Category Archives: Morality

The Moral Arc and Animals, Animal Intelligence, and People Who Don’t Read Books

Posted on 26 January 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Just these three topics for today, one focusing on Ray Nayler’s SF novel The Mountain in the Sea.

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Things That Are Not True, and Immorality

Posted on 24 January 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Catching up on interesting items from the past few days, about the Christian right’s embrace of a “lying libertine,” how faith healers who kill their children get away with it in some states, how Republicans who lose elections react to … Continue reading →

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Michael Shermer: THE MORAL ARC

Posted on 23 January 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (Henry Holt, January 2015, 541pp, including 55pp of notes, 30pp of bibliography, and 15pp of acknowledgments and index) This is Michael Shermer’s magnus opus, perhaps, culminating a running … Continue reading →

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Current Affairs, 8 Dec 2022

Posted on 8 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

How Christian morality plays out; the Respect for Marriage Act and the weeping Republican; the right’s sense of grievance; how the media is disconnected from reality; opposite opinions about the American defense budget.

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Current Affairs: Concerning Morality, and Good and Evil

Posted on 7 December 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

And a fun item about Christmas. That one first. Boing Boing, Gareth Braynwyn, 3 Dec 2022: In search of a more “Bible accurate” Christmas

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Prognostic Myopia: More about Justin Gregg

Posted on 22 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Picking up from where I left off yesterday. My basic summary of this book is: humans are not “stupid”; the issue is that human intelligence has both good and bad consequences, and apparently we can’t have the good without the … Continue reading →

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Justin Gregg: IF NIETZSCHE WERE A NARWHAL (2022)

Posted on 21 September 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a recent nonfiction book with a provocative thesis and some interesting points which nevertheless I give a mixed review of. Perhaps helpful to consider scoring the book along several independent parameters, like on some of those cooking shows, e.g. … Continue reading →

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World Views and Cosmic Views

Posted on 19 July 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Two items today by Adam Lee. OnlySky, Adam Lee, 17 Jul 2022: How to tell if you’re in a bubble OnlySky, Adam Lee, 19 July 2022: My humanism comes from the stars

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LQCs: Sincerity, Norway, the Moral Arc

Posted on 12 May 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

OnlySky, Hemant Mehta, 7 May 2022: The Supreme Court should stop taking religious beliefs so seriously, subtitled, “Not every ‘sincerely held religious belief’ is sincerely held. The Supreme Court should admit that.”

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LQCs: The Arc of Historical Progress vs. Religious Oppression in the US

Posted on 10 May 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

First, my favorite print magazine The Week, for May 13th, in its “Viewpoint” box on the “Best Columns US” page, quotes Francis Fukuyama in The Wall Street Journal (a newspaper I don’t read). But unlike the similarly found David French … Continue reading →

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