1. Call to teach biblical creation as science

Comment #225224 by peahix on August 6, 2008 at 10:53 am

"This is not about removing anything from the classroom â€" although that would probably be the ideal for me â€" but this is about us having equality of access to other views as to how the world came into existence..."

so, in other words, you're all for touting "equality of access" up to the point where you've gotten your foot in the door... then you'll get down to business trying to remove evolution from the classroom... i get it...

2. The Return of Religion

Comment #211978 by peahix on July 16, 2008 at 12:42 pm

There are two reasons why people start shouting at their opponents: one is that they think the opponent is so strong that every weapon must be used against him; the other is that they think their own case so weak that it has to be fortified by noise.

Personally, I find that the foundation for my desire to argue for an atheist/secular viewpoint begins with the fact that "the opponent is so strong," ie in socio-political influence, etc. But I find that when I lapse into shouting, it's for a much more basic reason than the two Scruton gives- it's because I get the feeling that I'm literally not being heard, therefore I must apparently speak louder. Of course, that doesn't make it a rational or worthwhile measure, as in most cases the person can actually hear my voice just fine. But the failure of the other person to comprehend crystal clear reason and common sense tends to leave me with the instinctual impression that the problem IS as basic as their not being able to hear my voice. So I raise it, somewhat involuntarily.

3. Science is not philosophy

Comment #198628 by peahix on June 24, 2008 at 10:18 am

we should expect a whole new round of these kinds of articles coming from canada, as expelled is opening there this weekend...

4. Expelled Overview

Comment #150214 by peahix on March 26, 2008 at 3:19 pm

re comment 104, i like how kevin says to email him the questions instead of posting them in the blog... assuring that he'll be able to simply pick and choose the questions he wants to answer, without anyone else seeing the questions he decided not to answer...

i suggest posting your questions in the blog... even if he says something like "i'll only answer questions sent via email," at least there'll be lots of visible, tough, unanswered questions there... unless they get deleted...

5. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132562 by peahix on February 25, 2008 at 1:33 am

here's campos' bio:

http://justice.colorado.edu/profiles/profile.jsp?id=10

hard to believe such tripe could be written by someone with such apparent academic credentials...

6. Cutting Edge: Baby Bible Bashers

Comment #129252 by peahix on February 18, 2008 at 11:10 pm

"marjoe" is a great movie and is well worth owning:

http://tinyurl.com/27pkzj

7. Hitchens and Boteach Debate on God

Comment #125925 by peahix on February 12, 2008 at 9:20 am

he was trying to make a joke that fell totally flat, ie "non-prophet organization."

8. Hitchens and Boteach Debate on God

Comment #125068 by peahix on February 10, 2008 at 9:37 pm

not to mention that fact that boteach shrieks "where's the evidence?!?" with respect to evolution, whilst:

a) demonstrating an immense degree of ignorance about the evidence for evolution

and

b) failing to have any problem whatsoever with the complete lack of evidence for the existence of his god

9. Hitchens and Boteach Debate on God

Comment #125050 by peahix on February 10, 2008 at 8:35 pm

boteach's mental gymnastics and extreme ignorance are on full display here, unfortunately hitch didn't have sufficient time to refute every single inane point. the stuff about mathematical probability was particularly inane.

however, i'd like to point out a couple things. on the whole business of the high court in israel, etc, if you listen back you'll find that hitch DID in fact slip up in his statement and tried to smooth it over after he was caught out by saying something like "...the rabbinical court AND the high court..." so his rather forceful reaction to boteach's challenge was a unjustified in this particular situation because he did, apparently, state inaccurate information. haven't looked up precisely what he said in _god is not great_, but at least here he seems to have mis-spoken.

another thing is that i don't quite buy his oft-repeated challenge about naming a moral act that could not have been done by an atheist, etc. actually, it's not the first part i disagree with, it's the 2nd part, or "corollary," as he puts it. the problem is, when he says "name an evil act that could only have been done because of belief in god," he leaves out the other logical part of this proposition, which is "name an evil act that could only have been done because of lack of belief in god."

now, i personally don't believe that lack of belief in god is likely to lead to evil acts (at least not as frequently/easily as believing in a god who condones genocide, slavery, etc), but it can easily be argued that it can and does. it's simply a matter of examining what any given atheist's interpretation is of the state of affairs where there is no god. the default position is for the question of god to not matter on the question of ethics and morality, but certainly some will take the absence of an ultimate authority figure as a license to do whatever they please. just look at the theists who say things like "without god, i'd be out there raping and murdering!" presumably for such a person, such acts could only be done if they were an atheist.

obviously you can argue about the levels of justification in theistic amoral acts vs atheistic amoral acts, but nevertheless, to be fair, hitch should acknowledge this further point in his challenge. to not do so is, i think, intellectually dishonest and manipulative.

10. Putting Candidates' Religion to the Test

Comment #121982 by peahix on February 4, 2008 at 12:51 pm

here's huckabee on the creationism/evolution question:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=n-BFEhkIujA

11. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #120993 by peahix on February 2, 2008 at 8:58 pm

re: evidence and testimony in the contexts of science and law, some useful distinctions may be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence#Anecdotal_evidence_and_faulty_logic

12. MySpace: No place for Atheists?

Comment #118187 by peahix on January 30, 2008 at 1:04 pm

my "scarlet A" is still on my myspace page... i wonder if it would help for me to put "atheist" in the "religion" field? i've always left it blank because, for me, atheism is NOT a religion. if they had an option for "none," i would put that.

edit: i suggest to NOT delete your myspace account, and instead send this story as a bulletin to all your myspace contacts. hopefully the word will get buzzing around myspace very quickly.

13. It is possible to be moral without God

Comment #105118 by peahix on December 30, 2007 at 3:46 pm

Take an analogy: someone hears a great piece of music and responds to it in itself. But someone else knows that the piece is part of a symphony and can be even more appreciated when heard as part of the whole in which it has a crucial place. As human beings we can recognise and respond to particular moral insights. But a religious believer claims to understand these as part of a much larger whole in which they have a vital place: in particular, there is a fount and origin of all our moral insights which is good, perfect good, all good, our true and everlasting good. For a Christian, this is above all shown in the willingness of God to enter the flux of history, to redeem it from within.

this is a flawed analogy, which is shown clearly by the author himself in that first he says "But someone else knows..." and then later "But a religious believer claims..." in other words, there's a difference between knowing something and claiming something. it's obvious that we can know the details of a symphony and it's various movements, historical context, etc. assuming these details are historically documented, as is normally the case. but no theist can truly claim to know for certain the existence and will of god in the same way. they can say they do, but they can't prove it. at best, they're just guessing. so, for the analogy to be fair, you would have to say something like

"if someone hears a piece of music and likes it, it's not as good as if someone else hears the same piece of music and writes a bunch of other music that they think sounds nice with it."

well, what if i simply like the original piece just as it is, and i actually don't think it's made any better by adding anything to it? what if i don't like the other music the other person added at all? indeed, i could even say the same thing if we were talking about the original analogy, where the person knows that the entire symphony was written all as one piece by the original composer. it may very well be that, despite knowing the overall context, i may simply only like one particular movement of the symphony.

i could say alot more about this (ie about the subjectivity of aesthetics vs the objectivity of ethics, etc), but i guess my basic point is that this is a very flawed analogy.

(btw, long time lurker, rarely a poster)

14. The God Delusion - Dawkins Feature

Comment #50746 by peahix on June 19, 2007 at 7:20 pm

speaking as one who has not read the book, but rather listened to the audiobook, which is read by dawkins himself, i have to say that i had no such problem with the "tone" of the writing, at least when spoken in dawkins' own well-mannered style.

15. Teachers rebel over atheism promotion

Comment #44998 by peahix on May 25, 2007 at 6:41 pm

in my opinion, the best way to teach kids to think critically is by direct example from parent to child. it would seem to me that anyone likely to send their kids to this sort of camp most likely is already aware of the importance of leading their children by example.

this sort of camp, while i agree with the basic direction of it, looks to have more to do with dragging kids into a reactionary "us vs them" type stance. this could be just a knee-jerk reaction i'm having, and obviously i don't know anything about their program other than what's described on the flyer, but i tend to be suspicious of any sort of formal program that seems designed to indoctrinate kids into a particular way of thinking, even if it's "freethought."

16. Angry atheists are hot authors

Comment #44481 by peahix on May 25, 2007 at 12:12 am

re comment #20, i just read this debate too, and in my opinion, it wasn't that wilson was a "worthy adversary," more that hitchens seemed to have taken a very lazy/bored approach with his responses. there were many easily dismissable points made by wilson that hitchens simply ignored, which, to the uninformed reader, comes off as hitchens not having any good answers for those points.

it seems odd, since presumably in this format, each side could take as long as they wanted to consider and compose a reply. maybe they were limited on the word count of their replies, i don't know, but surely hitchens could have come up with economic retorts that addressed many more points than he did.

i'm almost tempted to rebut wilson's points myself.

17. Angry atheists are hot authors

Comment #44443 by peahix on May 24, 2007 at 6:41 pm

blueollie, i agree, but i would also venture to guess that most folks will say something like that at least partially out of fear of some sort of consequences if they *don't* profess belief in god. sure, many may not think about it that much, but most folks have learned, at a minimum, that lack of belief in god supposedly has serious consequences, so they go with the visceral response, assuming it's good enough to just say "yeah, i believe in god," without further qualification or specificity.

18. Angry atheists are hot authors

Comment #44440 by peahix on May 24, 2007 at 6:24 pm

"Indeed, believers far outnumber nonbelievers in America. In an 2005 AP-Ipsos poll on religion, only 2 percent of U.S. respondents said they did not believe in God."
*****************

whenever i read some statistics about percentages of believers vs non-believers, i can't help but get the feeling that the large numbers of "believers" are mostly just folks taking pascal's wager at its most simplistic level... ie, when they're presented with a poll which probes their belief in god, there's a paranoid, knee-jerk affirmative response because *certainly* god is watching you when you're writing something down and setting it in stone, even though you're supposedly anonymous to the folks taking the poll... so even though "belief in god" doesn't really factor into your day-to-day life, this is the sort of situation where you'd best not take your chances being totally honest...

19. I Don't Believe in Atheists

Comment #44390 by peahix on May 24, 2007 at 1:33 pm

peterk, post #30, isn't that what's called "speaking in tongues?"

20. Freethinking Ruins All Things

Comment #42247 by peahix on May 18, 2007 at 1:26 am

But, of course, religion is man-made. Men build the temples, write the prayers, organise the rites and offer the oblations and sacrifices. That does not mean that there is no divinely inspired and true religion.
****************

of course, he misses the important point here, that god is man-made as well.

21. Television evangelist Falwell dies at 73

Comment #41611 by peahix on May 16, 2007 at 11:51 am

i noticed an article on the cnn website titled "Falwell had many sides -- some surprising" and thought, hmmm... maybe there are some redeeming tidbits in there...

turns out, at the end of the article, the "surprising" bit is that he was proud of the liberty university women's basketball team!

wow, now THAT's progress!!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/05/15/king.fallwell.btsc/index.html

22. Furor over author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's visit stirs debate on religious freedom

Comment #40546 by peahix on May 14, 2007 at 1:00 pm

"One is free to choose whatever religion and body of truths one wants to believe," said the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese.
*********

even if one body of "truths" contradicts another body of "truths?" are both bodies still "true?"

and if something really is objectively "true," what does it mean to "want to believe" it, assuming we're already convinced of its truth?

i'm always amazed at the abuse of the word "truth" coming from religionists.

23. Lou Dobbs w/ Hitchens on Al Sharpton's Bigoted Remark

Comment #39631 by peahix on May 11, 2007 at 11:25 am

hi mr. mark, please see comment #4 for my take on the sharpton's choice of words, and how this indicates his meaning.

related to this topic, here's an interesting article:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1619552,00.html

24. Lou Dobbs w/ Hitchens on Al Sharpton's Bigoted Remark

Comment #39377 by peahix on May 10, 2007 at 12:42 pm

i've been lurking around here a bit, but this is my first post. anyway, maybe it's already been pointed out, but sharpton's intentions here are made perfectly clear by his use and stress of the word "really," as in "those of us who *really* believe in god..." in other words, he's distinguishing himself as a true believer, as opposed to a pretender, ie romney. in his damage control, he's trying to insist that he was referring to hitchens (not romney), but this clearly is not what's implied in his choice of words. if it was, he'd have left out the word "really" entirely, since hitchens makes no claim of god-belief which sharpton could discount.

i hope that made sense! anyway, it's interesting that, most likely, hitchens wouldn't even agree with sharpton that romney does not believe in god. i, for one, take romney at his word that he believes in god, and it's every bit as scary to me as the god that sharpton believes in.