Posts

Why Prayer?

I don't get prayer. Why, for example, are believers asked to pray for the pope? God is said to be perfect, which includes being all-knowing and all-good. But praying implies that God needs help in making decisions, that he lacks relevant information or good will. How can that be? The only way to reconcile this conflict is to believe that God enjoys seeing human beings, whom he allegedly loves, getting on their knees and abasing themselves. He values the sight of people groveling and acknowledging their inferiority. Some would call that pathological. God seems to be the cosmic Trump.

Big No-no

The fact is, you cannot derive an ought from an is . Therefore, you ought not try to do so.

The Law of Identity is Rubbish

Not  that  law of identity. A is A is not rubbish. It's still good. I'm talking about a new law of identity: each of us has an inner "gendered" spirit that might or might not be changeable at will and might be at odds with one’s body or biological sex. It’s the law of gender identity that is rubbish, a myth. “Trans” ideology is a fraud because there is no “trans.” When you hear a person say he (or she) "identifies as a woman (or man)," think how Yoda might respond, "No. Be or be not. There is no ‘identify as.’" Why wouldn’t the person just say, "I am a woman (or man)"? That question needs to be asked. It might be because a man who said, "I am a woman," couldn't help but realize that he is uttering a fiction. "Identify as" is a cushion between the speaker and the truth. "I am a woman" can be falsified (or verified). "I identify (or see myself) as a woman" cannot. That’s a clue to the con going on...

Hirsi Ali's Christianity

Former Muslim and atheist and now Christian convert Ayaan Hirsi Ali seems to think that even if you cannot bring yourself to believe in the story and precepts of Christianity, you should for the sake of civilization pretend you do.  She also seems to think that if reason is a hard sell, we should stop trying to sell it.

No Apologies

Re Daniel Dennett: free will buries its undertakers. (Without apologies to Etienne Gilson.)

The Real and Unreal

Anything outside reality is unreal. Anything inside reality is accessible in principle to reasoning beings. Where does that leave any god?

Logical Atheism: Neither Materialism nor Spiritualism

I’ve been an atheist for over 50 years. It took one lecture to convince me. I don’t just disbelieve in the existence of the supernatural. I believe in the  non existence of the supernatural. The natural universe is it. How do I know? (That’s always the appropriate question but with the caveat below). The wrong answer to that question is that we have no or too little evidence. (The “new atheists” seem to like that answer.) But that gives theism credit it does not deserve. Before you ask for evidence, you need to know what an assertion means. Otherwise, you cannot know if something qualifies as evidence or not. If I say, “Crooly blurps,” the right question is not “How do you know?” but “What are you talking about?” I submit that the same applies to the assertion “God exists.” God is always defined incoherently (it can’t be all-knowing and all-powerful, etc.), and since God is said to be literally out of this world, I don’t know what the word  exists  means in the supposed s...