The Onion AV Club has a review of The God Delusion this week. “Big deal, ” you say, “Who cares what a humor magazine thinks?” I’ve found in recent years, though, that the AV Club is one of the most consistent sources of reviews of movies, music, and books out there. They’re sharp, they get […]
Category: Religion
Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is probably the best writer in blogdom, when it comes to matters of religion and the intersection between religion and politics. This might sound like damning with faint praise, given how screechingly awful most blogospheric writing about religion is, but it’s not intended that way. He’s a terrific writer by any […]
Atheist Church Socials?
It’s mildly ironic that the recent Dawkins discussion has centered around whether he does or does not do an adequate job of addressing the logical arguments for the existence of God, because that’s one of the few areas where I probably agree with him. I don’t find any of those arguments particularly convincing, either. There […]
Local Realism, Loopholes, and the God Delusion
The recent discussion of reviews of The God Delusion has been interesting and remarkably civil, and I am grateful to the participants for both of those facts. In thinking a bit more about this, I thought of a good and relatively non-controversial analogy to explain the point I’ve been trying to make about the reviews […]
Dawkins and Theology
This week’s New York Times Book Review features a review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion that judges the book fairly harshly: The least satisfying part of this book is Dawkins’s treatment of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The “ontological argument” says that God must exist by his very nature, since he […]
Give the Rubes Some Credit
Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman both pick up on the new book from Dennis Kuo saying that the “faith-based initiatives” program was a political scam. The MSNBC piece contains a few colorful quotes about the shenanigans Kuo is reporting, which sound pretty bad. Kevin cites them, then asks: Like I said a few days ago, […]
No God Left Behind
Over at Inside Higher Ed, William Durden resorts to satire in response to the Spellings commission report: In the nation’s current zeal to account for all transfer of teaching and insight through quantitative, standardized testing, perhaps we should advance quantitative measurement into other areas of human meaning and definition. Why leave work undone? I suggest, […]
Pope Catholic, Film at 11
There was a fair bit of talk last week about Pope Giblets Benedict’s weekend seminar on evolution. I haven’t seen any post-seminar commentary yet, but I’m not sure I would expect much, given that no official statements are forthcoming. I’m sort of puzzled as to why this is a story, though. As the Times puts […]
Sunday Times Round-Up
Miscellaneous stories that caught my eye in today’s New York Times: First, on the science sdie of things, a long article about how people are living longer, not to mention bigger and healthier, than their ancestors. It compares medical records for Civil War veterans with people of similar age today, and finds amazing reductions in […]
Physicists in the Culture War
This month’s Physics Today has an article by Murray Peshkin on “Addressing the Public About Science and Religion”, that is both a nice change of pace (as physicists don’t do much of that sort of thing), and a reminder of why a lot of physicists don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not that he […]