Busybody: noun; a person who mixes into other people’s affairs; meddler; gossip
Every year at this time, as predictable as snow in Saskatchewan or icicles in Idaho, it happens. The bleating about the “oppression” of Christians starts anew. Usually, it is triggered by some evangelist group that wants to place a nativity crèche on a courthouse lawn or a public park.
Life has value, we would intuitively claim. But what is it about life which gives it its value? Does life have value in and of itself, or is the value derived by things which life can give us, that we can do with it? The first is intrinsic value, that life is inherently meaningful and valuable in and of itself. The second is extrinsic value, where the value is derived from other things which life facilitates.
The Paris mass shootings and bombings have been terrible. It’s a right minefield of religion, politics and sadness. One idea which has routinely popped up on social media has been that Christians should pray for Paris.
James A. Lindsay is author of Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly which is a book I edited and released on Onus Books. He has recently written a book due for imminent publishing called Everybody Is Wrong About God. I was lucky enough to see a draft version of the manuscript which I worked on with James. It’s great.
Apologist Matthew Flannagan has criticised my points made on the recent post “Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism” which can also be expressed as “Covenantal Moral Relativism” as Justin Schieber has stated it. In this post I declared that the moral obligations being different between the Old Testament (OT) and the New Testament (NT) amounted to moral relativism (MR). Here is what Flannagan had to say:
Brilliant, form the present thread here: Being a biologist, I usually give people like you the benefit of the doubt…
APPENDIX (to On the Skepticism of Free Market Economics) You don’t need to read this, but here is a selection of…
Several months ago I was asked to participate on a conference about the Star of Bethlehem at the University of…
Here I want to discuss a few books published recently and which I have read in the last few months that are focused on math. They are not books on how to do math (i.e., textbooks), but instead they discuss mathematical concepts and their relations to ways of thinking about the world. Sometimes they touch on theological issues, sometimes a lot. But all three are good reads.
I am just about to listen to this but have not yet. H/T Skepticule podcast for this! Let me know…
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.
So, every four years, my life comes to a grinding and formidable halt. People have nervous breakdowns around me. I…
So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of…
Science Daily: May 15, 2013 — Two fossil discoveries from the East African Rift reveal new information about the evolution of primates, according to a study published online in Nature this week led by Ohio University scientists.
The team’s findings document the oldest fossils of two major groups of primates: the group that today includes apes and humans (hominoids), and the group that includes Old World monkeys such as baboons and macaques (cercopithecoids).
Pain is a really important notion in conversations about subjective experience and qualia. I’ll have to think about how this…
I was listening today to The Reasonable Doubts podcast and I had a really interesting discussion that made reference to…
My pre-recorded debate with Randal Rauser, a Christian apologist from Canada, is now available.
Let me know what you think, please. It is my first debate, and hopefully not my last! The format was a 20 minute opened, 15 minute rebuttal, 7 minute second rebuttal, another 5 minuter and then a 2 minute closing statement. Here is the amusing picture that Justin Schieber did, at Reasonable Doubts, who hosted it:
Oh my cosmos, he does it again. William Lane Craig has moved from the Slaughter of the Canaanites to trying to make sense of the massacre in Connecticut in the context of Christmas. Get ready to scream at the computer screen.
Isn´t it interesting how the same argument can be very powerful and persuasive for some people while being completely uninteresting for others? The problem of evil is one of the most powerful arguments against the existence of an all-loving God for many Atheists, but I never cared much about it. I´m not sure why, maybe because I never believed in a God anyway, for other reasons, so speculations about what an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God would or would not do always seemed kind of moot to me. But nevertheless, I recently thought about the problem of evil when I had a discussion with our local young earth creationist JohnM.
I have commented before on homosexuality, particularly with regards to the moral proclamations of Christianity, here and here. I think the subject is incredibly interesting in light of the ideas of genetics, and within the context of free will. In my first book (available from the amazon bar on the right) about free will, I set out a case for the denial of free will. Most Christians and people who find homosexuality ‘wrong’, ‘unnatural’ and suchlike will invoke the notion that people choose homosexuality (h/s), like a new jumper or a political party to vote for. Of course, to me, all of these things are causally determined.