Moderate Islam
August 31, 2010 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under Sam Harris, people, religion, social and literary criticism
Sam Harris’ The End of Faith was the first and, to my mind, most important of the “New Atheist” books. Important, because after the September 11th attacks, the crazy in the liberal half of American thinking about religion came out and it seemed like everyone was saying that the attacks had nothing to do with [...]
Continue Reading »Why not be a dick?
July 21, 2010 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under religion, social and literary criticism
I’ve been hearing something about a Phil Plait talk that became a meme under the heading “don’t be a dick,” but didn’t feel informed enough to comment until I found a partial transcript of the talk. (HT: Jason Rosenau). I got thinking about this, and concluded that for such a commonsensical-sounding thesis, it’s amazing how [...]
Continue Reading »Most US Protestants belong to creationist denominations
May 11, 2010 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under biology, religion, science, social and literary criticism, stupidity
Jerry Coyne criticizes a study that makes a big deal of the fact that 63% of believers in the U.S. belong to religious organizations that are officially pro-evolution. Coyne rightly points out that even in pro-evolution denominations, lots of believers in the pews have creationist sympathies. He only briefly mentions, however, the fact that “This [...]
Continue Reading »Tone vs. Content
May 9, 2010 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under dishonesty, language, religion, science, social and literary criticism, stupidity
Russell Blackford has a post arguing that tone is important, even if a lot of the things people say about tone are foolish:
For these sorts of reasons, intelligent discussion of tone is always in order. The problem is likely to be that a lot of discussion of tone is just not very intelligent – how [...]
Generation Infidel? Not exactly…
April 28, 2010 by Chris Hallquist
Filed under religion, social and literary criticism
Yesterday, I saw a news story announcing that most young people today (specifically the 18-29 crowd) don’t go to church and consider themselves “more spiritual than religious.” Thomas of WWGHA calls the story heartwarming. I disagree: look at the rest of the details of the report, you’ll notice that close to two-thirds identify as Christian, [...]
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