May 13, 2009
Writing in Slate, Marc Oppenheimer has a thoughtful piece about bringing his young daughter to synagogue:
I don't kid myself that Rebekah has some unusual, precocious spirituality. She loves ritual, as all children love ritual. Nothing, except milk and maybe Graham crackers, is more comforting to…
May 12, 2009
Matt Taibbi opens a can of whoop-ass on the hapless tag team of Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton. I discussed the same essay in this post. Taibbi writes:
The whole premise recalls Woody Allen's famous syllogism: "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates." And...well…
May 12, 2009
The evolution blogosphere has lately been abuzz over the question of compatibility between science and religion. Jerry Coyne got the ball rolling with this post, criticizing the accommodationist views of the National Center for Science Education. He writes:
Here I argue that the accommodationist…
May 12, 2009
Jerry Coyne offers some further thoughts on the Richard Lewontin essay I discussed in yesterday's post. Specifically, he addresses the question of why natural selection deserver pride of place among evolutionary mechanisms. He writes:
First of all, yes, it's true that the evidence for natural…
May 11, 2009
The current issue of The New York Review of Books features this essay, by Richard Lewontin. Officially it's a review of three recent books about Darwin and evolution. But since this is the NYRB we are discussing, the essay doesn't really say much about the books themselves.
The essay is…
May 11, 2009
They make creationists sad:
Driving home from church recently, I spotted one of two new billboards sponsored by a local coalition of atheists. “Don't believe in God? You are not alone” was their message, an attempt, the group declares, to let the city know that good people in Dallas, like…
May 7, 2009
Odious Catholic League President William Donohue had this to say about the forthcoming Ron Howard film Angels and Demons:
Finally, the pop culture offers many challenges. The film “Angels & Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” opens May 15. Once again, the tag team of Dan Brown and Ron…
May 6, 2009
That's Michael Coulter, production editor for The Sunday Age. Commenter mrcreosote left a link to a magnificent essay by Coulter in in my post of two days ago. It's so good I felt it deserved a post of its own. Let's have a look.
MOST weeks I read The Sunday Age's Faith column, out of…
May 6, 2009
The subject of evolution has come up twice on recent editions of the MSNBC show Hardball, hosted by Chris Matthews. Our host has just discovered that the Republicans have a problem with science, you see, and has decided to explore this troubling development.
Better late than never, I suppose.…
May 5, 2009
New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently wrote this interesting column about the persistence of religion. Here is an apt summary:
While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is…
May 5, 2009
As a follow-up to yesterday's post about Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, go have a look at P. Z. Myers' lengthy review of Eagleton's book. It seems that Myers was trapped on a very bad plane ride with only Eagleton for reading material. So what did Myers think?
As I was marking up his little…
May 5, 2009
Supreme Court justice David Souter announced his retirement this past week, meaning that Obama's first justice nomination will come sooner than expected. Since there is also a decent chance that he will be appointing successors to Justices Ginsburg and Stevens, it seems Obama has a real chance to…
May 4, 2009
During a recent bookstore browse, I came across Terry Eagleton's recent anti-New Atheist book Reason, Faith and Revolution. I was tempted to buy it in spite of Eagleton's deeply silly review of Dawkins in the London Review of Books. This review was, in large part, the motivation for P.Z. Myers to…
May 1, 2009
Just finished teaching my last class for the term. Feels soooo goooood.
Well, there are still finals to get through, and the extra-long office hours I generously hold on the days before the finals. And then comes the grading. Sooooo much grading. First the exams. Then the course grades. Then…
April 30, 2009
Keith Olbermann delivered a nice smackdown of empty-headed Minnesota representative Michelle Bachmann on last night's Countdown:
The bronze to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. We're all laughing at her historical gaffe yesterday about Jimmy Carter and swine flu. It turned out she topped herself…
April 23, 2009
You might have noticed that the overlords have updated my blog template. That was very nice of them! Alas, it does mean that some maintenance is required over on the sidebar. I'm not likely to get to that for a day or two, so you will just have to put up with a distorted view of my smiling mug…
April 23, 2009
Browsing through S. T. Joshi's book Atheism: A Reader (Prometheus Books, 2000) I came across an excerpt from H. L. Mencken's writing from the Scopes' trial. It contained the following quote:
Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention…
April 22, 2009
Here's Uncommon Descent's Barry Arrington holding forth on on the bleak conclusions he believes follow logically from atheism:
Make two assumptions:
(1) That atheistic naturalism is true.
(2) One can't infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of…
April 17, 2009
In the spirit of ending the week with lighter fare, don't miss this article, from Slate, extolling the considerable talents of action star Jason Statham. He is one of those actors who, even when he is in bad movies (as he often is) , always comes off looking good.
April 17, 2009
The article by Julian Baggini disucssed in yesterday's blog post was a reply of sorts to this article by Madeleine Bunting. She starts with some encouraging words:
This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday…
April 16, 2009
I was going to write something up about those miserable teabagging dimwits, but I can not improve on the eloquent summary of Comrade PhysioProf. My longstanding no profanity rule prevents me from quoting any of it, alas, so you will just have to follow the link.
April 16, 2009
Via P.Z. Myers I came across this article by Julian Baggini. Baggini is the editor of The Philosopher's Magazine and the author of Atheism: A Very Short Introduction.
The essay is rather weird. It begins with the standard brain-dead boiler-plate about how Dawkins et al are just too darn mean in…
April 13, 2009
Happy news from the Boston Globe:
Let's just say that in these days of digital shock and computerized awe, Jay dazzles us the old-fashioned way: with his hands. He last appeared in Boston eight years ago in the Mamet-directed off-Broadway hit "Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants." On Friday Jay brings…
April 10, 2009
Glenn Beck is not happy with the Obama administration:
Glenn Beck is so outraged by President Obama's immigration plan that he was forced to ask on his show Thursday, “President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire?”
In his “The One Thing” segment Thursday (that was picked up and hammered by…
April 7, 2009
I have not been blogging much lately, a state of affairs likely to persist until the end of the semester at the start of May. This is partly a consequence of blogger burn-out; I just flat haven't felt like blogging. Mainly, though, it is because this semester has been an unusually busy and…
April 3, 2009
Regular blogging will not resume until the end of the semester, but I couldn't resist emerging from my hidey hole to call attention to this article, from The Times of India:
Bad at maths? Gorge on chocolates before you attempt your next
examination.
A new study has revealed that eating chocolate…
March 26, 2009
Here's William Dembski holding forth on the bacterial flagellum.
Requiring no great conceptual leaps or being unable to find a case where Darwin's theory could not possibly apply is not the same thing as providing evidence. Sure, the proteins in the flagellum may have homologues that serve…
March 23, 2009
Distressing news from Florida:
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences announced its plans to cut 10% from its budget. It targeted three departments: Communication Sciences and Disorders; Religion; and Geology. These three departments will take a far larger cut than 10% in order to 'preserve'…
March 22, 2009
Paul Krugman is disturbingly convincing about the merits of Obama bank bailout plan:
But it's immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating -- deliberately! -- the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s…
March 21, 2009
For reasons that are obscure, George Will has a reputation for being the most intellectual of conservatives. Not for him the cheap theatrics of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter. He's the thinking man's conservative, or so goes the CW.
On at least two recent issues, however, Will has shown himself to…
