Category Archives: Religion

Another Ten Commandments – Actually, Two

Posted on Friday 27 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Ten Commandments That Would Have Changed the World Who knew? Valerie Tarico points out, in this post, that there is a second set of Ten Commandments a bit later in Exodus following the ones from Exodus 20 most often cited. … Continue reading →

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Ann Druyan on Cosmos

Posted on Monday 23 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon’s film critic Andrew O’Hehir interviews the actual creator and author of the recent Cosmos TV series– not Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was just the on-screen host, but Carl Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan. “Why is God telling me to stop … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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 →

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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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