Mark R. Kelly
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- Kingsley Amis, NEW MAPS OF HELL
- Recent Links Saved from Facebook
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- Tim Crane, THE MEANING OF BELIEF
- de Camp & de Camp, SCIENCE FICTION HANDBOOK, REVISED
- Neil deGrasse Tyson, ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY
- James Blish’s ISSUES AT HAND
- From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: My Own Journey to 2001
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Meta
Category Archives: Religion
Tim Crane, THE MEANING OF BELIEF
Subtitled: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View This is a small volume that appeared in 2017 and was well-reviewed in the New York Times. The author is a philosopher, and as the subtitle indicates an atheist (he denies the … Continue reading
Posted in Atheism, Book Notes, Religion
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Links and Comments: Optimists; Bible; Children
Time Magazine’s current issue is called “The Optimists,” and is edited by Bill Gates. Steven Pinker has a piece: Why We Refuse to See the Bright Side, Even Though We Should According to the latest data, people are living longer … Continue reading
Posted in Children, Culture, Human Progress, Religion
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Link and Comments: UFOs and Other Fairy Tales
No I don’t “believe” in UFOs, in the sense of believing them to be evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, because I’ve long been too familiar with the many ways human perception can go awry and of the many ways reports of … Continue reading
Posted in Psychology, Religion
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Link and Quote: Hitchens on Christmas
Slate reposts a 2008 essay by curmudgeon Christopher Hitchens: ’Tis the Season to Be Incredulous: The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas. Aesthetics aside; whether Jesus existed or not, was the Son of God or not… Suppose we put the … Continue reading
Posted in Religion
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Links and Comments: Regulations; Science on Sundays; How to Talk to Someone in a Conservative Bubble
Slate: Trump’s quiet attack on the regulatory state is another part of his broader class war The conservatives’ simplistic rebellion against “regulations” will have consequences, and costs. Regulations are there for a reason. Yes, these rules and regulations might technically … Continue reading
Posted in Conservative Resistance, Psychology, Religion, Science
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Link and Comments: Fractured Reality
The cultural theme of this second decade of the 21st century seems to be the fracturing of consensus cultural norms, even of consensus reality, especially in the US. I’ve observed this in tandem with reading about advances in psychology, over … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Psychology, Religion
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What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper
Robert H. Frank, Molly Worthen, Anthony Doerr, and Nicholas Kristof on cutting taxes for the rich, rejecting Roy Moore-style evangelicalism, how even the conscientious among us react to warnings of climate change, and how Blue States do better at practicing … Continue reading
Posted in MInd, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science
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Links and Comments: Roy Moore and Religious Hypocrisy
The Roy Moore scandal fascinates me for several reasons. First, because Roy Moore has been a villain, a sort of comic-book villain, for years and years, among progressives who observe his brand of religious zealotry as a sign of the … Continue reading
A Very Short Book by A.C. Grayling
A.C. Grayling, AGAINST ALL GODS (2007), subtitled “Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness” I saw this referenced from Tim Crane’s book that I mentioned a couple posts ago, and ordered it without realizing that it’s very short, … Continue reading
Pinker and Crane: Quotes and Comments about Faith and Religion
Still working my way, slowly, through Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE. In Chapter 4, The Humanitarian Revolution, he discusses various kinds of violence over human history, beginning with human sacrifice, and then to violence “against blasphemers, heretics, … Continue reading
Posted in Book Notes, Quote at Length, Religion
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