Category Archives: Religion

Links and Comments: Optimists; Bible; Children

Posted on Sunday 7 January 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Link and Comments: UFOs and Other Fairy Tales

Posted on Tuesday 26 December 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Link and Quote: Hitchens on Christmas

Posted on Tuesday 26 December 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Links and Comments: Regulations; Science on Sundays; How to Talk to Someone in a Conservative Bubble

Posted on Tuesday 26 December 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Link and Comments: Fractured Reality

Posted on Monday 20 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

Posted on Sunday 19 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Links and Comments: Roy Moore and Religious Hypocrisy

Posted on Friday 17 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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A Very Short Book by A.C. Grayling

Posted on Thursday 9 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Pinker and Crane: Quotes and Comments about Faith and Religion

Posted on Monday 30 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

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 →

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Links and Comments: Reviews of Books about Religion and Science

Posted on Monday 23 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

NY Times: “Ivory Tower” column review of three university press books on religion: Unknown Unknowns: Three Inquiries Into Religion, by James Ryerson. The most interesting of the three seems to be the first, Tim Crane’s THE MEANING OF BELIEF: Religion … Continue reading →

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