More From Richard Carrier
Has anyone read this yet?
I just learned about it today.
Sounds yummy! :-)
Not the Impossible Faith (Richard Carrier; 456 pages; Feb 2009)
Dr. Richard Carrier is an expert in the history of the ancient world and a critic of Christian attempts to distort history in defense of their faith. Not the Impossible Faith is a tour de [...]
Darwin & Eugenics
Charles Darwin’s relationship with “eugenics” (meaning well born) is often misunderstood or mischaracterized. The term itself was invented and first fully articulated by Sir Francis Galton – Darwin’s cousin – in 1883 (a year after Darwin died). Galton defined it as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the [...]
The Good Old Days (2)
A few more glimpses of the 20th century, courtesy “Curious Moments: Archive of the Century” (Hendrick Neubauer/Das Fotoarchiv; published by Konemann; 2006):
Galileo & The Church (2): Copernicus
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Back to Part 1
Both John Draper and Andrew Dickson White used the Galileo Affair as one of their many examples of the religious oppression of scientific progress. However, lingering in the background to this affair is Copernicus and his monumental work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which revived the heliocentric model [...]
Galileo & The Church (1): The Conflict Thesis
It would not be unreasonable to observe that the figure of Galileo Galilei has emerged as the emblematic example of the conflict between science and religion. Galileo was put on trial in 1633 by the Roman Catholic Inquisition for advancing a heliocentric cosmology, in contradiction to the sacred scriptures, found guilty, and placed under house [...]
Science & Religion in Unscientific America
A lot of blogging words have been spilled over Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, which I have now read. My opinion is that the major criticisms leveled at the book are generally fair and I have no intention or desire to pick through those again. Rather, [...]
X Marks the Christ
I went into a bookstore this weekend and came back out with a book informing me that “ain’t” ain’t such a bad word, that it’s OK to masterfully split an infinitive, and that a preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with. The book, Origin of the Specious, authored by Patricia T. O’Conner [...]
A Few More Thoughts
After posting my analysis of Gregory Koukl’s essay, Greatest Mass Murderers Have Been By Far Atheists, Not Christians, it occurred to me that there’s a huge and fundamental difference in the examples that Christians and atheists cite in support of their belief that the other group has been responsible for history’s worst atrocities.
Christians like Koukl point to [...]
A Few Thoughts Of My Own Now…
… about Gregory Koukl’s essay, Greatest Mass Murderers Have Been By Far Atheists, Not Christians.
“Many conflicts that appear at first to be religious are actually political or cultural wars that divide along religious lines. The strife in Northern Ireland is not a theological dispute about Catholicism vs. Protestantism per se, but rather a cultural power struggle [...]
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