The Retreat from the Enlightenment

Posted on Friday 21 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

The key theme of our age, at least in the US: the retreat from the aspirations of the Enlightenment, both political and scientific. Reverting to tribalism and intuitive superstitions.

Actually, these forces have probably never gone away. The difference now is they’re being driven by the current US administration.

(Edit next day: I changed “achievements” of the Enlightenment to “aspirations,” because there wasn’t any perfect past of such achievements.)

NY Times, Thomas L Friedman, 18 Nov 2025 (in today’s print paper): On Republican Neo-Nazism, Hamas and Israel: An Epidemic of Moral Cowardice (gift link)

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Now It’s Calls for Execution

Posted on Thursday 20 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Several Democrats advise the military that they don’t have to follow illegal orders; Trump orders their trials for sedition, punishable by death;
  • More about Trump and Piggy;
  • And more about Trump and the Crown Prince;
  • Items about the CDC reinstating an implication between vaccines and autism, despite RFK Jr.’s promise not to; weakening the Endangered Species Act; how the Coast Guard will no longer consider swastikas and nooses as hate symbols; and a MAGA rant blaming illegals for every imagined problem.
  • And an elegant bit of Zbigniew Preisner.
– – –

Yesterday it was Trump calling a female journalist “piggy.” Today it’s Trump calling for the execution of Democratic politicians who would follow the law.

Politico, 20 Nov 2025: Trump calls for Democratic lawmakers to face trial for ‘seditious behavior’, subtitled: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” he wrote on Truth Social. (via JMG)
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What Meaning Means, and if AI Gods Provide That

Posted on Wednesday 19 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What the search for meaning actually means;
  • How AI apps fulfill religious needs;
  • Reasons why math scores are falling;
  • Short items about Nick Fuentes, people fired for criticizing Charlie Kirk, Trump and the Saudi crown prince, and RFK Jr.’s miasma theory.
  • Robert Reich on honor and shame.
– – –

Thought for the day. It’s been long established that primitive human nature involved searching for patterns in the environment, to detect causes and effects that could be relied on for survival. And this in fact led to the development of the human mind, but also the detection of a lot of false positives, i.e. apparent causes that did not actually exist. Thus superstitions. And, now is my thought, the idea that every effect, even human existence, must have a cause, is the origin of the persistent human pursuit of “meaning”. What is the “meaning” of life? Perhaps that notion is a just a projection of the propensity to search for causes of *everything,* and in this case, as in many others, simply doesn’t exist. Perhaps we just are.

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Greene and Pinker, and “Piggy”

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • A conversation between Brian Greene and Steven Pinker, two of the current greatest scientists/writers;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on how Trump “cares,” and his “piggy” comments;
  • Briefly noted items about how the GOP destroys, not builds; how the Trump administration uses bogus math; Christian nationalism and football games; and how conservatives discover new “rights” to take down Obergefell.
– – –

I have said before that in our modern age knowledge of the world is available to every person, in great detail, in books and in videos and on websites like Wikipedia, and how they comprise detailed understanding of the world far beyond anything captured in the ancient holy books. And there are podcasts, including those by many of the great nonfiction writers of our time. Here’s an example, which popped up on Fb today.

YouTube: What Happens When We All Know? | Brian Greene & Steven Pinker

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Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How Religion Poisons Everything”
(Twelve, May 2007, 307pp, including 24pp of acknowledgements, references, and index)

Here is the fourth, and last-published, of the four books by the so-called “new atheists” published in the mid-2000s. While Sam Harris was an academic, Daniel Dennett a philosopher, and Richard Dawkins an evolutionary biologist, Christopher Hitchens was a journalist and “public intellectual.” It’s worth glancing at the table of contents of his enormous essay collection Arguably to get an idea of his range of subjects. He had opinions about a great many things. He drank and smoked a lot and died at age 62. And he deliberately used lower-case “god” in the title of his book.

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Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 6

Posted on Tuesday 18 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; Post 5)

*

Here are glosses on the Preface and 10 chapters of the book, followed by some general comments.

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Six Seven and Human Nature

Posted on Monday 17 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What does “six seven” say about human nature? Brain rot, or something else?
  • Morality: what should we wish upon people who despise us?
  • Short pieces about cattle, single mothers, Obergefell, Trump’s lying about the economy, Christian nationalism, and Trump’s itch to start a war with Venezuela
– – –

What does this say about human nature?

The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman, 14 Nov 2025: Is “Six Seven” Really Brain Rot?, subtitled “The viral phrase is easy to dismiss, but its ubiquity suggests something crucial about human nature.”

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Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 5

Posted on Monday 17 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4)

*

Here are notes on the final four chapters. Glosses follow in the next post.

*

Ch 7, The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist, p235

So are scriptures the source of morals? They might be so directly, via rules like the Ten Commandments, or indirectly, by setting examples. Either way, the Bible is just weird, as would be expected of a “cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents…” (p237). That zealots hold it up as the source of morals indicates they haven’t read it, or don’t understand it.

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Status on a Gloomy Day; Why Anyone Should Care

Posted on Sunday 16 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s a gloomy day in the Bay Area, with one rainy storm moving through last night, another due tonight, with clouds and patches of sunlight today. We visited the Farmers Market in Montclair Village today, bought some produce, and a falafel.

Remarkably, I found no political news items or political commentaries today worth capturing for comment on this blog. Just as well; I spend too much time posting here about things that virtually no one will ever read, with no expectations about why anyone should care about my views about politics and religion.

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Richard Dawkins, THE GOD DELUSION, post 4

Posted on Sunday 16 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)

(Post 1; Post 2; post 3)

Our chapter today is about morality, and where it comes from if not religion. We could begin with my standard arguments. If you think morality is derived from religion, does that mean you wouldn’t know right from wrong without consulting a list of rules in your holy book? Do you people who don’t follow your religion are immoral, or amoral? Most, given a moment’s thought, would say no to both. There is something about morality that seems innate, intuitive. In fact, from current understanding, morality is in fact part of evolved human nature, and is reflected, second-hand, in the various religious texts. Dawkins alludes to a number of other writers who’ve explored this theme; I’ve gathered a few others over the years since Dawkins published.

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