Category Archives: Religion

Links, Quotes, Comments: 20 June

Posted on Friday 20 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A post today by Amanda Marcotte, on both Salon and Alternet– Salon: Reason vs. the right: Have conservatives abandoned science and rationality? Alternet: Have Conservatives Abandoned Rationality, Skepticism and Truth? The possibility that rationality itself has become a partisan issue … Continue reading →

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Links and Quotes, mid-June

Posted on Monday 16 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Preoccupied with writing up book notes this past week (and other things), I have a bunch of linked articles to note without making any of them separate posts. From last Monday, two interesting op-eds in the New York Times. Charles … Continue reading →

Posted in Cosmology, Culture, Quote at Length, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Quotes, mid-June

Notes on Peter Boghossian

Posted on Saturday 14 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Peter Boghossian’s book has an aggressive title, A Manual for Creating Atheists, though it is in no way as ‘angry’ as Greta Christina’s book, discussed last time. Boghossian is a faculty member in Portland State University’s philosophy department, and his … Continue reading →

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Unafraid of the Dark: Highlights from the last episode of Cosmos

Posted on Monday 9 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Passages from the last episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”. Early in the episode, he describes a thought experiment: Pick a star, any one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which is just one … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, Cosmology, Culture, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on Unafraid of the Dark: Highlights from the last episode of Cosmos

Mathematics and Reality

Posted on Friday 6 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A new book called How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, by University of Wisconsin professor Jordan Ellenberg, is getting some attention. Here’s an NPR interview. And Slate has been posted several excerpts of the book by … Continue reading →

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No One Can Be An Expert on Everything

Posted on Friday 6 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

This post by Andrew Sullivan, about GOP denialism of climate change, raises fundamental epistemological questions about how we know *anything*. I’m not a scientist either. I have no expertise in measuring carbon levels back thousands of years; I have no … Continue reading →

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Sean Carroll: The Meaning of Life

Posted on Saturday 31 May 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I was checking out Sean Carroll’s blog today, and saw this post with a YouTube excerpt of comments he made during a debate with Michael Shermer, Dinesh D’Souza, and Ian Hutchinson. Can’t resist quoting extensively, since he summarizes much of … Continue reading →

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Believers, the Bible, the Internet, and Humanity’s Future

Posted on Friday 30 May 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The writer is a blogger who deconverted from Christianity and is frustrated by discussions he has on the internet: Why don’t theists admit they’re wrong? He’s reacting as I did earlier to the New Yorker article about how no evidence … Continue reading →

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Kalam, Infinities, and Intellectual Honesty

Posted on Friday 30 May 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I was glancing around Adam Lee’s website and noticed his archive of foundational essays (some of which have been partially incorporated into his book). One is a very long, detailed response to the traditional arguments for the existence of God. … Continue reading →

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Assorted Links and Quotes: Selective Thinking, Southern Atheists, Creationist Logic, Fox News, Neuroscience

Posted on Tuesday 27 May 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Assorted links from the past couple days: Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the right: “Cosmos,” Christians, and the battle for American science, by Sean McElwee. About the selective thinking of the religious right in denying those Enlightenment values that threaten their … Continue reading →

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Evolution, MInd, Religion, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on Assorted Links and Quotes: Selective Thinking, Southern Atheists, Creationist Logic, Fox News, Neuroscience