There is a disturbing trend afoot, and we should be aware of it. It is a trend which seems to be gaining momentum. It can be described as a collective tunneling of our vision, and not in the sense of healthy focus, but in the sense of disease-induced progressive exclusion of peripheral vision. Benjamin Jowett […]
Read more...Tag: false neutrality
The Satanic Temple
(Photo Josh Reynolds/Washington Post) You may have heard about this effort to introduce a private after-school program for “Satanic Temple” in public schools. As reported in The Washington Post among many other places, it is a program offered in reaction to after-school Christian clubs. Their serious goal is to provide an atheist alternative. Their not-so-serious […]
Read more...Evasion
Albert Camus famously suggested that suicide is the central question of philosophy. We discussed this in the post Is Life Worth Living? There is no God, Camus believed, so there is no meaning to life. We are to live, according to Camus, acknowledging this fact, but finding a reason to live nonetheless. Is life worth living? Atheists […]
Read more...Zoom Out
In Inside Baseball we looked at the position of agnostics, and the point was made that agnostics are agnostic because they approach the God question from a position they suppose to be neutral, but which isn’t; and further, the degree of certainty they require for the evidence of God (this one question only) is an […]
Read more...Unraveling Agnosticism
It matters what we believe. A Condemning God? Maybe you’ve heard this criticism of Christianity before: that God is unfair because He gives people the death penalty for not choosing Him. That doesn’t reflect the goodness they associate with their conception of God, so they feel there must be no God. One flaw in this thinking is that […]
Read more...Extraordinary Claims
The Artificial Standard Skeptics often approach a proposition with a screen through which they intend to sift any evidence: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This phrase was popularized by Carl Sagan, and is repeated by skeptics routinely, when encountering any hint that there might be a God. It sounds reasonable superficially, but it’s actually just a way of […]
Read more...Materialism Is Not Religious Neutrality
In “Nothing” is Not Religious Neutrality, we suggested two competing ideas, A and Z. A and Z are mutually exclusive, and together they comprise the only two possibilities concerning the subject matter. If we disbelieve A, we should believe Z, and vice versa. Non-belief Does Not Create Neutrality We discussed how muddled thinking might cause […]
Read more...“Nothing” Is Not Religious Neutrality
We considered the concept of “nothing,” for example in Is Nothing Something, and in It’s Not Nothing. Instead of conceiving of truly nothing, we tend to think instead of a something. That something may be simple or minimal or invisible or insubstantial, but it is not nothing. Something from Nothing The tendency to mis-conceive nothing […]
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