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Link Humanism: not an ‘impossible dream’

Andrew Brown, at The Guardian‘s ‘Comment is Free’ (CIF) wrote an article a couple of weeks ago now rubbishing humanism and the British Humanist Association. I’ve responded today on the…

December 31 2012, 6:57am | Comments

Video

August 29 2012, 3:44am | Comments

Metafilter On rituals and algorithms What is the relationship between the ritual and the algorithm? Are all rituals algorithmic? I'm interested in any papers or books/chapters written about this. I'm writing about Google's…

July 17 2012, 8:10am | Comments

Link Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks…

June 15 2012, 5:29am | Comments

Link A challenge to God-guided mutations

The renowned philosopher of science Elliott Sober has, in recent weeks, given a talk and written a paper that both make the same points: Evolution is totally silent on the…

May 17 2012, 3:35am | Comments

Link The social cell

A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a…

April 30 2012, 10:46am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) "The perfect – complete, clear, and distinct – knowledge that the subject has of…

“The perfect – complete, clear, and distinct – knowledge that the subject has of the object is entirely external; it results from manufacture; I know what the object I have made is; I can make another one like…

April 25 2012, 4:24pm | Comments

Twitter Links Buying the Body of Christ

“We’re proud to put our name on what will become the body of Jesus.” The wafers I bought were manufactured by the Cavanagh Company…

April 8 2012, 1:06am | Comments

Twitter Links Free Will and “Free Will” : How my view differs from Daniel Dennett's : Sam Harris

I have noticed that some readers continue to find my argument about the illusoriness of free will difficult to accept. Apart from religious believers…

April 7 2012, 4:04pm | Comments

Link The Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the…

Written jointly by philosopher of religion Charles Taliaferro and visual artist Jil Evans, The Image in Mind takes up a suggestion of Suzanne Langer that religious thought operates primarily with…

April 2 2012, 2:34pm | Comments

Link John Gray on Critiques of Utopia and Apocalypse

There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the…

March 28 2012, 1:43am | Comments

Twitter Links Does It Matter Whether God Exists?

Discussions of religion are typically about God. Atheists reject religion because they don’t believe in God; Jews, Christians and Muslims take belief in God…

March 23 2012, 1:51am | Comments

Twitter Links God and the New Physics by Paul Davies

This is not a book about God: it is a book about what was in 1983 the new physics , by a distinguished scientist…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Tumblr “God,” Eldritch said, “promises eternal life....

March 18 2012, 5:17pm | Comments

Link The God wars

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in…

March 7 2012, 2:42pm | Comments

Link The Exegete

When Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of a series of strokes brought on by years of overwork and amphetamine abuse, he was seen within the science fiction genre as…

March 4 2012, 5:22am | Comments

Twitter Links Lars von Trier: the interview

As a director, he’s been accused of sadism too, for putting his actresses and characters through the mill – Emily Watson in Breaking the…

February 25 2012, 2:20am | Comments

Twitter Links Life after Papyrus: The Swerve

Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of…

February 17 2012, 5:05am | Comments

Twitter Links No secularism please, we're British

This is what always happens with religion: it is meant to make people behave better, but when they get too serious about it, it…

February 15 2012, 3:20am | Comments

Twitter Links The God gap

Religion may have lost much of its power to explain our modern world but we still crave its emotional satisfactions

January 28 2012, 10:35am | Comments

Link Nature, nurture and liberal values

Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses

January 25 2012, 10:35am | Comments

Link Kopimism: the world's newest religion explained

Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish…

January 15 2012, 1:32pm | Comments

Twitter Links File Sharing Is Now an Official Religion In Sweden

The Missionary Church of Kopimism: "I think that more people will have the courage to step out as Kopimists. Maybe not in the public,…

January 4 2012, 9:52am | Comments

Link The Mystery of the Five Wounds

Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St.…

November 21 2011, 12:07pm | Comments

Link Does Pinker’s “Better Angels” Undermine Religious Morality?

It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong,…

November 2 2011, 6:58am | Comments

Twitter Links Atheists, theists, and gnostics, oh my!

There’s a popular idea that being an atheist involves sharing the exact ideas of all non-believers, a notion I would argue is extremely misguided.…

October 24 2011, 4:36pm | Comments

Link The Roots of Religion: Myth, Play and Human…

Robert Bellah, one of America's most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age" , a near 800-page…

October 19 2011, 3:17am | Comments

Tumblr 100,000 Monks

October 16 2011, 5:08pm | Comments

Link The case for reconciling the scientific with the…

As a both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of…

October 8 2011, 10:01am | Comments

Twitter Links Which one of you is Jesus?

In 1959, Dr Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist, received a research grant to bring together three psychotic, institutionalised patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in…

September 27 2011, 12:17am | Comments

Link Can religion tell us more than science?

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and…

September 20 2011, 3:12am | Comments

Link The New Atheism

Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell. The New…

August 30 2011, 8:21am | Comments

Twitter Links Theology is Dead

"...there is, in accord with reason’s movement, no name to which another is not opposed”

August 23 2011, 10:52am | Comments

Twitter Links Shock: Adam and Eve NEVER existed! (If it wasn't for you pesky biochemists...) http://t.co/hjiA8lK #religion #faith…

Shock: Adam and Eve NEVER existed! (If it wasn't for you pesky biochemists...) http://t.co/hjiA8lK #religion #faith #belief #science #x

August 18 2011, 1:37am | Comments

Wikipedia Sacred Contagion Sacred contagion is the belief that spiritual properties within an object, place, or person may be passed to another object, place, or person, usually by direct contact or…

August 12 2011, 8:08am | Comments

Link Secularism and Its Discontents

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that…

August 9 2011, 3:57pm | Comments

Twitter Links A Trick of the Mind - Reason Magazine

The Believing Brain: From alien intervention to federal conspiracy http://t.co/G5KcJN7 #conspiracy #religion #belief #human #culture #mm

August 6 2011, 5:02am | Comments

Link Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a…

How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him,…

July 24 2011, 4:03am | Comments

Link Heaven for Atheists

It’s human nature, I suppose, to want to survive, to resist succumbing to the same fate all living things do. It’s the reason we write books, create art, have children—we’re…

July 4 2011, 9:01am | Comments

Link How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the…

APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews,…

June 20 2011, 9:16am | Comments

Link Georges Bataille Electronic Library

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of…

June 1 2011, 4:18pm | Comments

Link How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make…

A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up…

May 11 2011, 3:14am | Comments

Link The Philosophy of Insomnia

Philosophy is no friend of sleep. In his Laws (circa 350 BC), Plato platonized, "When a man is asleep, he is no better than if he were dead; and he…

April 21 2011, 2:44am | Comments

Link When the King Saved God

Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England”…

April 12 2011, 3:57pm | Comments

Link Views on Evolution, Intelligent Design Hinge on Death…

It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for…

April 7 2011, 3:39am | Comments

Link The Font of the Hand

JUST AS IN OUR DAY a fervid minority denounces the digitization of literary experience, fifteenth-century literati responded to their own depredations. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote De…

March 24 2011, 5:23pm | Comments

Link Hawking contra Philosophy

Professor Hawking has probably been talking to the wrong philosophers, or picked up some wrong ideas about the kinds of discussion that currently go on in philosophy of science. His…

February 19 2011, 5:31am | Comments

Link 400 years of the King James Bible

The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated…

February 11 2011, 3:43am | Comments

Link The New Atheists' Narrow Worldview

With tongues in cheeks, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett are embracing their reputation as the "Four Horsemen." Lampooning the anxieties of evangelicals, these best-selling atheists are…

January 24 2011, 2:58am | Comments

Link John Gray on humanity's quest for immortality

How do we deal with a purposeless universe and the finality of death? From Victorian séances to the embalming of Lenin's corpse to schemes for uploading our minds into cyberspace,…

January 9 2011, 3:38pm | Comments

Link Is there a secular body?

Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of…

December 3 2010, 8:47am | Comments

Link Kubrick on 2001

You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their…

November 19 2010, 2:29am | Comments

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