by Chris Bodenner
A poem of sorts from a reader:
Do I lie when I say dinner was good?
Do I lie when I say the sex was great?
Do I lie when I say you look as beautiful as the day we met?
Do I lie when I say I love your mother?
Do I lie when I say I want to go shopping?
Do I lie when I say I forgive you?
Not every time.
Do I lie when I say I still love you after 25 years?
Never.
by Chris Bodenner
In his Sunday column, Andrew sounds off on Gatesgate:
So was this an example of excessive racial grievance on the part of Gates or excessive racial insensitivity on the part of Crowley — or a little bit of both? Such moments are fully understood only by the individuals involved — and even then the truth is murky in such emotional circumstances. But it is indeed unusual to arrest someone for “disorderly conduct” when he is on his own property.
(No need to fret much further: our fearless leader should be back from his blog sabbatical tomorrow.)
by Patrick Appel
John Gray reviews a collection of essays by Timothy Garton Ash:
Equating fundamentalism with terrorism is loose thinking, but the biggest drawback is the loss of historical memory that making the parallel entails. Much of the state terror in the past century was secular, not religious. Lenin and Mao were avowed disciples of an Enlightenment ideology. Some will object that they misapplied this. And yet it is a feature of the fundamentalist mindset to posit a pristine faith, innocent of complicity in any crime its practitioners have ever committed, and capable – if only it is implemented in its pure, unsullied form – of eradicating practically any evil. This is pretty much what is asserted by those who claim that the solution to the world’s problems is mass conversion to “Enlightenment values”.
Isaac Chotiner fires back at Gray.
by Patrick Appel
Caleb Crain discusses "bike salmon," bicyclists who liberally violate the laws of the road, and the war between cars and bikes:
by Patrick Appel
Sean Carroll doesn't find tinkering with them useful:
Some people would prefer to define “religion” so that religious beliefs entail nothing whatsoever about what happens in the world. And that’s fine; definitions are not correct or incorrect, they are simply useful or useless, where usefulness is judged by the clarity of one’s attempts at communication. Personally, I think using “religion” in that way is not very clear. Most Christians would disagree with the claim that Jesus came about because Joseph and Mary had sex and his sperm fertilized her ovum and things proceeded conventionally from there, or that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, or that God did not create the universe. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, whose job it is to judge whether a candidate for canonization has really performed the required number of miracles and so forth, would probably not agree that miracles don’t occur. Francis Collins, recently nominated to direct the NIH, argues that some sort of God hypothesis helps explain the values of the fundamental constants of nature, just like a good Grand Unified Theory would. These views are by no means outliers, even without delving into the more extreme varieties of Biblical literalism.
Furthermore, if a religious person really did believe that nothing ever happened in the world that couldn’t be perfectly well explained by ordinary non-religious means, I would think they would expend their argument-energy engaging with the many millions of people who believe that the virgin birth and the resurrection and the promise of an eternal afterlife and the efficacy of intercessory prayer are all actually literally true, rather than with a handful of atheist bloggers with whom they agree about everything that happens in the world. But it’s a free country, and people are welcome to define words as they like, and argue with whom they wish.
(Hat tip: 3QD)
by Chris Bodenner
Comedian Craig Ferguson goes off on society in an unexpectedly unfunny way. VideoSift adds:
The sad part of it is the audience laughing [doesn't realize] it's them he's talking about & validating everything he's saying – and apparently understanding nothing.
The context of his ire isn't apparent till the very end. (Here's a clue.)
by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
"So, yes, religion has to answer for the crusades. And atheists have
to answer for having no meaningful words of hope to provide in crisis."
Excuse me? Just because the reader has witnessed people with faith drawing strength from that "belief [in their] existential choice" does not mean that people without faith have no strength to draw on. My entire family is atheist. We've weathered the death of my mother and grandfather in car crashes, my father's death from cancer, three divorces, one cousin going blind while caring for three special-needs kids, and my own struggles with infertility — without once any of us needing to deliberately set aside rationality or reason in order to be comforted by an imaginary friend.
We lean on one another. My father died when I was in grade school. My mother didn't tell me he was in God's hands. She told me that she loved me and that she was hurting too, and that together we would survive. When my mother was killed, my grandparents didn't tell me that "everything happens for a reason." They told me they loved me, that they were grieving their daughter (she was their daughter-in-law, but they loved her as their daughter), and that I always had a home with them. My aunt is going through a rough divorce after 40 years of marriage, and she says "we won't ever get over this. But we will get through this."
If people who believe in a deity take comfort from that belief when they're suffering, more power to them. But I greatly resent being TOLD that because I don't believe in the Bearded Sky Fairy that therefore my way of coping with suffering MUST by definition be inferior, empty, hollow, and meaningless. It works for me, and it works for my family. Kindly give me the same respect that I afford you as a theist and don't assume that because you don't understand or agree with our method that it must be stupid or useless.
by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
Your reader's comment about "atheist Sunday school" is phenomenal, and gets right at one of the most important reasons I call myself a believer. I started going to church after struggling with a lot of the questions about dogma and doctrine and what not, but what it eventually came down to was, in one convenient package I get thoughtful discussions on what faith in the modern world is like, a choir I can sing bass in, a supportive community, a trusted institution to which I can donate and which will distribute charitable funds effectively, and team in a local basketball league. Now, the atheists will no doubt turn around and say, "yes, but we could do all this without the religion stuff!" Well, I suppose that's true, but the question is, do they? The answer is almost uniformly, "no," and as your reader's e-mail and my experience show, it's not for lack of trying. Why it doesn't work is hard to say, but the failure of atheists to reproduce the beneficial aspects of religion should be something that concerns them more than it apparently does.
I have a huge number of doubts about the doctrines of the church, but as I've come to settle in to my church (they're making me a deacon this fall — urf), I've come to realize that many other members harbor very similar qualms and objections. Indeed my senior minister, when I was trying to decide whether to join or not, said, "you don't have to buy everything here. We just ask that we all try to work out the truth together as a community of faith rather than on your own."
Every time I get into one of these online conversations, I get the Crusades, Dobson, Randal Terry, and the Inquisition thrown in my face. Fine, if I'm going to claim the same faith as them, I have to reconcile that (I won't here in the interest of brevity). However, the cocksure assertions of what the "truth claims" that my personal faith and my church makes and its impact on the world aren't effective rhetoric; I'd go so far as to say they're pretty uninformed and clueless. Atheists of the world: if you want to have a meaningful discussion with Christians (rather than doing what can only be describe as proselytizing), find out what they actually believe before you tell them why they're wrong.
Another reader says non-believers are adapting:
[C]ooperation in chimpanzees is highly constrained. Chimpanzees will cooperate only with familiar group members, with whom they normally share food. If they don't know or like a potential partner, they won't cooperate no matter how much food is at stake. Humans, however, make a living collaborating, even when it's with people they don't know and in many cases don't particularly like. (Do you have a boss?) This high level of social tolerance is likely one of the building blocks of the unique forms of cooperation seen in humans. So perhaps a lack of tolerance is one of the main constraints on chimpanzees' developing more flexible cooperative skills.
The Dish 