- New on Ebon Musings: Red Crimes
The Foyer • January 29, 2007
A new essay, "Red Crimes", has been posted on Ebon Musings. The essay surveys the crimes committed during the 20th century by totalitarian communist regimes, and critically examines the claim that atheism was in some way responsible for the bloodshed they caused.
This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.
- Witch Hysteria Is Alive and Well
The Observatory • January 27, 2007
One of the great tragedies of the human species is the violence and turmoil still happening in Africa. Africa is the continent of our origins, the place of our species' birth, and the one place on Earth to which everyone now living can trace their ultimate ancestry. It should be a place of peace and [...]
- The Virtues: Be Compassionate
The Garden • January 25, 2007
The second of the Virtues is compassion. The Latin roots of this word literally mean "suffering together", but I think this captures at most one-half of what it means to be compassionate, and the less important half at that. While being compassionate does include perceiving others' pain and distress and being motivated to relieve it, [...]
- A Religion Not Made for Success
The Loft • January 23, 2007
Were I inclined to believe in them, I would say that the New Testament gospels were a set of maddeningly strange and frustrating documents. Although they contain some beautiful ideas, they always stop just short of bringing them to their logical conclusions. They contain moving admonitions of universal love, but never go so far as [...]
- Little-Known Bible Verses V: God Creates Evil
The Library • January 21, 2007
The passage that today's edition of "Little-Known Bible Verses" will examine is, if I say so myself, one of the most shocking in the entire Bible. In a book that contains talking snakes and donkeys, a man taking two of every living species to survive a flood in a wooden boat, and a god who [...]
- Kent Hovind Is Sentenced
The Rotunda • January 19, 2007
After a nearly three-month wait, the wheels of our legal system have turned, and justice has been done at last: Kent Hovind, tax protestor and creationist con man extraordinaire, has been sentenced to ten years in federal prison for tax evasion. Hovind's wife Jo, who was also convicted on the same slate of charges, will [...]
- The Virtues: Be Mindful
The Garden • January 17, 2007
As regular readers of Daylight Atheism are likely aware, morality is a major concern of mine, both in how ethical behavior finds its foundation and in how those principles can be applied to issues of everyday life. Mainly this is because I genuinely am interested in determining what best constitutes the good life, although I [...]
- In the Image of God
The Rotunda • January 15, 2007
I have written previously about many different religious beliefs that cause harm to human lives, but today I intend to target a new one. This is the belief that human beings have not come into existence as the result of natural processes - or at least, not solely as the result of natural processes - [...]
- Blockbuster
The Library • January 13, 2007
A Response to Ned Block's "Blockhead"
In a classic 1981 paper titled "Psychologism and Behaviourism", the philosopher Ned Block proposed a thought experiment that has been dubbed "Blockhead" in his honor. Block's experiment has to do with the Turing test, itself a classic proposal on how to test for the presence of intelligence in a machine [...]
- Priming the Mind
The Observatory • January 11, 2007
In a previous post from Daylight Atheism titled "On Presuppositions" (all the way back in February 2006!), I wrote about how subconscious biases and prejudices, instilled in us by culture and surroundings, can exert a disturbingly measurable effect on our behavior. However, there is more to this story that deserves to be told. In the [...]
- The World Is Ending, Send Money
The Rotunda • January 9, 2007
2006 has come and gone, and a new year is upon us. I don't know about you, readers, but I feel a mood of unaccountable optimism. There seems to be a feeling of renewal in the air, one not solely accounted for by the unseasonably warm and pleasant weather in the northeastern United States, where [...]
- Professional Pandering
The Rotunda • January 7, 2007
Around the time of the elections last year, I read Crashing the Gate, a book by the creators of the popular liberal political blogs Daily Kos and MyDD. Among other things, this book put the blame for Democratic electoral losses in recent years at the feet of high-paid, ineffective consultants who encourage Democratic politicians to [...]
- A Disturbing Experience
The Loft • January 5, 2007
In the several years I have been writing for Ebon Musings, I have received a great quantity of reader feedback. I read it all and, with a very few exceptions, respond to it all, and I am pleased to report that the large majority of it has been thoughtful, sincere and polite, regardless of whether [...]
- The 29th Carnival of the Liberals
The Rotunda • January 3, 2007
Welcome, welcome, friends and fellow progressives, to the 29th edition of the Carnival of the Liberals! My name is Ebonmuse, my weblog is Daylight Atheism, and I'll be your guide on this tour of some of the best progressive political writing on the Internet.
As the glow of our well-deserved victory in the American midterm [...]
- An Answer That Begs the Question
The Library • January 2, 2007
I don't want to spend all my time picking on the Newsweek/Washington Post blog On Faith, but a recent posting there contained such a devastatingly revealing omission that I couldn't resist the chance to comment on it.
The posting in question was written by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary and a minister [...]
