So we are now in an era when the Supreme Court — driven by religious reactionaries — is *taking away* rights rather than ensuring they apply to all people. What’s next? as many are asking. Right to marry? To segregate? To vote? We may be descending into a religious dystopia.
I’ve commented a few times about map projections, and how projections of the entire globe are invariably misleading in one way or another, because there’s no accurate way to map a spherical surface onto a flat map. Inevitably there are distortions. Here’s one today, from xkcd:
Big news today is that a draft of a Supreme Court decision about abortion was leaked, by someone, and the draft indicates an intention to completely overturn Roe v. Wade. As everyone’s been expecting for some time now. The shock to many isn’t the decision itself, but the fact that it was leaked, which is unprecedented. Still, the decision itself is troubling to very many people.
Finishing up key points and detailed notes on the second half of this book. Will have some general comments, and notes on the appendices, tomorrow.
Here’s a book published in 2006. The author, Daniel C. Dennett, is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. He became grouped among the four so-called “new atheists” of the 2000s, along with Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, though despite Michel Onfray’s characterization of the group as “angry,” Dennett doesn’t sound the least bit angry at all, just intellectually curious.
The theme of the book is how to understand religion as a natural phenomenon, that is, part of the social evolution of the human race; it’s not a book about the particulars of religious beliefs or religion’s claims to supernatural knowledge.
Page 15: “For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion. For this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.”
Two thoughts for today. Continue reading
Pondering.
NYT, 30 April 2022: Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’
Subtitled: “Night after night, the host of the most-watched show in prime-time cable news uses a simple narrative to instill fear in his viewers: ‘They’ want to control and then destroy ‘you.’
Finishing my summary and comments about this book.
(From here on I’m preserving the author’s chapter section breaks, with titles, to illustrate the structure of the book…)
