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 [...]
Category Archives: social and literary criticism
Most US Protestants belong to creationist denominations
Posted by Chris Hallquist on May 11, 2010
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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 [...]
Tone vs. Content
Posted by Chris Hallquist on May 9, 2010
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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 – [...]
Generation Infidel? Not exactly…
Posted by Chris Hallquist on April 28, 2010
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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, [...]
Atheists are smart because of SEX
Posted by Chris Hallquist on April 23, 2010
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Or, rather, smart people become atheists because of sex, so says a psychology today blogger (HT: WWGHA). The psychology today blogger describes this as a “silly reason,” and obviously he means to make it sound embarrassing. But it makes the most sense if you understand it in a less crude way. I grew up in [...]