05.16.08
Neural buddhism, and software/hardware
Scienceblogs links to ‘Neural Buddhism’, see also Douthat & other links there.
David Brooks’ essay was a fishing expedition Read the rest of this entry »
Richard Dawkins Interview on TVOntario
Richard Dawkins Interview on TVOntario
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05.15.08
Is Science Killing the Soul?
Is Science Killing the Soul?
by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Edge
This is an old debate from 1999, but we didn’t have it on the site yet.
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Did God create little green men?
Did God create little green men?
Forget trying to count the number of angels on the head of a pin - there’s an even more critical theological question weighing on the minds of Vatican astronomers: did God create little green men?
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05.13.08
Neural buddhists?
David Brooks on The Neural Buddhists,
and comments here.
The idea, at least, correctly expresses the deficit in the platform of the New Atheists, and other devotees of scientism, and suggests their eclectic drift to make up the deficit with bits and pieces of Buddhism.
05.12.08
Render unto Darwin…
Render Unto Darwin That Which Is Darwin’s
The German chemist August Kekulé fell asleep in his study after a fruitless struggle to identify the chemical structure of benzene. He dreamed of a snake eating its own tail and awoke instantly. The dream gave him, through the ancient language of symbolism, the circular structure of the benzene ring that had eluded his conscious mind. The dream may have had its basis in Kekulé’s experiments, but it was the nonrational that brought him his discovery.
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3QD interviews Richard Dawkins
Three Quarks Daily
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/05/3qd-interviews.html
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05.09.08
Dawkins/Boteach
My Response to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
by Richard Dawkins
Huffington Post
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Super and substitions; Darwinism and religion
Best of both worlds
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Boxers or briefs? Liberal or Conservative? Spicy or mild? When given two options, we often can only choose one. But when the options are science and religion, people shouldn’t be dismissed as unreasonable if they choose both.
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Super and substitions; Darwinism and religion
Best of both worlds
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Boxers or briefs? Liberal or Conservative? Spicy or mild? When given two options, we often can only choose one. But when the options are science and religion, people shouldn’t be dismissed as unreasonable if they choose both.
Read the rest of this entry »
05.07.08
Research on belief
Research Volunteers Needed
by Sam Harris
We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.
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05.05.08
Sam Harris on Islam, free speech, and film Fitna
Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
by Sam Harris
Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world’s most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna (”strife” in Arabic) over the internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur’an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously defend Wilders’ right to make such a film. But then one would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of “religious sensitivity.” Read the rest of this entry »
05.04.08
Dawkins interview
Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins
Shaw TV, Richard Dawkins
On April 29th, 2008, Richard Dawkins was interviewed by Fanny Kiefer on Vancouver, BC’s Shaw TV.
Atheism learning from critics
Op-Ed: Why Atheists Should Start Their Own Religion-Free Churches
Is it an oxymoron for atheists to start their own churches? Even God-less ones? As more North Americans continue to move away from religion, a growing movement to efficiently organize is taking root. How atheism is learning from its fiercest critics.
05.02.08
Church bells, bats in the belfry…
If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?
The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church.
I have already commented on this piece from New York magazine (with some degree of ridicule), but in fact the idea won’t go away. The idea of an ‘atheist church’ is an intelligent absurdity that at least makes its way to the rank of ‘gedanken experiment’. Read the rest of this entry »
04.30.08
How to reconcile Richard Dawkins?
How to reconcile Richard Dawkins?
by Peter McKnight
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/columnists/story.html?id=8a47c504-1b56-4492-805d-90f427e20422
Author of The God Delusion in person is a lot more open-minded than his critics would have you believe.
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Dawkins interview
Bill Good Interviews Richard Dawkins
CKNW Vancouver
For more information go to: http://www.cknw.com/
Date: Monday, April 28, 2008 at 09:00 AM
The Bill Good Show CKNW News Talk Radio AM980
04.29.08
Interview manque
For all Dawkins’s claims of being open-minded, he ends up coming across as a smug ideologue — devoted to the civil religion of “scientism,” the faith that science will eventually answer all questions and the only truths are those that can be verified in a laboratory. One of the big rhetorical mistakes he makes is to focus almost exclusively on the bad aspects of religion, creating a caricature of it. If Dawkins wanted a real dialogue, he would compare the best of religion with the best of science, or maybe the worst with the worst.
04.26.08
Exterminating Buddhists. Don’t forget Sam Harris
If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House?
The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church.
There is something infuriating about the New Atheists, as if a considerable opportunity had been squandered in advance, by a bunch of secular thumbsuckers stuck on Darwin. And now, on schedule, the question of their becoming a religion comes up. I don’t take it lightly. There is no force that can stop idiots from creating a new mass movement. It has happened before, by god.
Don’t they watch the news? What’s their take on the destruction of Buddhism in Tibet?
Perhaps the world’s greatest atheist religion already exists, or will for a while longer, and they can’t even connect, on any level with its history, significance or achievement, evidently content (unconsciously, or subliminally) to let that atheist religion generated by Feuerbach, and codified by Marx/Engels, do the dirty work of exterminating the last remnants of the Axial Age’s stupendous creation: the Buddhist revolution of the wheel of dharma.
All I can say is they had better stab Harris in the back fast. His head is filled with suspicious heresies and he will prove a liability to the movement.
BBC: Dennett
Interview with Dan Dennett
BBC Radio 4
Reposted from:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek_20080421.shtml
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04.24.08
New discoveries, brazen Darwinist dogmatism, and the evolution mystery
What genes remember.
The issue of epigenetics makes plain what should have been public knowledge all along: evolutionary theory is incomplete and there are no grounds for the current dogmatic paradigm rigidity. In fact, the question of evolution far outstrips even the ‘minor’ extended insights visible in these discoveries in the field of epigenetics. Deafening silence will continue to reign with respect to public communication of new research.
The fetish of the Darwinian hardline is a brazen public deception intended to serve the agendas of a dominant clique of pseudo-secularists whose main achievement is to discredit science and secularism both.
Even a cursory glance at the eonic effect would suffice to show that something really big is completely missing from all accounts of evolution. The reality is that we barely have a handle on evolution, whose mystery is ill-served by obsessive scientism, to say nothing of fundamentalist religion.
The great evolution mystery remains as a constant in terms of human knowledge, metaphysical limits, and the corrupt dominance of the public sphere with lies in the name of science (and religion).
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