1. 'Boycott Worked': Compass Flops - Opening Weekend $26 Million; Narnia $63 Million

Comment #97470 by anandamide on December 12, 2007 at 6:32 am

[quote]I haven't read any of these books or seen the movie. From what little I have heard and read about it on the Internet, I don't really see how it is "anti-religion", other than it depicting authority figures trying to control peoples' lives[/quote]

Killing God could be seen as anti-religion...

2. Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch

Comment #63364 by anandamide on August 14, 2007 at 3:08 am

OR, it could be that the 'real' world operates on completely different principles! It could be that there's this malevolent entity - a 'demon', say, which is manipulating something about the very core of us - call it our 'soul' - now, obviously this 'soul' would exist outside spacetime as we percieve it - you could almost say it's 'unextended'. Wow! I wonder why no-one has thought of that idea before?!

[/sarcasm]

3. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62537 by anandamide on August 10, 2007 at 4:01 am

Comment #62525 by AtheistAttorney: Ethical pronouncements can be scrutinised scientifically, and they can be pronounced unscientific and wrong - no matter who makes them with whatever motivation.

I'm not sure what you mean here; I'd agree that certain actions can be more clearly defined as good or bad (to simplify) using scientific knowledge. But ethics itself is non-scientific as it does not relate to objective knowledge about the world. From this wider viewpoint, science cannot inform ethics.

4. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62502 by anandamide on August 10, 2007 at 1:56 am

The problem of Hume's fork is one which keeps niggling me when I read some of the comments on this site. No matter which way you turn it, you can't derive ethics from knowledge about the world. Yes, religions can lead to people behaving in ways which are morally abbhorent, but their reasons for doing so can often be couched in 'ethical' terms. Rationalists in liberal democracies can express revulsion at such acts, coming as they are from a liberal democratic tradition with notions such as human rights and equality. But those notions have no basis in fact - you can't derive them from observation about the world. They seem self-evident to us because of the culture we grow up in - just as homophobia, sexism and even xenophobia can be self evident to people from other cultures.

Put another way - I don't think it takes religion to make good people do bad things: I think it takes a radically different ethical system, and ethics is not rational.

5. We of little faith

Comment #62121 by anandamide on August 8, 2007 at 8:40 am

With regards to Sue Blackmore's 'buddhism' - from what I've read, she claims to practise a form of Zen buddhism, but (vitally) does not claim to be a Buddhist.

Buddhism (and Zen in particular) claim that the self is an illusion, and that meditation can be used as a way of piercing this illusion so that perception can be experienced without a perciever. This is a fairly paradoxical concept but cuts right to the heart of the many, many problems in consciousness studies and philosophy of mind - which Sue Blackmore is particularly interested in.

Zen as practised in the West can be very different from more traditional forms (which can cling on to more supernatural notions). The very fact that a large number of Zen practitioners in the west are atheist rationalists means, I believe, that we may be witnessing the birth of a new 'rationalist' religion, which does without woo notions of souls, afterlives, heavens and hells, and without spooky spirits and gods - but based on current concepts of self and identity arising from neuroscience (i.e. you're a fool if you think you exist).

6. Arrogance, dogma and why science - not faith - is the new enemy of reason

Comment #62098 by anandamide on August 8, 2007 at 6:43 am

Although I do have to say, despite the context I'm really quite amused that the Daily Mail featured something as obscure (to a general readership) as the Cambrian explosion.

7. Arrogance, dogma and why science - not faith - is the new enemy of reason

Comment #61878 by anandamide on August 7, 2007 at 8:48 am

While anything printed in the Daily Mail should be taken as at best an outright lie, at worst a complete reversal of the truth, the fact is that while it is poisonous, sexist, racist, homophobic, and fear-mongering, it also has a wide circulation.

Their 'health' section endorses all sorts of quackery (magnets, homeopathy, 'electrosensitivity' - the list is endless), and Melanie Phillips herself has been a populariser of the MMR vaccine-autism 'link' which has been running through the UK for the past few years. I'm not in the slightest bit surprised at this latest rambling; every article she writes is brimming with factual errors, logical howlers and non sequiturs.

If people are trying to respond to the site, I think one of the ways past the mods is to begin with a few seemingly positive statements about the article before digging your teeth in.