Planet Atheism » Paul Wright

Mohammed pictures should have trigger warnings

Paul Wright — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:23:21 +0000

There was apparently another Draw Mohammed Day yesterday: Hermant at Friendly Atheist covers it (that link may obviously contain links to pictures of Mo).

My previous LJ entry on Muslims vs Student Atheist Societies provoked some discussion about whether criticism of Islam is necessarily motivated by racism, and whether white atheists ought to be involved in such criticism. During that, cartesiandaemon linked to Yvain's utilitarian argument against Mo pics which appeared on Less Wrong. Yvain argued against Draw Mo Day on the basis of harm minimisation (Less Wrong orthodoxy is consequentalist so people there are likely to be responsive to such arguments).

Vladimir M won the Less Wrong thread with the response that "In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason". He also made the observation (due to Thomas Schelling) that "in conflict situations, it is often a rational strategy to pre-commit to act irrationally (i.e. without regards to cost and benefit) unless the opponent yields. The idea in this case is that I'll self-modify to care about X far more than I initially do, and thus pre-commit to lash out if anyone does it". He adds "such behavior is usually not consciously manipulative and calculated. On the contrary -- someone flipping out and creating drama for a seemingly trivial reason is likely to be under God-honest severe distress, feeling genuine pain of offense and injustice.". Yvain then behaved excellently by formally withdrawing their argument.

Muslims may be harmed by seeing Mo pictures. However, Vladimir M's point applies. So, what to do?

There are things called "trigger warnings" which are popular in some parts of the Internet. Medically, a trigger is something which can set off PTSD symptoms. These trigger warnings are usually appear on links to, and the beginning of, pages about rape or domestic violence, where victims may suffer from PTSD on reading the text.

[Latterly, the term has been broadened to encompass not just PTSD flashbacks, but that uncomfortable feeling you get when reading something which advances a view different from your own (for instance, the trigger warnings for misogyny and Islamophobia on this post mean "comments disagreeing with feminists/Muslims"), and has also become a way of signalling that one is down with the identity politics posse (this is well known enough for it to be parodied: see Is this Feminist?, for example). However, I think that few people would disagree with the idea that some Muslims' distress at seeing such pictures is more towards the PTSD end of things than the "people disagree with me"/signalling end.]

It feels like a Schelling point in this conflict might be to agree that pictures of Mo should appear behind trigger warnings. These might be specific warnings; or a general warning that by continuing to read a site, one may encounter such pictures, or links to them. In the case of the atheist Facebook group, Jesus and Mo cartoons should not be used for public events (since the cartoons may then appear on the feeds of people who are not members of the group) but would be OK for events which are private to the group, assuming that the group is covered by a general warning. Obviously, all Draw Mo Day pictures should appear behind such warnings.

Link blog: philosophy, atheism, anglican, church-of-england

Paul Wright — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:15:56 +0000

God Is Not Dead Yet | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction: William Lane Craig lays out his best arguments for the existence of God.
(tags: kalam william-lane-craig christianity religion apologetics atheism philosophy)
On God and Our Ultimate Purpose: Stephen Maitzen argues that introducing a God does not solve the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful.
(tags: god purpose stephen-maitzen maitzen atheism philosophy)
Cycle of Fear - NYTimes.com: Tim Kreider (of "The Pain, When Will It End?") on the meditative value of fear: "When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in."
(tags: meditation funny flow cycling anxiety)
How filthy lucre could subvert the Church of England | World news | The Guardian: "Conservative evangelical churches threaten to withhold cash from pro-gay and liberal 'heretics'". What fun.
(tags: andrew-brown money evangelicalism church-of-england anglicanism anglican)
Beyond Mitt's Underwear: Part 1: Apostasy and Restoration: tongodeon did an excellent series on Mormon beliefs. This is the first part, which links to all the others. The conclusion is worth reading even if you skim the rest.
(tags: lds joseph-smith underwear mitt-romney religion mormonism mormon)
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is – Whatever: An explanation which tries to avoid those problematic identity politics jargon terms (see what I did there?)
(tags: sexuality feminism race privilege gender)

Bishops Gone Wild: York vs gay marriage

Paul Wright — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:50:27 +0000

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, recently released a statement on gay marriage. It's doing the rounds on Facebook. Here's a comment I posted there:

What an odd article: long on words, short on reasons why broadening the definition of marriage would be a bad thing.

Civil partnerships aren't identical to marriage for some people: for example, married couples where one person transitions from one gender to another are forced to dissolve marriages and get civil parterships. For such people, it is very clear that a civil partnership is a second-class marriage: see http://www.sarahlizzy.com/blog/?p=87 for example.

The Archbishop claims that no Act of Parliament touches upon a definition of marriage, but then quotes a Canon which defines it as being lifelong. Did Parliament lack the authority to legalise divorce and re-marriage (a practice which, as I've said previously in http://pw201.livejournal.com/71272.html, has much stronger Biblical condemnation than homosexual relationships, and yet is curiously rather more acceptable to evangelicals)?

The Archbishop fears it may become "impossible to say how a good society needs most of its members to live". But, if we want government to be involved in marriages at all, it is presumably because we think they are a social good. The people who want to broaden marriage need not be seeking a free for all, they may just think that gay marriages would also be a good. The Archbishop gives no good reasons to think that they wouldn't be.

Despite saying that he is not merely advocating Christian marriage, his argument ultimately seems to rely on an (evangelical) Christian conception of it and of gender roles. I agree that Parliament has no warrant to define what that conception should be, nor what Pagan marriage or Quaker marriage should be (the fact that Parliament would prevent religious ministers from marrying two people of the same sex is a similarly unwarranted intervention). Let us have a civil conception of marriage based on public reason, and let everyone else do as they like: evangelicals can choose to marry only straight non-divorcees, Quakers can marry gays, and so on, in separate ceremonies, with only the civil marriage being recognised in law, and no compulsion on ministers of religion from equality laws.

Stephen Law: are unbelievers without excuse?

Paul Wright — Sun, 13 May 2012 10:36:29 +0000

Stephen Law read a bunch of stuff by top apologist William Lane Craig and noted that Craig believes a bunch of odd things (apart from the odd things you'd already know about from Craig's debates, I mean). There was some discussion in the comments over this one:

"Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God."

[William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), pp. 35-36.]

This is all very Biblical: Craig's "loves darkness rather than light" is a reference to the verse following that famous verse in John 3:16: "And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed."

As a good inerrantist, Craig apparently believes this and other passages like Romans 1 (see my old blog post about this) where the Apostle Paul writes that unbelievers are "without excuse". Atheists know there's a God really but don't worship him because to do so we'd have to acknowledge how bad we are, or something. This is a culpable error, not a mistake, too.

The pathologising of non-belief based on knowing what people think better than they do is itself pathological, as Thrasymachus says, at least if it's used to dismiss atheist arguments without engaging with them (note that Craig does not do this in debates, though he seems to do it personally, and to advocate other Christians doing it, which is bad).

In the comments, wombat suggests that the evangelical claim is that atheists are in the situation "where one accepts something intellectually but not at a more basic emotional level e.g cigarette smokers who continue in spite of acknowledging its dangers. The Christian apologists here are claiming that the "knowledge" is at that deeper visceral level." wombat also linked to Jamie Whyte's observation that religious believers don't really act like they believe what they say they believe.

On that subject, there's also Georges Rey's "Meta-atheism: religious avowal as self-deception", where he argues that Christians generally don't act as if they believe what they say they believe. I've discussed Rey's paper before.

There's a folk psychology where "thoughts" are propositional sentences that occur to us, and "beliefs" are the ones we hold on to as true over time and use to guide our actions. But the way the phenomenon we call "belief" really works doesn't seem much like that. This doesn't just apply to religion: see The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist.

If the evangelical claim is just to know that atheists are secretly lying, it's bizarre, as Thrasymachus says. On the other hand, if the evangelical claim is that atheists anticipate-as-if there's a God while avowing-as-if there isn't, I don't think that works. What are the things that atheists are doing which give away the fact that they are anticipating that way? And why does this make them culpable and deserving of Hell?

I don't think the atheist version (i.e. Rey's or Whyte's) has the same problem, because there are plenty of examples of Christians who don't act like there's a God.

The New Testament | I. G. Mansfield

Paul Wright — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:17:44 +0000

Friend Iain recently read the New Testament and reviewed it. He made some comments on it, including the observation that the early Church members thought that Jesus would return within their lifetimes. This prompted some comments giving the standard evangelical gloss on these passages (see also), to avoid the conclusion that the Bible contains errors. I wrote a comment:

http://de-conversion.com/2008/11/09/the-psychology-of-apologetics-biblical-inerrancy/ is worth a read to understand what’s going on in the comments here :-) Short version: Quine says evidence alone doesn’t compel us to change a particular belief, because we can modify another one instead. Quine was writing in the context of scientific theories: if you don’t measure a difference in the speed of light in two directions, say, maybe there’s no luminiferous aether, but if you really think there must be one, maybe the Earth sort of drags the aether with it, or your instruments were faulty, or something. Paul thought Jesus was coming back within his life time, but if you really want Paul’s writings to be without error, what Paul actually meant is that you should live with a sort of Buddhist detachment to the things of this world.

Quine has clearly got something over the sort of naive falsificationism (i.e. if your theory is ~~disproved~~contradicted by a single experiment, it’s curtains for that theory) which is supposed by some to be how science works. Nobody discards a trusted hypothesis so easily.

Still, something seems to have gone wrong with a theory when it allows anything: if you started from the position that the Bible contains no factual errors (call this innerancy1), you probably would not have predicted what Paul wrote in 1 Thess or 1 Cor 7:29ff, 1 Cor 15:51 (“sleep” = “die” here) etc; yet there they are, and what-evangelicals-call-inerrancy (call this inerrancy2) is somehow compatible with them. I think this means that inerrancy2 doesn’t compress anything: it’s just a list of what happens (the Bible) with a cherry on the top (“this list contains no errors or contradictions”). I’m using Eliezer’s ideas about http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/ here.

Link blog: food, enchilidas, mexican, beef

Paul Wright — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:15:06 +0000

Beef enchiladas - Tesco Real Food: Saving for my reference. This was nice.
(tags: mexican enchilidas beef food)

Alternative to God?

Paul Wright — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:57:26 +0000

Over on Ask Metafilter, there's a question about hope in a godless universe. Here's a response I just posted (the original poster's text is in italics):

Like where I could tell myself to turn it over to God or let things go and he will guide me and/or keep me from harm. This is so comforting to me

Suppose you "turned things over to God" or "let go and let God" in the past and things worked out. You now grasp there is no God, or at least, no God that makes any difference (gods that are identified with the good that is, in a very real sense, within us all; or with the universe; or any other gods which don't cause you to anticipate the world being any different are gods which make no difference in this sense). But this didn't become true at the moment you realised it, it has always been true! God did not in fact guide you or keep you from harm in the past, and you survived anyway.

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
- Eugene Gendlin

Can this feeling ever be replicated? What can I do to help guide myself through difficult times? I've tried to "act as if" there is a God (since I am in the camp that thinks we can never really know) but it seems empty and fraudulent.

When I was a child, I thought that my parents could make it all right and that nothing could truly harm me. It seems like your concept of God was a bit like that. Other people have suggested you can come to a kind of acceptance of the world as it is, a thread which seems common to the Buddhism and existentialism that people have been mentioning. In the real world, what hope there is must be tentative rather than sure, but I don't see why that means there must be no hope.

There are plenty of de-conversion stories on the web where people similar feelings to yours: depending on how much you'd invested in your beliefs, it can be very unsettling to lose them. Maybe reading some of those stories would help.

But, as Gendlin says, the world is as it as always been, and you survived it before. At the end of my de-conversion story, there's a longer quote along similar lines: there is no abyss.

Link blog: missiles, london 2012, brian-whelan, olympics

Paul Wright — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:15:07 +0000

Missiles over London: a new Olympic event | A Latent Existence: "Today Brian Whelan woke up to find information from the Ministry of Defence waiting by his letter box.

The leaflet informed him that during the London 2012 Olympic games the army will be putting missiles on the roof of his building and there will be soldiers on duty there 24 hours a day. He was not asked about this in advance, or given a choice, simply informed that his building was the best place to site these missiles."
(tags: brian-whelan security military missiles london 2012 olympics)

Stephen Law and the existence of Jesus

Paul Wright — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:34:42 +0000

Stephen Law's paper Evidence, miracles and the existence of Jesus argues that the New Testament (NT) is not good evidence for the existence of Jesus. He takes an interesting approach: he argues that the evidence for the NT miracles isn't good enough, and that the presence of the miracle stories contaminates the non-miraculous parts of the story such that we should be sceptical of those too.

Law introduces and defends two principles:

P1 Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.

and

P2 Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth.

He then uses these in a deductive argument, concluding that "there's good reason to be sceptical about whether Jesus existed".

Debating P2

Most of the debate in the comments on Law's blog is about P2. Law says that "Because once we know that a powerful, false-testimony-producing mechanism (or combination of mechanisms) may well have produced a significant chunk of a narrative (e.g. the miraculous parts), we can no longer be confident that the same mechanism is not responsible for what remains."

Bradley C. came up with some counter-examples to P2. Bradley rightly says that the false-testimony-producing mechanism is key. What feels different about the ancient miracle reports (and perhaps Law's "sixth islander" thought experiment) compared to Bradley's examples is that in the ancient reports, we don't really know what the mechanism was, we just know something has gone wrong. (In Bradley's examples, we know that magicians and faith healers do tricks). If we don't know quite what has gone wrong, we have to consider various possible mechanisms, which includes ones where the mundane testimony is also false. If we give such mechanisms any weight, that makes the mundane testimony less convincing (though it may still be positive evidence for the mundane events). But I think we'd have to consider how much weight to give them based on the circumstances, which makes it hard to come up with something general like P2.

So, I think Bradley's come up with the equivalent of Gettier cases for P2 as it stands: even if they're contrived, they show P2 needs changing.

Law responds to Bradley saying "You need to identify a mechanism as being the likely mechanism accounting for the false miracle claims, and then explain why that mechanism wouldn't quite likely result in false mundane claims too."

I don't agree with Law here. If all we know is that something's gone wrong with the testimony but the mechanism is obscure, perhaps it's reasonable to say that it's as likely that we'd have the testimony if it's mundane parts were true as it is that we'd have it if the mundane parts were false. Then the testimony is no evidence for or against the mundane events: you should consider the events as likely as you did before you heard the testimony.

I'm not sure I'd want to go further than that and say that the burden of proof is on the people who believe the mundane portion of the testimony to show why it isn't contaminated: mightn't they equally well argue that the burden is on you to show that it is? But that's what P2 says, I think: in P2, the testimony becomes evidence against the mundane events.

If you give a mechanism, though, maybe that's just what you can argue: if you think Jesus' disciples made it up, for example, who's to say where the made up stuff ends? (Though why not make stuff up based on a real person, for verisimilitude?)

It looks like someone who wants to justify their belief in the mundane stuff has a motive to push the unbeliever to identify the mechanism so they can criticise it. The problem with my "average over possible mechanisms" idea, above, is that it's pretty hard to identify them all. I don't think we have a duty to do that with every weird testimony, though. Earlier, in defence of P1, Law correctly says that "the fact that it remains blankly mysterious why such reports would be made if they were not true does not provide us with very much additional reason to suppose that they are true."

So, I'm not that convinced by Law's general contamination principle, but I think he makes some good points along the way. For example, Law says:

It would also be foolish to try to construct a two part case for Jesus’ miraculous resurrection by (i) bracketing the miraculous parts of the Gospel narrative and using what remains to build a case for the truth of certain non-miraculous claims (about Jesus’ crucifixion, the empty tomb, and so on), and then (ii) using these supposedly now “firmly established facts” to argue that Jesus’ miraculous resurrection is what best explains them (yet several apologetic works – e.g. Frank Morrison’s Who Moved The Stone? – appear implicitly to rely on this strategy).

William Lane Craig's rebuttal

The apologetical strategy Law talks about is used by William Lane Craig in his "4 facts" defence of the resurrection (see Craig vs Ehrman, for example). Craig read Law's paper and attempted a rebuttal on his own blog, which I think was only partially successful.

Craig's stuff about Ehrman is weird. I guess Craig's point here is to show how reasonable he's being by pointing out that even this bloke he beat in a debate (Ehrman) agrees with him. But Ehrman is not a radical sceptic, Law is not die-hard mythicist. The conclusion of Law's argument is that we should be sceptical about J's existence, not "Therefore J never existed", so it's not even clear that Ehrman's ire applies to Law, or that we should care if it does, unless Ehrman's arguments are made more explicit.

On Sagan's dictum that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", Craig writes: "This sounds so commonsensical, doesn’t it? But in fact it is demonstrably false. ... Rather what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred. This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself."

Craig makes a reasonable statement of Bayes Theorem. However, Sagan's dictum can be read in a Bayesian way (by incorporating all the probabilities Craig mentions, so that the evidence is Bayesian evidence). Craig gives no good argument that the dictum must mean what Craig takes it to mean, or that Law's argument relies on taking it to mean what Craig thinks it means.

Craig continues: "In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, for example, this means that we must also ask, “What is the probability of the facts of the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, if the resurrection had not occurred?” It is highly, highly, highly, improbable that we should have that evidence if the resurrection had not occurred."

This might be Craig's attempt at that argument, namely, Craig saying that Law hasn't considered that it's unlikely we'd have the evidence we do if Jesus didn't do miracles. But Craig plays fast and loose: the facts are that we have the gospel narratives (and whatever other historical documents we have to hand). The empty tomb and post-mortem appearances are not facts, and Law's argument against the "bracketing" strategy is that they cannot be treated as facts. Craig cannot have the empty tomb or the post-mortem appearances as "facts" without addressing Law's arguments.

Oddly, Craig doesn't address really P2 or Law's arguments for it at all: he just says "oh no it isn't". Craig's strongest when he says that there is extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus' existence. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Josephus' mentions of Jesus is thought by historians to have a core around which Christian interpolations accreted, for example. Since even if we grant P2, Law's argument fails without premise 6 ("There is no good independent evidence for even the mundane claims about Jesus (such as that he existed)"), perhaps this is a good tactic on Craig's part. Law appears to agree that premise 6 is his weakest empirical premise: "6 is at the very least debatable". In a way, it's odd that everyone is concentrating on P2.

So, I think Craig casts doubt on Law's conclusion about Jesus' existence, but he doesn't do much to convince us that Jesus rose from the dead or did any other miracles.

Jerry Coyne's blog has some good comments on Craig's rebuttal.

David B Marshall's rebuttal

David Marshall also had a go at rebutting Law. He didn't do as well as Craig, as his arguments relied on attempts to differentiate Law's thought experiments ("Ted and Sarah", and "The Sixth Islander") from the claims about Jesus, but the distinctions he made between these weren't relevant to Law's arguments, as far as I can tell. You can see my response to him here , his reply here and my response to that here.

I think this rebuttal is interesting for what it shows about what ordinary believers (rather than super-apologists like Craig) think are good arguments. Marshall appears to think that because the Jesus story is more fleshed out and more meaningful, it's more likely to be true. I'm not sure whether this is a straightforward example of conjuction bias (obligatory Less Wrong link), or of the notion that the point of religion is to be in a meaningful story. Charitably, it might be an attempt at inference to the best explanation, but I don't think the stuff that Marshall mentions means that the best explanation of the NT stories is that they are true.

So what do you think?

There was bloke called Jesus who was the basis of the NT stories. Pre-moderns had porous selves, so it's pretty difficult to understand their writings in modern terms, but there is no good evidence that this bloke did miracles or rose from the dead. I don't know how much of the NT is true, but I don't accept Craig's bracketing or 4 facts arguments: taking out the core miracle but leaving the context which points to a miracle does look like cheating without independent evidence of the context, because mechanisms whether both the context and miracle are made up seem pretty likely to me.

Link blog: homosexuality, ex-gay, psychology, peter-ould

Paul Wright — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:15:10 +0000

How to resolve poor battery life & battery issues on Android | Ken's Tech Tips: There's an app for that.
(tags: battery android)
Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide: Presentation on cognitive biases.
(tags: cognitive brain bias psychology)
Banned from the buses: mattghg is the source of my bus farrago links, so here's a link to his post, where he argues that ex-gay therapy might work and that there are free speech concerns with Boris banning the ads.
(tags: mattghg ex-gay adverts advertising bus religion homosexuality)
Spitzer Retracts his 2001 Paper – Kind Of… | An Exercise in the Fundamentals of Orthodoxy: Peter Ould again, this time on the retraction of the main paper people quote as evidence that homosexuals can change orientation.
(tags: science ex-gay psychology homosexuality peter-ould)
Ex-Gay Adverts on London Buses | An Exercise in the Fundamentals of Orthodoxy: Peter Ould, who identifies as "post-gay", has some interesting comments on the bus advertisement farrago.
(tags: ex-gay adverts bus christianity peter-ould religion homosexuality)
On Spitzer’s “Change” « Limning the Psyche: "People are asking me about Robert Spitzer’s reported desire to retract his study of 200 people who claimed to have experience change of their sexual orientation. "
(tags: homosexuality psychology)
If Atheists Talked Like Christians… (A Contest): Reversing some popular Christian sayings. Kind of fun.
(tags: parody funny atheism christianity religion)

Link blog: science, philosophy, theology, universe

Paul Wright — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:15:08 +0000

‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss - NYTimes.com: David Albert, a professor of philosophy at Columbia who also has a physics PhD, points out that Krauss hasn't really explained why there's something rather than nothing by . Via Jerry Coyne.
(tags: theology philosophy religion krauss science quantum universe)

Link blog: cambridge university, text, SMS, argument

Paul Wright — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 09:15:08 +0000

The Fireplace Delusion : Sam Harris: "I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about. We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.”"
(tags: sam-harris wood health psychology fireplace samharris religion)
The Art of Controversy - Schopenhauer: Machiavelli for arguments, illustrated here by someone with a keen knowledge of internet memes.
(tags: trolling controversy schopenhauer philosophy argument logic fallacy)
BBC News - Swiftkey, a scientific start-up: Interesting article about the best predictive keyboard for Android: it's the product of some Cambridge PhDs who studied natural language proccessing, apparently.
(tags: cambridge university compsci language swiftkey keyboard text SMS android)

Link blog: funny, humour, bmj, science

Paul Wright — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:15:08 +0000

The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute | BMJ: "Objectives To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom."
(tags: humour science journal research teaspoons funny bmj)

Link blog: belief, science, humanism, christianity

Paul Wright — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:15:08 +0000

What Nonbelievers Believe | Psychology Today: "Common sense, not complex philosophy, often drives religious skepticism."
(tags: belief psychology atheism science humanism religion)
Without a pack of lies to back them up, Christian claims of persecution fall flat on their face: "So these two women, again with the help of the evangelical activists who are seeking special privilege for Christians, have gone to the European Court of Human Rights claiming that the equality law is wrong and should be changed. The Government has argued that the court's decisions were right and that the law has been correctly applied in both cases. The National Secular Society has made the same argument in an intervention in the case, the only intervener to do so.

This could hardly be more different from arguing that the Christian cross must never be seen in the workplace again, as the newspaper headlines imply."
(tags: politics uk religion christianity)

Link blog: descartes, consciousness, sampling, mp3

Paul Wright — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:15:06 +0000

gmancasefile: TSA: Fail: "I have dealt with TSA since its inception and FAA security prior to that. I have witnessed TSA operate since they became a separate organization in 2002 and seen their reaction to intelligence provided them. I have now watched them operate for a decade, and I have respect for their hard-working employees who are doing a thankless job. But I have come to the conclusion that TSA is one of the worst-run, ineffective and most unnecessarily intrusive agencies in the United States government."
(tags: america 911 hijacking usa government fbi politics DHS security tsa)
Open letter to violent Muslim protestors | The Chronicle: "I really don’t understand how my fellow Muslims do not see that, with their reactions, they actually prove what has been said about them by their enemies. You call my religion evil or terrorism and, in order to “disprove” this insult, I will go kill people, burn embassies, act like a bloodthirsty crazy person…. Don’t you fellow Muslims see the ridiculousness of this logic and actions! The uncivilized images of these violent protests by these irresponsible and violent Muslims shape the image of 1.6 billion Muslims all around the world. "
(tags: violence religion terrorism quran islam)
Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities. » blog2.easydns.org - Happenings and observations: Don't register a .com if you don't want the US authorities to be able to take it down, apparently.
(tags: SOPA web law DNS verisign internet domains icann)
24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed: "there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space." Includes good stuff about how ears work. Via andrewducker.
(tags: Nyquist sound sampling mp3 science music audio)
The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind by Eric Schwitzgebel: "Crazyism about X is the view that something that it would be crazy to believe must be among the core truths about X. In this essay, I argue that crazyism is true of the metaphysics of mind. A position is “crazy” in the intended sense if it is contrary to common sense and we are not epistemically compelled to believe it. .... Well developed metaphysical theories will inevitably violate common sense, I argue, because common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. No coherent and detailed view could respect it all. Common sense is thus impaired as a ground of choice. Nor can scientific evidence or abstract theoretical virtue compellingly favor any one moderately specific metaphysical approach over all competitors. Something bizarre must be true about the mind, but which bizarre propositions are the true ones, we are in no good position to know."
(tags: crazyism david-chalmers epistemology descartes dualism idealism materialism consciousness metaphysics philosophy)

Link blog: de-conversion, shopping, psychology, dawkins

Paul Wright — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:15:11 +0000

deconversion | Black, White and Gray: Some Christian sociologists did some research into why people leave, by looking at 50 de-conversion "testimonies". Results: intellectual problems (hell, suffering, reliability of the Bible); God's failure to answer prayer; other Christians responding to doubt in trite or unhelpful ways. Contact with unbelievers wasn't often cited as a cause of de-conversion.
(tags: psychology de-conversion christianity religion sociology)
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones: "My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine."
(tags: economics work warehouse poverty shopping shipping online amazon)
Why Richard Dawkins is still an atheist - Guest Voices - The Washington Post: Paula Kirby on the recent "Dawkins admits he's an agnostic!" stories following his debate with Cuddly Rowan Bear. "Religious commentators have become so excited at the thought of his conversion that I almost don’t have the heart to break it to them that he said nothing in Thursday’s discussion that he hadn’t already said six years ago in "The God Delusion""
(tags: the god delusion religion agnosticism paula-kirby richard-dawkins dawkins atheism)

Link blog: christianity, richard-dawkins, philosophy, dawkins

Paul Wright — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:15:08 +0000

What is the proper place for religion in Britain's public life? | World news | The Observer: An exchange between Dawkins and Will Hutton. D: "That doesn't mean religious people shouldn't advocate their religion. So long as they are not granted privileged power to do so (which at present they are) of course they should. And the rest of us should be free to argue against them. But of all arguments out there, arguments against religion are almost uniquely branded "intolerant". When you put a cogent and trenchant argument against the government's economic policy, nobody would call you "intolerant" of the Tories. But when an atheist does the same against a religion, that's intolerance. Why the double standard? Do you really want to privilege religious ideas by granting them unique immunity against reasoned argument?"
(tags: uk secularism politics religion dawkins richard-dawkins will-hutton)
The Sins of the Fathers - Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net: Dawkins sez: "Yesterday evening I was telephoned by a reporter who announced himself as Adam Lusher from the Sunday Telegraph. At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take. I obviously can’t repeat what was said word-for-word (my poor recall of long strings of words has this week been highly advertised), and I may get the order of the points wrong, but this is approximately how the conversation went." Lusher says Dawkins's ancestors owned slaves and wonders whether D will make reparations. Bizarre and desperate.
(tags: adam-lusher slavery dawkins richard-dawkins journalism newspapers telegraph)
Stephen Law vs. William Lane Craig Debate: Argument map » » The Polemical MedicThe Polemical Medic: "there’s lots of debate over who won the Law/Craig debate. Instead of joining that, I though I’d do something niftier: I’ve mapped the whole of the debate in argument form, to give a more intuitive way of seeing how all the arguments and objections interact". This is excellent stuff.
(tags: religion theodicy philosophy christianity atheism debate william-lane-craig stephen-law)
Evangelism, disbelief, and being 'without excuse' » » The Polemical MedicThe Polemical Medic: "Christians who indulge in evangelism and apologetics often hold to a thesis of disbelief as epistemic pathology – that disbelief is the result of some culpable error of judgment. Such an attitude is a poor fit for the facts and counter productive to the cause of evangelism. Ironically, the urge of these people to pathologize disagreement is diagnostic of their own epistemic pathology." I've mentioned this attitude (inspired by Romans 1) before: Thrasymachus neatly dissects it.
(tags: philosophy epistemology christianity religion apologetics evangelicalism evangelism)

Link blog: science, relationships, epistemology, biology

Paul Wright — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:15:07 +0000

Hegemonic Heterosexuality: "hegemonic heterosexuality is the vast cultural conspiracy to describe all heterosexual relationships as the unending war between stupid people and crazy people." Good observation of the view of the world promoted by TV and film. Via auntysarah.
(tags: psychology relationships sex)
The Apologist's Turnstile: "the idea that no particular level of knowledge is needed to assent to a religion, but an impossibly, unattainably high level of knowledge and expertise is needed to deny it. In the minds of many believers, the entrance to their religion is like a subway turnstile: a barrier that only allows people to pass through in one direction."
(tags: apologist epistemology religion atheism)
Cancer is just as deadly as it was 50 years ago. Here's why that's about to change.: "We spoke to cancer experts to find out why the death rate from cancer hasn't changed in the past 50 years — and we learned how genetic therapies could transform cancer treatments tomorrow."
(tags: medicine biology science genetics cancer)
How not to attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism - Maarten Boudry: "In recent controversies about Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC), the principle of methodological naturalism (MN) has played an important role. In this paper, an often neglected distinction is made between two different conceptions of MN, each with its respective rationale and with a different view on the proper role of MN in science. According to one popular conception, MN is a self-imposed or intrinsic limitation of science, which means that science is simply not equipped to deal with claims of the supernatural (Intrinsic MN or IMN). Alternatively, we will defend MN as a provisory and empirically grounded attitude of scientists, which is justified in virtue of the consistent success of naturalistic explanations and the lack of success of supernatural explanations in the history of science. (Provisory MN or PMN). Science does have a bearing on supernatural hypotheses, and its verdict is uniformly negative."
(tags: creationism intelligent-design religion science naturalism philosophy)

Link blog: moral argument, philosophy, theism, william-lane-craig

Paul Wright — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:15:09 +0000

Angra Mainyu's blog: The Moral Argument: Why Craig's metaethical case for theism fails: A pretty comprehensive attempt to refute William Lane Craig's Moral Argument for the existence of God.
(tags: moral argument philosophy religion morality theism william-lane-craig)

Link blog: politics, internet, law, lse

Paul Wright — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:15:08 +0000

Unexpurgated atheist FAQ: At last, it can be told! Via andrewducker.
(tags: faq funny religion atheism parody)
synecdochic: the Megaupload indictment, in detail; or, a crash course in the DMCA and why they're totally fucked: Why Megaupload are doomed, and some interesting stuff about the DMCA. Via andrewducker.
(tags: internet law DMCA copyright megaupload)
YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood: "Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise." Y Combinator requests that startups come up with ways to kill Hollywood.
(tags: internet startups technology sopa hollywood ycombinator)
A Positive Account of Property Rights: Vladmir M on Lesswrong linked to this as a good explanation of what Schelling points are. It's also an interesting theory about how property rights could arise out of a Hobbesian state of nature, although I'm not familiar enough with the literature to know whether that part of it makes any obvious errors.
(tags: game theory philosophy Hobbes Schelling politics Friedman economics)
Alex Gabriel // LSE's student union copy UCL's: More on the LSE nonsense: "Essentially, a large of group of Muslim students felt offended that there were pictures of Mohammed on the facebook group. As a result, they felt that our facebook group was no longer a ‘safe space’ for Muslims." Alex Gabriel points out that the Facebook group in question is a closed one, and certainly not what you'd expect to be a "safe space" for Muslims. It would certainly be crass for a student atheist group to put that cartoon on posters, say, but complaining about a closed Facebook group is just whining for the sake of it.
(tags: lse university freedom religion politics islam)
LSE Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society say giving offence is no crime: More student unions and offended Muslims vs atheists, this time at LSE. "Ms Bartle commented, ‘There has been too much conflation recently of being offended and being intimidated, with the implication being that they are equivalent. Such an assumption is a potential threat to free speech and free debate, and we are concerned to address this underlying problem in the long term.’"

This time, it's about the LSE atheists putting a cartoon on their Facebook page. Again, why are the Muslims looking at it? Very strange.
Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America : The New Yorker: Astonishing (and worrying that it's apparently so easy for British people to be extradited to the US).
(tags: america law crime politics prison)
The New French Hacker-Artist Underground | Magazine: "There is no law in France, it turns out, against the improvement of clocks." Fascinating stuff. Via mefi.
(tags: restoration tunnels underground activism france paris pantheon)

Link blog: islam, christianity, office, solitude

Paul Wright — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:15:09 +0000

When people ask why I have a problem with religion, it's hard to come up with a single answer... - Imgur: (tags: christianity islam religion)
Worrying developments for freedom of expression in the UK - Various - Various - RichardDawkins.net: "This thread combines a number of examples where atheists, humanists and/or secularists have been threatened or coerced into silence, both by Muslims and by institutions or other groups apparently subscribing to the view that 'If someone believes it, you must respect it'. All these examples have happened in the UK in the course of the last week or so. ... But the key thing to note in all these cases is that it is no longer just the religious who would inhibit our freedom of expression: increasingly, secular bodies are buying into this invidious idea too, all in the name of 'tolerance' or 'community relations' or 'respect'."

Fuck it, I'm joining the EDL.

Just kidding, I don't have the beer belly or the conviction for football hooliganism and I've never seen a "Muslamic raygun". Still, it is alarming to see these things happening in Britain. Who are the reasonable opposition? Can't leave something that important to the Nazis.
(tags: sharia speech freedom islamism uk islam)
Atheism isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship … with reality | Unreasonable Faith: A summary of blogged responses to that "I hate religion but love Jesus" video that's been doing the rounds. I made a comment at the bottom. Also good for the comment thread on Atheismo, the diety for atheists.
(tags: relationship with god video atheism religion)
Driscoll & Brierley on Women in Leadership « Cognitive Discopants: Well known complementarian and fan of big strong manly men, Mark Driscoll, recently did an interview with Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio. Driscoll came out with a few choice quotes about Christians in the UK (“guys in dresses preaching to grandmas”).

He then had a go at Brierley for going to a church run by a woman (Brierley's wife!) and not believing in penal substitutionary atonement and eternal conscious torment in Hell (Brierley is an annihilationist: we unsaved will be told off and then vapourised rather then being tortured forever). Fun times.
(tags: homosexuality premier christian radio complementarianism mark-driscoll religion church mark driscoll christianity women sexism markdriscoll)
The Rise of the New Groupthink - NYTimes.com: "Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption."
(tags: flow solitude groupthink team office work creativity)

Link blog: culture, university, programming, atheism

Paul Wright — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:44:17 +0000

Project Euler: "Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."
(tags: puzzles maths mathematics programming)
Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: How to replace the School ICT Curriculum: 10 PRINT "PAUL IS SKILL"
20 GOTO 10
The undeniable fact and its inescapable consequence | Alethian Worldview: "The undeniable fact is this: God does not show up in the real world, not visibly, not audibly, not tangibly, not for you, not for me, not for saint or for sinner or for seeker. ... the inescapable consequence is that we have no alternative but to put our faith in men rather than in God. ... When men say things on God’s behalf, and make promises that God is supposed to keep, the word they tell you is the word of men, not the word of God. That’s true even if what men say is, “This is the word of God.” They’re not giving you God’s word, they’re giving you man’s word about God’s word (or at least what they claim is God’s word). Sure, you can believe what men tell you about God if you like, but if you do, you are putting your faith in men. Before you can have faith in God, God has to show up, in person, to tell you directly the things He wants you to have faith in. Otherwise it’s just faith in men."
(tags: deacon-duncan religion atheism)
I Am An Atheist: 16 Things Atheists Need Christians to Know: Some only relevant to Americans, but there are some good general points.
(tags: lists religion christianity atheism)
Atheists face Muslim-led censorship from UCL Union: The atheist society at UCL posted a Jesus and Mo cartoon as the image accompanying their Facebook event. One Muslim objected as the cartoon depicts Mohammed in a pub (what the Muslim was doing looking at the Facebook page for an atheist event isn't clear). The UCL student union got a complaint from someone and asked them to take it down. They refused. The story got picked up by atheist blogs and Dawkins Our Leader and hence the newspapers. The union backed down though there's still the vague threat in the air that the atheist soc might be guilty of bullying or harassment.

Hopefully the media attention has put the fear of God into the Union and they won't be so silly in future. Muslims do not have the right not to be offended.
(tags: richard-dawkins dawkins ucl university censorship religion islam)
Bash Tips for Power Users: I didn't know about the "fc" command. Nice.
(tags: programming shell unix linux bash)
Twilight: The Use of Sparkle: If Iain M. Banks had written Twilight. Funny, even though I've never read/seen any Twilight.
(tags: parody twilight iain-m-banks sf science-fiction sci-fi culture books)
So who is good enough to get into Cambridge? | Education | The Guardian: Guardian reporter sits in on admissions meetings at my old college. Inevitably, the photo with the story is of King's, because it's prettier than Churchill.
(tags: churchill cambridge-university university education cambridge)
Fat Acceptance Movement. || kuro5hin.org: kuro5hin is still alive: who knew? Anyway, this is a recent Diary entry from HollyHopDrive who discovered a bunch of Fat Acceptance blogs while looking for fitness information. Her division of what she found into stuff she agrees with and bullshit looks sound.
(tags: medicine health fat)
The Americanization of Mental Illness - NYTimes.com: The expression of mental illness is cultural: anorexia was more or less introduced to Hong Kong by newspaper articles. A view in which mental illness is caused by brain problems rather than childhood experiences or demons actually makes people less sympathetic to those with mental illness, because they're perceived as being unfixable.
(tags: anorexia schizophrenia culture science psychiatry psychology)

Comments elsewhere on theodicy, de-conversion, sex and fat

Paul Wright — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:02:22 +0000

I've been commenting in other places. You might be interested in where:

The Evil God Challenge

Stephen Law's Evil God Challenge is a new take on the problem of evil. The challenge is to ask theists why it's more reasonable to believe that there's a good God (accepting the standard theodicies for the problem of evil) than it is to believe there's an evil God (accepting flipped theodicies, for example, that evil God created us with free will so that we could freely choose to do evil).

Law has been dealing with responses to this challenge ever since his debate with William Lane Craig. On his blog, he mentions a conversation with Glenn Peoples. That blog entry attracted a few comments, so I joined in.

What does good mean?

There's been a lot of chat about just what Law means by good or evil, how this is "grounded" and so on, as theists often want to say you cannot have meaningful morality if there's no God (there's no reason to suppose this is true, as far as I can tell, but it's psychologically appealing even to atheists). Law says he's using the terms in a "pre-theoretic" sense (I suspect because he doesn't want the whole thing to turn into an argument about meta-ethics). Interestingly, I found a quote from Craig which says that theists shouldn't argue that atheists can't meaningfully use moral vocabulary, so I commented on that: it seems perfectly reasonable to use terms like (morally) good in the common sense way, or to point to cases like gratuitous suffering and call those evil (in fact, Law says he can make his challenge about suffering rather then morality: the challenge is then why it's reasonable to believe there's a God who doesn't want us to suffer unnecessarily, I guess).

Thomist God

I've also been responding to some comments by someone called BenYachov. He's been arguing that if you believe in the God of Thomas Aquinas (which apparently is the official God of the Catholic church), Law's challenge won't faze you. I was trying to tease out why. BenYachov claims that God "grounds" moral goodness but isn't himself a moral agent (a moral agent being something which is capable of acting on moral considerations). As Thomist God is not a moral agent, he cannot be said to be morally good or morally evil. Nevertheless, he is still Good in some sense related to "grounding" all goods and being perfect (the Thomists seem to like to use lots of Capital Letters for Significant Concepts).

I wondered at this Thomist God's "goodness" if it means nothing like moral goodness. I went on to say that this God is morally alien. He's a bit like what happens when weird aliens build an artificial intelligence. I was also still not sure what it means for Thomist God to "ground" moral goodness as he's not morally good, only Good: as I've said before, the word "ground" should be a red flag in debates like these, as it often means the other person is skating over something for which they don't really have a good explanation. Finally, I responded to another comment of BenYachov's, by saying that there's no reason to worship something because it created you or because it's mysterious.

I get the impression that there's a lot of work being done by Capital Letter Concepts in BenYachov's world, and a lot of trading on different meanings of the world "good". There's also the weird idea that these meanings have something in common and that there's an attribute called "Goodness" which somehow incorporates them all. This seems a bit like what Jaynes calls the Mind Projection Fallacy, the idea that every property we perceive in something is out there in the world.

Problem page

Over on Metafilter, there's a section where people can ask questions. Someone recently said they'd been talking to their father-in-law about religion and philosophy and ended up accidentally de-converting him from Christianity. Now the mother-in-law is trying to cut her daughter and son-in-law off. I posted a response trying to explain what the in-laws might be thinking, and suggesting that the best way back with the mother-in-law might be to talk about seeking truth.

Brains, sex, fat

livredor posted about brain sex differences and fat acceptance. I commented: I think the popularisation of research into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology leads to unscientific statements (see also this Less Wrong article about one way to misunderstand it), but there's also a set of feminists who don't believe in innate brain differences between men and women because it contradicts their ideology, making them equivalent to creationists. In the case of fat acceptance, I was also a bit suspicious of activist claims that the medical establishment is wrong about fat being unhealthy being linked with the desire to see fat people treated more kindly. I owe livredor some replies there.

Link blog: anglican, c-of-e, church-of-england, christianity

Paul Wright — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:15:06 +0000

The return to religion - Telegraph: "Church attendances, in freefall for so long, have started to rise again, particularly in Britain’s capital city. Numbers on the electoral rolls are increasing by well over two per cent every year, while some churches have seen truly dramatic rises in numbers." (The electoral roll of a church is the only way the C of E has of recording membership: they don't really go in for the formal process of the free churches, as it's an established church).

This is interesting, though not sure how good the evidence of a revival is: you've got a couple of anecdotes plus evidence of a positive second derivative (decline is slowing). It's interesting that this is always presented as being about an alternative to shopping and a search for meaning rather than being about the evidence. I suspect that's the way it actually works though, depressingly.
(tags: christianity church-of-england anglican c-of-e telegraph uk religion)

Link blog: philosophy, hume, atheism, david-hume

Paul Wright — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:15:07 +0000

Times Higher Education - Divine irony: Blackburn's summary of Hume's "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion".
(tags: simon-blackburn david-hume hume history religion philosophy atheism)
A Christmas Cracker: "On 16 December 1893, when Parliament had been in continuous session for 11 months and it had been announced that members would have only four daysě°˝€™ recess for Christmasě°˝€”Mr Gladstone received a letter in a neat but childish hand, written on ruled paper, from the infant son of the Earl of Pembroke."
(tags: parliament history funny politics)
Good Minus God: The Moral Atheist - NYTimes.com: Louise M. Antony writes a reasonable introduction to the idea that being an atheist does not lead to moral nihilism. Mentions the Euthyphro dilemma but doesn't deal directly with apologetical responses about "God's nature" (but then we've dealt with those here before, I think).
(tags: Euthyphro morality ethics philosophy religion atheism)
Of Hume and Bondage - NYTimes.com: Simon Blackburn defends Hume from some sillier criticisms, and wonders what philosophy is for.
(tags: simon-blackburn hume david-hume philosophy)
Talking Philosophy | Religion and science: the issue that won't go away: This is great, and has productive discussion in the comments too. Subscribed!

"Recall that the rise of science did not subtract from our pre-existing resources for investigating the world. Rather, it added to them; and the old pragmatic and scholarly methods and the new, distinctively scientific, ones can always be used together in any given case. We need to know whether such claims as that Jesus rose from the dead and that the universe was created by God are plausible when set against what we know overall about how the world works, both through methods that we could have employed anyway and through the distinctive methods developed by science.

When the question is framed like that, surely we don't think that these claims come under no pressure at all from our best empirical investigations of the world?"
(tags: resurrection russell-blackford philosophy science religion)
Islam and "Islamophobia" - a little manifesto: "The extreme right benefits from the availability of politically respectable criticisms of Islamic thought and associated cultural practices. As this goes on, there is a risk that the word "Islamophobia" will be used to demonize and intimidate individuals whose hostility to Islam is genuinely based on what they perceive as its faults. In particular, we should remember that Islam contains ideas, and in a liberal democracy ideas are fair targets for criticism or repudiation. ... After all, there are reasons why extreme-right organizations have borrowed arguments based on feminism and secularism. These arguments are useful precisely because they have an intellectual and emotional appeal independent of their convenience to extreme-right opportunists."
(tags: islamophobia politics religion islam)
All things to all people, but Christmas is ... people - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): A very human Christmas to you all :-)
(tags: religion christmas)

Link blog: science, philosophy, naturalism, epistemology

Paul Wright — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:15:07 +0000

Scientific presuppositions and the supernatural « Just Another Deisidaimon: Konrad Talmont-Kaminski on the metaphysical/methodological naturalism distinction, which he thinks is a distortion of actual naturalist views: "it effectively assumes the primacy of ontology over epistemology... assumes that to understand science one must begin with the ontology of science. This is very much understandable from the point of view of someone who was brought up on a Christian religion that is presented as having its basis in a number of ontological claims that must be taken as true. It is also a profound misunderstanding of what science is. It would be better to think of science in terms of various methods that are used to investigate the world. The scientific ontology is an a posteriori result of the application of those methods to the world. To put it in other terms again, ontological naturalism is the a posteriori result of accepting epistemic naturalism. Yet, even that is not quite right as it suggests that science can be identified in terms of some set of methods."
(tags: philosophy science religion epistemology naturalism)

Link blog: medicine, dance, lindyhop, genital-mutilation

Paul Wright — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:15:07 +0000

Infant male circumcision is genital mutilation | Martin Robbins | Science | guardian.co.uk: "Men should have the right to choose circumcision, not have the choice forced upon them. Infant circumcision without consent or immediate medical justification is an unjustified violation of basic human rights, that shares more in common with ancient coming-of-age rituals than responsible medical practice." Seems fair enough to me: the only reason we permit this is because of the common error of "respecting" religious opinions.
(tags: circumcision medicine surgery genital-mutilation religion science)
How Doctors Die « Zócalo Public Square: Doctors are better at making end of life choices for themselves than they are for their patients, as they're often hamstrung by patients, families and "the system".
(tags: death medicine health healthcare ethics dying doctors medical)
richardpowers.com: "Richard has been teaching contemporary and historic social dance for over thirty years. He leads workshops around the world and is currently a full-time instructor at Stanford University's Dance Division." Some interesting stuff on teaching, DJing and whatnot.
(tags: dance swing waltz dancing ballroom lindyhop stanford)
Open letter to Bell Pottinger | Bloggerheads: PR firm Bell Pottinger has been editing Wikipedia articles using fake accounts on behalf of their rather unsavoury clientele. When caught out, they responded that they'd done nothing illegal. Great public relations there, chaps.
(tags: astroturfing bellpottinger wikipedia lobbying uk news public-relations)

Link blog: economics, money, currency, betrand-russell

Paul Wright — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:15:06 +0000

King Under The Mountain: Soundtrack and Adventure Log: Someone actually ran a Dungeons and Discourse game (see the Dresden Codak cartoon). This is what happened. "In the middle of the Cartesian Plain at the confluence of the rivers Ordinate and Abcissa stands the mightiest of all, the imperial city of Origin. At the very center of the city stands the infinitely tall Z-Axis Tower, on whose bottom floor lives the all-seeing Wizard of 0=Z."
(tags: betrand-russell philosophy roleplaying dungeons-and-dragons funny)
Cow Clicker Founder: If You Can't Ruin It, Destroy It : NPR: Bloke makes spoof Facebook game to mock the grinding required by Facebook games. Facebook users play it for real.
(tags: games zynga facebook cow psychology)
Embedded in Academia : Nine ways to break your systems code using volatile: "The volatile qualifier in C/C++ is a little bit like the C preprocessor: an ugly, blunt tool that is easy to misuse but that — in a very narrow set of circumstances — gets the job done. This article will first briefly explain volatile and its history and then, through a series of examples about how not to use it, explain how to most effectively create correct systems software using volatile. Although this article focuses on C, almost everything in it also applies to C++." Relevant to my interests as compilers get cleverer about re-ordering.
(tags: volatile embedded programming C threads multicore memory-model)
Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism - ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews: "On Scooby-Doo, do you prefer the monsters to be real or people in costumes?"
(tags: scooby doo rationality)
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin | Magazine: Whatever happened to Bitcoin? Via Andrewducker.
(tags: bitcoin currency money economics wired crypto cryptography)

Link blog: bible, psychology, ai, gender

Paul Wright — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:15:06 +0000

Boys’ brains, girls’ brains: How to think about sex differences in psychology. - Slate Magazine: "Fear of sexism has produced a bias against conceding sex differences, which gets in the way of frank discussion and investigation." "Beware any explanation that relies on a single factor. Hormones matter, but so does socialization." "The fishy part of neuroscience isn’t the data. It’s the spin we put on the data in the guise of explanation."
(tags: gender neuroscience psychology feminism)
How Much Religion Should You Expose Your Children To? | Friendly Atheist: Tycho and Gabe talking about what they should teach their kids about religion. Interesting that Gabe (who's son is also called Gabe) is a vague theist but didn't want to pass on much formal religion to his son, but Tycho (an atheist) thought the kid should know about the Bible.
(tags: atheism religion bible penny-arcade children)
Strange Horizons Fiction: Tomorrow is Waiting, by Holli Mintzer: A short science fiction story about the Muppets. Heartwarming stuff. Via Sumana.
(tags: sci-fi science-fiction muppets ai)

Link blog: daniel-kahneman, psychology, cognitive-bias, rationality

Paul Wright — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:15:07 +0000

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog): The guy who single handedly runs Pinboard writing about Facebook and social stuff.
(tags: socialgraph social facebook graph pinboard relationships)
The Marvels And The Flaws Of Intuitive Thinking Edge Master Class 2011 | Conversation | Edge: The Edge also did a feature on Kahneman a while back. Here it is, with more examples of ways in which our thinking fails, but also things we can do which we're finding difficult to program computers to do.
(tags: psychology intuition daniel-kahneman cognition cognitive-bias rationality)
Michael Lewis on the King of Human Error | Business | Vanity Fair: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did ground breaking work on cognitive biases: the ways in which human thinking systematically fails. Fascinating article. Via andrewducker.
(tags: psychology rationality bias cognition cognitive-bias daniel-kahneman amos-tversky)
Requests: HTTP for Humans — Requests 0.8.0 documentation: An HTTP library for Python that's less awful than urllib2. Hopefully someone will add it to the standard library at some point. Via Leonard Richardson.
(tags: python http library requests programming)

Link blog: funny, stonehenge, larp, laundry

Paul Wright — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:15:06 +0000

I kveld med YLVIS - «Stonehenge» - YouTube: This is epic.
(tags: video funny stonehenge)
Index of /nelhage/Public/condition-echo-blueshift/case-nightmare-green: Someone's LARP rules for a game based on Charles Stross's Laundry books.
(tags: laundry roleplaying charles-stross horror cthulhu larp)
Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies: So cute! I like the Close Encounters one.
(tags: funny baby movies cinema pictures)

Abandon LiveJournal! WordPress or Pyblosxom?

Paul Wright — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:26:45 +0000

So, I've been looking into ways of running a "proper" blog, and I've come down to PyBlosxom or Wordpress. In either case, I'll get my own hosting for it.

Advantages of PyBlosxom over Wordpress:

Keeps entries in text files. I fear databases.
Seems to have a better security record than Wordpress.
In Python, so hackable and I'd feel I'd have some hope of understanding what it's doing (Wordpress is in PHP).

Advantages of Wordpress over PyBlosxom:

Very active developer community, so lots of nice plugins. (PyBlosxom isn't abandoned but doesn't have so many people working on it).
More themes, some of which are pretty (PyBlosxom has a few themes in their repository, none of which are that pretty).

Anyone who's used either of those care to comment?

Link blog: funny, sally-morgan, murder, jo-yeates

Paul Wright — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:15:06 +0000

A Much More Exotic - The bad kind of murder: "A call to restrict porn is, in effect, a call for more women to be murdered. It's a good thing we have a government that's not afraid to take tough decisions.

Starting next week, this LJ account will be syndicated on Comment is Free and Feministing."
(tags: porn rape murder jo-yeates media guardian satire)
Testing psychics « Derren Brown Blog: Derren Brown carefully avoids libelling Sally Morgan while pointing out that, well, all the other psychics were frauds...
(tags: derren-brown psychics woo woo-woo simon-singh sally-morgan sally morgan)
A suggestion for Dr. Dawkins | Alethian Worldview: 'Dr. Dawkins should challenge God to a debate. There should be an empty chair on a stage somewhere, and Dawkins should stand up beside it and say, “Well then, I believe that according to William Lane Craig’s rules of engagement, I am now entitled to declare that God is afraid to face me because He knows He’s wrong.”'
(tags: funny religion richard-dawkins william-lane-craig debate god)

Livejournal could be news

Paul Wright — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:07:08 +0000

A thing I found while investigating how to get journal backups going again in the wake of LJ's most recent debacle:

A while back, geeks kept saying that LiveJournal should be Usenet news, that is, instead of mucking about with all the tedious web forum stuff, it'd be nice to have a program which let you read comments and entries, kept track of threading and which comments you'd already read, and so on (remembering what you've read on LJ was the motivation for my LJ New Comments script, but that doesn't avoid LJ's clunky interface).

This was tricky as there was no obvious way to get all the comments from an entry. There was the old comment export thing, but that only works on your own journal. You could "screen scrape" with a program that tried to pull the comments from the human-readable versions of LJ's pages, but that's considered rude because of the load it'd put on LJ's server, and it's fragile as it might break if LJ changes the human-readable output.

Luckily, LJ added a bunch of new stuff to its existing interface for "clients" (programs which access LJ, like Semagic). This includes the getcomments method, which allows you to get all the comments on any entry you can see.

Add this to the existing machine-readable stuff (Atom feeds, getfriendspage) and you could probably write either a client specific for LJ (the iPhone client is the reason LJ added the getcomments method, by the looks of it) or a proxy to turn the whole thing into NNTP and let you use conventional Usenet clients. Who's first?

(Personally, I still plan to be off once I can actually back up this journal, including the comments of my esteemed readers. But I won't stop reading, so this would be a nifty toy even for me.)

Edit: another thing this allows is third parties offering comment feeds of your journal: someone could write a thing which turned the comments from an LJ entry into an Atom feed. Real blogs have these, so LJ could too.

Link blog: science, relativity, youtube, simulation

Paul Wright — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:33:40 +0000

Optical Effects of Special Relativity - YouTube: What the world would look like if you went very fast (or lowered the speed of light).
(tags: physics relativity simulation animation video youtube science)

LiveJournal security issue: access to locked entries

Paul Wright — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:13:40 +0000

The latest code release onto LiveJournal has introduced a problem where people are randomly getting logged into the wrong journals. This exposes friends locked and filtered entries belonging to those journals to those random people. ~~There's no indication that this used to read the locked entries of a specific, targeted user, but there's no analysis of the problem available, so we don't know that it can't be, either.~~ Edit: It looks like this was a problem with caching. If that's true, it's unlikely that it could have been used to read posts from a specific user. More here from cahwyguy.

More information is available here.

This has been going on since at least yesterday morning, ~~yet LJ still hasn't responded officially to reports of the problem or warned users that their private data is at risk.~~ Edit: LJ has posted about the problem, however, they don't seem to have some details right. For instance, they're claiming it was only a problem for a few minutes, when people were noticing it all day on Thursday.

This is the second time that LJ has dealt with a major security incident with staggering incompetence. It illustrates that they apparently don't have a test server, i.e. they're a bunch of coyboys. My vague plans to move this blog just got a lot less vague.

Link blog: william-lane-craig, richard-dawkins, debate, philosophy

Paul Wright — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:15:06 +0000

Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig | Richard Dawkins | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: Dawkins now says he won't debate with Craig because Craig defends the genocide of the Canaanites in the Old Testament. Craig's views, like those of other evangelicals who share them, are pretty odious, but I don't quite see why that means Dawkins should not debate with Craig: "no platform" principles are there so people can't put forward their odious views, but a debate on the existence of God isn't likely to revolve around what God did to the Canaanites. I think I'd just prefer to say "Craig is a better public speaker, I'd lose" and offer to debate in written form.
(tags: richard-dawkins william-lane-craig debate religion philosophy)

William Lane Craig vs Stephen Law: Does God Exist?

Paul Wright — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:07:44 +0000

Top Christian William Lane Craig is on his UK tour, and recently had a debate with the atheist philosopher Stephen Law. Premier Christian Radio seems to be organising the tour, and they've posted the audio of the debate.

I listened to the debate. A short summary is below, with a longer one underneath the cut.

The debate topic was "Does God exist?". Craig ran some of his standard arguments

The Kalam Cosmological argument, a First Cause argument which avoids the usual "who made God?" riposte by only claiming that "everything that begins to exist has a cause".
The moral argument.
An argument based on the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.

Law relied heavily on the evidential argument from evil, and his own variant of that, the one from his paper The Evil God Challenge, which Luke Muehlhauser has previously summarised here. Law has summarised his main argument in the debate on his own blog.

If you want to see my notes on the whole thing, read on, otherwise, skip to the end for my thoughts on how both of them did, and how atheists might do better.

William Lane Craig's opening

There are good reasons to think that God exists, and there are no good reasons to think that atheism is true. Craig's good reasons to think that God exists:

Reason 1: The Kalam argument

The universe must have had a beginning. Actual infinities cannot exist because of paradoxes which mean they don't behave like subtraction on the real numbers. Real things don't exhibit these paradoxes: infinity is just an idea, not something that exists in reality. Past events are real, therefore finite.

Scientific evidence: Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem implies that universe has a beginning.

Atheists might say universe just popped out of nothing. That's silly: where did it come from? Must be a transcendent cause which brought the universe into being.

1. If the universe began to exist, the universe had a transcendent cause
2. The universe began to exist.
C. The universe had a transcendent cause.

The cause must itself be uncaused (cannot be an infinite regress of causes), changeless and timeless (it created time), immaterial (it created space). Either an abstract object like a number, or an unembodied mind. Abstract objects don't stand in causal relations (the number 7 doesn't cause anything), therefore transcendent cause is an unembodied mind.

Reason 2: The moral argument

Without God, objective moral values do not exist. Objective = existing whether people believe in them or not. The atheistic view that morality has evolved does not make morality binding: going against the herd morality merely means you are unfashionable, not wrong.

But objective moral values do exist. Any argument against them relies on premises which seem less likely than the existence of such values. Stephen Law agrees with this: he calls relativism "politically correct twaddle of a rather noxious sort".

Some people think evil argues against the existence of God. But, on the contrary, without God to ground the objective moral values, good and evil would not exist.

Reason 3: The resurrection of Jesus

Jesus was by all accounts a remarkable individual. Historical consensus is that Jesus claimed authority to speak for God, carried on a ministry of miracle workings and exorcisms. Most importantly, the resurrection. 3 facts:

Fact 1: Jesus tomb was found empty by women followers.
Fact 2: Post-death appearances of Jesus to different individuals and groups.
Fact 3: Original disciples suddenly believed in the resurrection.

N.T. Wright says he cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again. Attempts to explain away these facts have been rejected by scholars. Christians are justified in believing the best explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead. That implies that the God of Jesus exists.

Summary: cumulative case based on the origin of the Universe, existence of objective moral values and duties, and resurrection. Stephen Law must tear down these arguments and erect others in their place, or Craig wins.

Stephen Law's opening

Law's posted his own transcript of his opening speech. Here are my notes:

Will address Craig's arguments in first rebuttal, will use this time to lay out his own argument.

Bad stuff happens. Animal suffering: Komodo dragons poisoning and disembowelling each their prey caused wildlife cameraman to give up taking wildlife documentaries. Animals tear each other apart to survive, and this has been going on for millions of years.

Human suffering: parent watching a child die of malnutrition or disease. Over the course of history, parents have had to watch on average of half their children die. Unimaginable horror is part of our world.

Evidential Problem of Evil: If Craig's God exists, all this must be for the best. An all knowing all powerful God will ensure that the world does not contain gratuitous suffering. There must be an entirely adequate reason for it all. But, with all that suffering, it's very unlikely it can be explained away.

Suppose, after a bump on the head, I become convinced that there's a good who is all knowing, all powerful, and as evil as can be. Craig's Kalam argument doesn't rule this out.

You probably reject the idea that Evil God exists: the world contains too much good. Why would an evil creator give us a beautiful world to enjoy? Why wouldn't he destroy all the hospitals? Why would he give us children to love?

Someone who believes in an evil God faces the Evidential Problem of Good. If the problem of Good is fatal to the Evil God hypothesis, why isn't the problem of Evil fatal to the Good God hypothesis?

Christians have come up with ingenious arguments: free will allows for moral choice and moral good. But there's a mirror response to the problem of Good: the Evil God wants to allow people to choose evil, rather than creating automata.

Likewise there are mirror arguments for the existence of laws of nature, beauty, love. The soul-making theodicy has a soul-destroying counterpart.

"Mysterious ways" arguments work as well for Evil God as Good: Evil God is omnipotent and omniscient. Don't presume to know the mind of Evil God!

On the basis of what we see around us, we can rule out an Evil God. So why can't we similarly rule out the Good God hypothesis? We may not know why the universe exists, but we can rule out both the Good and Evil God hypotheses.

Challenge to Craig: why is belief in a Good God very significantly more reasonable than an Evil one?

Craig's Kalam says nothing about the moral nature of God. Craig may try a mystery argument, a smokescreen. But this can equally well apply to an Evil God.

Craig's 1st rebuttal

Stephen Law has not responded to Craig's arguments for God's existence. He has offered one reason not to believe: problem of evil.

Problem of evil is the greatest emotional problem for Christians, but philosophers are called to think, not just to say how they feel. Stephen Law would have to prove that it's highly improbable that God has a reason for allowing evil. Perhaps only in a world full of suffering can the maximum number of people freely come into a relationship with God.

According to Christianity, the purpose of life is not happiness in this world, but coming to know God and finding eternal life. Law has to show there's another world in which there are more people coming to God but with less suffering. That's speculation on Law's part.

God is good by definition: you can't have an "evil God". You could have an evil creator. Craig agrees with Law: you cannot prove the creator is good because of the good things in life, just as you cannot prove he is evil because of the bad things in life.

Law mistakenly thinks that theists think God is god after looking at the world. Rather, it's the moral argument which leads them to think that God is good.

Evil in the world proves God's existence:
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Evil exists: some things are objectively evil.
C: Therefore God exists.

Law admits in his own paper that a moral argument is the best argument against Law's Evil God argument.

Animal suffering: animals are part of an ecosystem, all ecosystems involve predators. Canadian authorities are re-introducing wolves into Canada to reduce caribou population. An ecosystem needs predators to be balanced.

Animals are not suffering as humans do: though they suffer pain, they're not self-aware and therefore aren't aware of being in pain. God has spared the animal world the human experience of suffering.

Summary: Law cannot show that God lacks morally sufficient reasons for the suffering in the world, goodness in the world doesn't disprove Evil God, evil in the world proves the existence of God.

Law's 1st rebuttal

Law doesn't in fact think that Christians think God is good because of what they see in the world around them. He presumes that Christians have other reasons for thinking that God is good.

Craig's argument that the existence of evil proves God assumes that you need God for there to be good and evil. But in any case, you can run the problem of evil without mentioning evil at all: one could be a moral nihilist and still observe that there's an enormous amount of suffering which we wouldn't expect from Craig's God.

Craig seems to concede Law's point. He becomes a sceptic and says that we cannot know that there is not an Evil God on the basis of the world around us. But if we reject Evil God on the basis of the world around us, why not Good God too?

Craig's afterlife explanation can also be run by someone who believes in an Evil God: the good in this world will be more than balanced out by the horror of the next.

We can see, on the basis of the world around us, that there's no basis for believing in Evil God. Why can we not do the same for the Good God?

Craig's explanations for animal suffering are variants of the "laws of nature" theodicy, which we can also flip over and run for an Evil God.

Craig's sceptical theism can also be run for an Evil God. Don't presume to know the mind of Evil God! If this smokescreen cannot work for Evil God, it can't work for Good God either.

Craig's 2nd rebuttal

Law hasn't responded to any of the 3 arguments for God in Craig's opening statement. Craig grants that the Kalam doesn't show God is good, but it's a pretty strange atheism that admits there's a powerful, immaterial, personal creator.

Law has retreated from his published position that relativism is wrong. On atheism, there is no explanation for the explanation for the reality of objective moral values and duties, unlike on theism.

Law has not shown that it's improbable or impossible that God has sufficient reasons for allowing suffering. You cannot disprove Evil God by looking at the good things in the world.

Craig agrees with Law that you can run the problem of evil as the problem of suffering, but then you're denying the reality of objective evil. Craig quotes Law's book "Humanism", where Law says that there is a puzzle about how there could be objective morality independent of humans or even God. Law has no solution to this puzzle.

When we see an incident of evil or suffering, we don't know what effects may result from it later, so we can't show that it's improbable that God has sufficient reasons for allowing suffering.

Law's 2nd rebuttal

Most philosophers reject Craig's moral argument (even Christian ones like Swinburne).

Why think that if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist? The onus is on Craig to show that no atheistic account of objective moral claims can be given. Craig only mentioned that evolution does not make something right, but we all knew that.

We certainly strongly feel that there are objective moral values. Some things that we strongly feel are in fact incorrect (for example, feeling that the Earth is not moving). This strong feeling of objective moral values doesn't undermine the problem of evil because of the weight of suffering. Rather, Craig's argument combines with the problem of evil to lead to the conclusion that there are no objective moral values.

Turning to the resurrection. You should be suspicious of arguments to the best explanation. UFO sighting: the best explanation was that people saw a large lighted object. But in fact it was the planet Venus. There are countless reports of miracles, UFOs, whatever, not all of which we can easily come up with mundane explanations for.

Evidence for a hypothesis is good to the extent that we'd expect to see it if the hypothesis were true and, crucially, not expect it if the hypothesis were false. We expect unexplained reports to crop up from time to time anyway, whether or not there are any miracles or UFOs.

Craig's summing up

Law has conceded that there's a powerful, immaterial creator. This is a funny form of atheism!

Craig can produce atheist philosophers who agree with Craig's moral argument to match Law's use of Swinburne (Law's Swinburne quote is an argument from authority anyway). Craig quotes Joel Marks's Confessions of an Ex-Moralist. In the absence of God there is no explanation for moral absolutes.

Law says there are many reports of miracles and we should be careful. But the resurrection of Jesus has no good natural explanation. It occurs in the religious and historical context of Jesus's life and ministry rather than as a bald anomaly.

All we've heard from Law is the Evil God argument, but you can't disprove either the Evil or Good God by looking at the world.

Law's summing up

Law has posted his own transcript of his closing speech. Here are my notes:

Suffering happens on a stupendous scale. This is powerful evidence against Craig's God, as even many Christians agree. Law challenged Craig to explain why his belief in a Good God is better supported than belief in an Evil God, as the latter is clearly absurd.

Craig has mostly just played the mystery card. Law wasn't relying on Swinburne's authority: he just pointed out that Craig's first premise ("no God implies no objective moral values") has no justification. Even if we accept the premise, because of the mountain of evidence against God from the problem of evil, we should then end up concluding that there are no objective moral values.

The resurrection argument is weak, as Plantinga agrees.

Why may not know why the universe exists, but we can rule out the Evil God quite reasonably. We can also quite reasonably rule out Craig's Good God.

A heckler: what about a God who's neither good nor evil?

Law: That's another one, but I was talking about Craig's God.

How did they do?

Who won? Hard to say, especially as I'm obviously biased. At the very least, Law wasn't crushed in the way that some of Craig's previous opponents have been.

I'm mostly going to offer what I hope is constructive criticism of Law. This is because I'm on his side :-)

Law's first rebuttal sounded a bit hesitant. He seemed to be astonished that Craig had actually claimed that theists don't conclude that God is good from looking at the world and didn't know how to respond to Craig's assertion that it's all about the moral argument.

Law had recovered a bit by his second rebuttal, but even later on, at times he didn't quite seem to have processed Craig's statement that looking at the world didn't provide evidence against either an Evil or a Good God: even after Craig had said that, Law sometimes seemed to be arguing as if Craig had said the opposite.

Craig's not afraid to use explicit syllogisms or arguments with numbered premises rather than relying on wordy arguments, so laying out the Evil God argument in that form would have allowed people to follow it better.

Law's failure to respond to the Kalam allowed Craig to score against by calling him a strange sort of atheist who believes in a creator (but see armchair generalship, below).

Craig accepts that we should generally be careful about accepting miracle reports but then argues the Jesus's resurrection is special. Law is right to say that Craig's reasons are flimsy, but he needs to say why.

Craig only used for 3 of his usual 5 arguments for God's existence. He left out the fine tuning argument and the argument from religious experience (which he usually turns into something close to an altar call). Law has written some strong rebuttals to the experience argument, and Law wondered whether Craig avoided it because of those. It'd be interesting to hear from Craig whether he avoided it for that reason.

In which I play the armchair general with 20-20 hindsight

Craig's claim that theists don't conclude the creator is good from looking at the world sounds well dodgy: you do see Christians saying stuff about how beautiful the world is and how that's evidence for their God. When Craig makes a claim where he seems to deviate from what Christians actually do, it's worth playing that up: "If you're a Christian who thinks that the beauty of the world is evidence for the Christian God, Dr Craig would disagree with you, apparently."

How do you solve a problem like the Kalam?

I'm not sure what I think of Law's refusal to say much about the Kalam (other than that it was also an argument for Evil God). It allowed Craig to score, but it could have ultimately been a good tactic as Craig's previous debates on the Kalam tend to turn into people trading obscure arguments about infinite sets or quoting from popular physics books.

If you're going to use Law's tactic, though, again you need to play it up more: "The title of the debate is 'Does God Exist?', and it's the Christian God that Craig is advocating, not any other possible gods. Craig is a Christian evangelist, the Kalam is there to lead you towards Christianity. But even if you are convinced by the Kalam, you are a long way from Christianity. There are countless other possibilities which shouldn't be ruled out merely because they're not as familiar as the Christian God you learned about at school, or because believing in them would make you a strange sort of atheist."

Arguments from authority

It's noticeable that Craig's allowed to quote people at length, but as soon as anyone else does, it's an argument from authority. That should be an easy (and funny) point for an opponent to make: Craig's defence of his moral argument is mostly quotes from people saying they agree with one or other of the premises. If Craig responds that he's quoting competent authorities, ask whether Swinburne or Plantinga are incompetent :-)

The resurrection

Craig didn't seem as polished on the resurrection as he has in the past, perhaps because he was expecting to get into the details and quote some more authorities. Law took it in another direction: just another unexplained weird report, like a UFO sighting that we reasonably assume wasn't caused by aliens without getting into the details of who saw what. All Craig can say about that is that there's no obvious natural explanation (which Law seemed to agree with and which doesn't affect Law's argument) and that there's something special about the context, by which he seems to mean the life of Jesus. That seemed ideal ground for a more specific counter-attack from Law than just calling it "flimsy".

The moral argument

The moral argument is a tough one because people are psychologically attached to both premises. In front of a general audience, I can see why Law wanted to be a bit careful not to deny absolute morality: Craig can then go into his usual routine about how there's nothing wrong with rape on atheism, or whatever.

Arif Ahmed famously did go after Craig on that second premise: "Dr. Craig says that 'objective moral values exist, and I think we all know it'. Now that might pass for an argument at Talbot Theological Seminary, and it might pass for an argument in the White House, but this is Cambridge, and it will not pass for an argument here." But Ahmed was talking in front of philosophy students.

Craig does get away with denying strong feelings, responding to the problem of evil. He says that philosophers are called to think rather than go on feelings, so perhaps that's sauce for the gander: our strong feeling that some things are Just Wrong shouldn't prevent us from thinking about it. If you're going to do that you do need to genuflect in the direction of people's feelings, though, as Craig does.

I think I'd try to unpick the psychological attachment: what looks different in a world where are no moral absolutes of the sort Craig wants when compared with a world where there are? Not much, as far as I can tell: even if they are there, people need some reason to obey them and it's open to them to say "I don't care what's Right". If you somehow discovered that there really were no moral absolutes, would you run out an murder your neighbour?

The segue

Craig accepts that the Kalam establishes the existence of a creator who might be evil, for all the argument tells us, but goes on to say that the moral argument shows that God is good. How does he know that whatever being "grounds" morality is the same being as this creator from the Kalam? Can the "God" in that the "no God means no real morality" premise be someone other than the creator? What is it about being a creator that also grants you morality-grounding powers? It's all pretty mysterious.

Similarly, what is it about the resurrection that links Jesus to the creator and to the morality-grounder?

In both these cases, Craig's relying on the audience's familiarity with Christianity to make the segue from one argument to the next seem obvious, but these are very burdensome details. The audience's familiarity with this stuff makes them vulnerable to conjunction bias. It's worth trying to get the audience to take an outsider's view of how the arguments work.

Other reactions

This Christian apologist thought Craig lost and came up with his own Evil God version of the moral argument, but thought that not questioning the Kalam made Law a funny sort of atheist.

Randal Rauser, another Christian, hosted an interesting discussion about Law's choice to only attack God's goodness. If Law is right, has he shown "God does not exist"?

Edit: Gregory Lewis has produced some excellent argument maps of the debate. I'd recommend those for another view of how it went.

Link blog: funny, sociology, transportation, alcohol

Paul Wright — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:15:06 +0000

Listening to the Hair Dryer: Why Nice Religion is Still Problematic, Analogy #37,476 | Greta Christina's Blog: "Let’s say Person 1 thinks their hair dryer is talking to them, and is telling them to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train.

And let’s say that Person 2 thinks their hair dryer is talking to them, and is telling them to volunteer twice a week at a homeless shelter.

Is it better to volunteer at a homeless shelter than it is to shoot every redhead who gets on the 9:04 train? Of course it is.

But you still have a basic problem — which is that you think your hair dryer is talking to you."
(tags: religion greta-christina accomodationism)
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on Induction: Wanna play doctor of philosophy?
(tags: philosophy funny cartoon)
The True Cost of Commuting | Mr. Money Mustache: Why it doesn't make sense to have a big house miles from where you work. I'm cycling in these days (unless it rains, then I'll probably drive).
(tags: car transportation bike commuting money planning)
BBC News - Viewpoint: Is the alcohol message all wrong?: Kate Fox, author of "Watching the English": "when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol."
(tags: alcohol sociology society uk britain kate-fox)

Link blog: funny, evolution, dawkins, dancing

Paul Wright — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:15:07 +0000

Richard Dawkins attacks Muslim schools for stuffing children's minds with 'alien rubbish' - Telegraph: "He said that while he opposed faith schools as a whole, it was the Muslim ones that worried him the most." That seems reasonable: the C of E schools are mostly harmless, as far as I can tell: they accept evolution and don't examine the consequences for Christian doctrine too carefully.
(tags: evolution religon islam richard-dawkins dawkins education schools)
Religious People Are Nerds - YouTube: Following on from my post about how religion is a fandom, here are some more interesting parallels.
(tags: religion nerds fandom hobby funny)
Strictly Come Dancing! | Woruld under wolcnum: "Some exciting factoids from my trip to be in the Strictly
studio audience (in no particular order!)"
(tags: television tv dancing)

Link blog: eliezer-yudkowsky, razor, ockham, occam

Paul Wright — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:15:05 +0000

julies blog: My Star Trek Quiet Book: I wasn't familiar with the term "quiet book" before, but this is excellent.
(tags: startrek craft book)
Ockham chooses a razor: Tee hee.
(tags: ockham occam razor philosophy cartoon funny)
Eliezer Yudkowsky offers odds of 99 to 1 against faster than light information propagation: "I'll take bets at 99-to-1 odds against any information propagating faster than c... I will not accept more than $20,000 total of such bets." Yudkowsky taking that xkcd cartoon literally.
(tags: physics eliezer-yudkowsky light ftl neutrino cern)

Link blog: cambridge, funny, philosophy, twitter

Paul Wright — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:35:03 +0000

War of words breaks out among Jehovah's Witnesses - Home News, UK - The Independent: For some reason, a bunch of newspapers in the UK have recently noticed that the Jehovas Witnesses are a cult. Nice to see so many people in the comments relating their stories of getting out.
(tags: religion cult jehovas-witness)
Richard Feynman on doubt, uncertainty and religion (subtitled) - YouTube: Feynman! Thou shouldst be living at this hour.
(tags: feynman doubt religion science physics)
Stephen Law: GOING NUCLEAR: A chapter from Law's "Believing Bullshit" about the tactic he calls "going nuclear": when the argument is going against you, blow everyone away by saying that "all arguments rest on faith" or "everything is relative" or some other such nonsense. Law anatomises the various forms of this tactic.
(tags: philosophy rationality argument stephen-law presuppositionalism)
Meeting Jesus at Oxford | Commentary | Fortean Times: CICCUs cousins DICCU and OICCU made the Fortean Times. Gripping stuff, with some ideas about why evangelical religion is so appealing to people at the famous universities.
(tags: ciccu religion university oxford cambridge)
An Interview with @AlmightyGod | Friendly Atheist: God has a Twitter feed (@almightygod). Hemant interviews Him.
(tags: religion funny god twitter)

Link blog: history, paralysis, psychology, barter

Paul Wright — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:15:07 +0000

gource - software version control visualization - Google Project Hosting: Cool tool which produces a video of your code's history.
(tags: video programming history software tools)
David Graeber: On the Invention of Money â€“ Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics « naked capitalism: Interesting demolition of the idea that barter economies always precede the invention of money.
(tags: economics anthropology money history sex barter)
The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills - Atlantic Mobile: Sleep paralysis and the Nocebo effect as a potential killer.
(tags: science psychology sleep paralysis)

Link blog: programming, development, vim, editor

Paul Wright — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:15:07 +0000

Text Message | Sunday Magazine: "FRIENDS THEY NEVER MEET: ACQUAINTANCES MADE BY THE TELEGRAPH KEY. CONFIDENCES EXCHANGED BETWEEN MEN WHO HAVE NEVER SEEN EACH OTHER — THEIR PECULIAR CONVERSATION ABBREVIATIONS." Cool steampunk stuff. Via andrewducker.
(tags: telegraph communication sms message)
Writing Vim Plugins / Steve Losh: What it says on the tin.
(tags: programming vim plugin development editor)
Coming Home to Vim / Steve Losh: Someone's page about going back to Vim, listing some config options I didn't know about.
(tags: programming tools vim editor tutorial)
Lost Garden: Rules of Productivity Presentation: "How do we get more work done? It is a question that every manager and every passionate worker faces. Yet, for the most part, teams operate on gut instinct and habit. The results are less than optimal. Over the years I've been collecting small pieces of research on various factors that actually seem to improve productivity. I've assembled eight of these experiments into a PowerPoint presentation. Feel free to use the graphs and data within to spread these practical ideas throughout your own teams." Via andrewducker.
(tags: psychology programming software development overtime scrum productivity)
CPBD 089: John Shook – Dewey, Quine, and Some Varieties of Naturalism: John Shook talks to Luke Muehlhauser about philosophical naturalism (with a transcript, for those of you who hate podcasts). Interesting to find about the various naturalistic philosophies, and to see the responses to the supernaturalist "you naturalists think everything is just atoms" argument.
(tags: philosophy naturalism science physics materialism)

Link blog: funny, philosophy, a.j.-ayer, privacy

Paul Wright — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:15:08 +0000

A. J. Ayer to the rescue! « Measure of Doubt: Ayer vs Mike Tyson, apparently really happened. "A. J. Ayer is known for writing "Language, Truth, and Logic." Lesser known is his sequel, "Language, Truth, and Being a Friggin' Badass.""
(tags: philosophy a.j.-ayer positivism funny biography)
TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search 'Rape' | Techdirt: A woman sexually assaulted by a Transport Security Agency employee is then threatened with a libel suit when she blogs about it. Thugs Standing Around, indeed. Her own lawyer writes an excellent letter in response. Note: contains a description of the assault.
(tags: privacy surveillance rape defamation tsa security transport)
What People Don't Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper) - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic: "Tell us what people don't get or appreciate about your job. The response was so eloquent and overwhelming, it was practically encyclopedic.
So we made an encyclopedia. From A to Z, we went through your responses to find the best vocational essays for each letter."
(tags: work jobs)

Link blog: biology, statistics, funnny, turing

Paul Wright — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:15:08 +0000

He Said/She Said: Grim-meathook-future SF author Peter Watts's wedding vows: "And you and I are going to kick biological determinism in the balls." Aw, sweet.
(tags: wedding marriage biology monogamy)
Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity: "One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory---the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems---leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume's problem of induction, Goodman's grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis."
(tags: philosophy programming complexity compsci turing)
Does the future have a church? | The Briefing: What evangelicals think of the general decline in church attendance in the UK. Their churches are holding their own numerically but not growing, so becoming a smaller percentage of a growing population. However, they're doing better than other Protestant denominations, which will die out as their older members die off. Getting them while they're young is essential for propagating religion, and they worry about the lack of youf in the church. Social trends like cohabiting couples and single parent families are worrying because evangelical churches don't really know how to cope with those people so won't evangelise them effectively. Via the artist formerly known as nlj21.
(tags: church religion statistics christianity uk)
Kayonga Kagame Shows Us The World. Episode: Darkest Austria : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive: A hilarious spoof on ethnological documentaries: an African TV team comes to the Austrian province to document the strange behavior of the natives... including the Feast of the Chicken. *
(tags: funnny anthropology ethnology)

Link blog: philosophy, hume, euthypro-dilemma, epistemology

Paul Wright — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:15:11 +0000

The Problem of Induction: Nice summary of Hume on induction.
(tags: philosophy hume induction knowledge epistemology science)
OK Go, The Muppets - Muppet Show Theme Song - YouTube: OK Go and the Muppets!
(tags: okgo muppets video music)
Mr. Deity and the Philosopher - YouTube: "Well, if I did order genocide, I'd have a pretty good reason, or at least, an apologist could make one up." Nice. The begging bit at the end is funny too.
(tags: euthypro-dilemma philosophy funny mr-deity religion)
A Sketch of an Anti-Realist Metaethics - Less Wrong: Nice explanation of the map/territory distinction, and seems to accord pretty closely with my own views on morality.
(tags: hume philosophy metaethics ethics morality less-wrong lesswrong)

Bad arguments about religion: faith and evidence

Paul Wright — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:24:18 +0000

There's an atheist bad argument which runs something like this: "Faith is believing stuff without evidence, believing stuff without evidence is always bad, therefore faith is bad".

This seems reasonable at first, but sooner or later you meet a William Lane Craig or similar apologist type, as Jerry Coyne did recently:

Craig argues that science itself is permeated with assumptions about the world that cannot be scientifically justified, but are based on faith. One of these is the validity of inductive reasoning: "Just because A has always been followed by B every time in the past is no proof at all that A will be followed by B tomorrow." To suppose the latter requires faith.

According to Coyne, as well as the problem of induction, Craig mentions last-Thursday-ism and the idea that we're all in the Matrix as beliefs that we reject on faith. Some of commenters on Coyne's blog react as if Craig is advocating these ideas that we all reject, that is, as if he really thinks that the Sun might not rise tomorrow or that we're in the clutches of a cartesiandaemon. But that's not Craig's point. Nor is Craig being inconsistent if he gets on an aeroplane assuming that the laws of physics will carry on working as they always have to keep it flying. After all, he's not the one claiming that it's always wrong to believe things without evidence.

The problem here, which makes the atheist's argument a bad one, is that the atheist has cast their net too broadly. Craig is right to say that there are things that atheists (and everyone else) believe "on faith". To say that these beliefs are always unwarranted leaves the atheist open to Craig's counter-argument that, to be consistent, the atheist should then discard those beliefs or admit that it's not always wrong to believe things without evidence.

Doing better

Nevertheless, something has gone wrong with Craig's argument if it's supposed to be a defence of religious faith (as all Craig's arguments ultimately are). Religious faith is different from belief in induction or the existence of an external world. The atheist should abandon the claim that unevidenced beliefs are always bad, and concentrate on the distinction between religious beliefs and, say, the belief that the external world is real.

One way of doing that would be to turn Craig's allegation of inconsistency back on him. As Chris Hallquist puts it

belief in the Christian God isn't very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threatened by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn't accept without evidence - namely, the beliefs of other religions.

The atheist's discomfort is now the apologist's: either he must accept that, say, Muslims or Scientologists are right to take things on faith (in which case, why not join up with them instead?); or further distinguish his religion from theirs (probably by making arguments about the resurrection of Jesus). The atheist's acceptance of the real world doesn't come into it.

Hume's own solution to radical scepticism was to note that he couldn't entertain that sort of thing for long. Creatures like us soon fall unavoidably back on treating other people as if they were conscious, the world as if it were real, and so on. The great man tells us:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Among educated folk, thoughts of gods rely on meetings with other believers to keep them going: believers are chronic sinus sufferers. They rarely anticipate the world being any different from a godless one, and those who act as if God is real are called crazy even by their fellow believers. To be sure, that doesn't mean their avowed beliefs are false. But again, they are not like the commonplace beliefs that everyone takes on faith. In my experience, they fly forgotten, as the dream dies with the dawning day. How about a nice game of backgammon?

Edit: gjm11 suggests another reasonable response in this comment: admit that believing stuff without evidence is bad, and try to minimise it, and say that the problem with religious faith (in so far as that means holding unevidenced beliefs) is that it means having way more unevidenced beliefs than necessary.

Edit again: I've also commented with a shorter version of this on Coyne's original posting, so there's some discussion there too.

See also

Everything is a faith position, atheism is a religion, my previous Bad Argument posting.
Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, Eliezer Yudkowsky's take on radical scepticism and suchlike.

Link blog: atheism, rationality, latex, integration

Paul Wright — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:15:08 +0000

Oklahoma Freethought Convention 2011 (speech 3 of 5) - The Thinking Atheist - YouTube: Seth the Thinking Atheist, a former Christian, on the "God goggles" that prevented him from seeing the truth for many years. He's an engaging public speaker.
(tags: atheism ex-christian religion)
Detexify LaTeX handwritten symbol recognition: Draw a symbol, get the TeX code for it. Amazing what they can do these days.
(tags: tools mathematics latex tex)
Atheism isn’t a religion, but it is a brand | The Uncredible Hallq: Quotes Ian Pollock: "What you will probably not notice, however, is that increasingly when you don’t know what you think about some issue yet (say, your country’s stance on foreign affairs), you will take your cue from other self-identified conservatives, as opposed to thinking it through yourself and then describing your conclusion in political terminology. The normative self-definition has staged its coup d’etat. Whatever “conservatives” think, that is going to be your opinion. Of course, when I put it that way, it looks ridiculous. But from the inside, this process feels perfectly rational — like wisely throwing your lot in with a really smart group of people."
(tags: pseudoscience rationality religion brand atheism)
Worth Promoting to Its Own Post: Notes on Arguing « Whatever: "This dynamic of people asking for facts, or at least data, beyond the anecdotal, is in itself non-partisan; implications otherwise are a form of ad hominem argument which is generally not relevant to the discussion at hand."
(tags: argument rationality)
Who broke the build? – PaperCut Blog / News: "Retaliation is a Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey." Excellent.
(tags: programming humour funny missile build integration jenkins)

Link blog: economics, consciousness, programming, fandom

Paul Wright — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:15:06 +0000

Git Immersion - Brought to you by EdgeCase: Looks like a nice introduction to the "git" version control system. Must get round to understanding that one of these days.
(tags: programming version-control git development tutorial software tools)
I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right - Telegraph: In the Torygraph of all places.
(tags: politics economics journalism murdoch news telegraph)
philosophy bites: Nick Bostrom on the Simulation Argument: "Nick Bostrom doesn't rule out the possibility that he might be part of a computer simulation. Find out why in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast." Hard to fault the argument, as far as I can tell, though I should probably check how people have responded to it.
(tags: philosophy computers consciousness simulation nick-bostrom transhumanism)
fic: the joinery (game of thrones) (1/2): A nice alternate history of A Game of Thrones from Cersei's perspective: what would have happened if Ned had taken the throne instead of Robert? Spoilers for the first book/TV series.
(tags: fandom fanfic game-of-thrones books cersei/ned)

Link blog: android, web, google, firefox

Paul Wright — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:15:06 +0000

[Updated] Rooting Explained + Top 5 Benefits Of Rooting Your Android Phone: Just for me, so I can decide whether to root my HTC Desire.
(tags: tutorial hack android rooting)
Chromium Blog: Connecting Web Apps with Web Intents: This looks like a nice idea, allowing one site to offer facilities to another similar to the way Android apps can advertise the ability to, say, share a link or send email. I imagine there'll be security stuff to work out. If Chrome and Firefox support it, that'd be great.
(tags: internet browser android intent api google firefox chrome web)

Anonymous comments are now off

Paul Wright — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:39:10 +0000

I was getting too much spam, so I've turned off anonymous comments. LJ's anti-spam system was correctly flagging a lot of it, but I can't help feel that it should just bin the more obvious stuff (with a rejection message so humans know what happened).

LJ's code base being what it is, this may also disallow logins via OpenID and TwitonMyFaceSpace, I'm not sure.

I'm still planning on moving away from LJ as soon as I get some spare hours to do it in.

Link blog: atheism, meme, sam-harris, politics

Paul Wright — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:15:08 +0000

New Statesman - Faith no more: "Earlier this year, Andrew Zak Williams asked public figures why they believe in God. Now it’s the turn of the atheists – from A C Grayling to P Z Myers – to explain why they don’t "
(tags: atheism richard-dawkins philip-pullman daniel-dennett sam-harris)
Pompous Theist: You've seen Advice Dog and Courage Wolf, now enjoy Pompous Theist. Well observed stuff: I've seen quite a few of these "arguments" in my time.
(tags: atheism meme funny humour theism religion)
“Shut Up, Rich Boy”: The Problem With “Privilege.” | No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?: "I’m a feminist writer, but I don’t like to use the word “privilege” in my writing. Here’s why not:"
(tags: feminism privilege)
Why Have Hackers Hit Russia's Most Popular Blogging Service? - TIME: Where LJ has been the past week or so. For once, it's not their fault.
(tags: internet security livejournal politics ddos)

Link blog: apologetics, internet, christianity, josh-mcdowell

Paul Wright — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:15:09 +0000

Apologist Josh McDowell: Internet the Greatest Threat to Christians, Christian News: McDowell is worried: “The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not.” Kind of revealing: McDowell is admitting that if you want to get kids into your religion, you need to get them young enough, before they've been exposed to other ideas.
(tags: internet apologetics josh-mcdowell christianity religion)

Link blog: funny, fsm, atheism, pastafarianism

Paul Wright — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:15:06 +0000

BBC News - Austrian driver's religious headgear strains credulity: An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear". This sounds sensible to me: if you're going to allow special privileges for religions, you should do so for all of them.
(tags: religion atheism funny pastafarianism ramen fsm)

Link blog: music, game-of-thrones, google, nick-davies

Paul Wright — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:15:07 +0000

YouTube - ‪Game of Thrones Violin Cover‬‏: This is rather nice.
(tags: music violin game-of-thrones)
YouTube - ‪Lara plays the Game of Thrones theme on piano and violin‬‏: Another nice version of the theme, via andrewducker.
(tags: music game-of-thrones tv)
The Real Life Social Network v2: Via andrewducker,a great presentation from Paul Adams at Google which goes some way to explaining the design of Google Plus.
(tags: internet facebook privacy relationships google social social-networks plus)
How to Talk to a Fundamentalist (If You Must): Former fundie talks about how her uncle convinced her by asking questions, preventing the whole cached thought/semantic stop sign thing, and showing how alternative ways of living can be fulfilling.
(tags: fundamentalism religion quiverfull debate)
Nick Davies on phone hacking, Murdoch and News of the World - video | Media | guardian.co.uk: The investigative journalist Nick Davies on how the phone-hacking scandal has escalated, leading to News of the World's announced closure.
(tags: video law press news-of-the-world nick-davies murdoch)

Link blog: philosophy, theodicy, geert-wilders, turing

Paul Wright — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:15:09 +0000

Unequally Yoked: Guestblogging Challenge: Take the Ideological Turing Test!: A suggestion: if you want to show that you understand the other side's position, test whether you can be distinguished from a genuine advocate of that position in a suitably anonymous test.
(tags: philosophy debate turing)
Theodicy: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Nice metaphor for "solutions" to the Problem of Evil.
(tags: theodicy philosophy comic religion)
Distinguish - Butterflies and Wheels: Ophelia Benson on the Geert Wilders thing: "Nobody should be required to love Islam."
(tags: islam geert-wilders religion)
A field guide to bullshit - opinion - 13 June 2011 - New Scientist: "How do people defend their beliefs in bizarre conspiracy theories or the power of crystals? Philosopher Stephen Law has tips for spotting their strategies." A bit similar to my Bad Arguments stuff: Law has "everything is based on faith" as the so-called "nuclear option". An interesting article, might buy the book he's plugging.
(tags: religion science empiricism sceptism philosophy new-age)

Link blog: cryptography, paula-kirby, economics, bitcoin

Paul Wright — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:15:08 +0000

Atheism Is the True Embrace of Reality - Paula Kirby - The Hibernia Times - RichardDawkins.net: Paula Kirby is a Scottish freelance journalist who used to be a Christian. She recently wrote a couple of good short articles on why she isn't one any more.
(tags: paula-kirby atheism religion)
Virtual currency: Bits and bob | The Economist: Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency, which hit the news recently after someone set up a site where you could buy illegal drugs using it. This Economist article is a great introduction to how it works.
(tags: cryptography economics bitcoin economist internet)

Link blog: charlie-brooker, football, injunction

Paul Wright — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 11:15:08 +0000

Charlie Brooker: Why idolise footballers? It's like living in a world where half of us worship shire horses | Comment is free | The Guardian: "It's like living in a world in which half the population has inexplicably decided to worship shire horses. But as if that wasn't strange enough, they're not content to simply admire the animals' ability to pull brewery wagons: they also want to know what the horses get up to back at the stables. And when Dobbin goes on a hay-eating binge, or tries to mount a donkey, not only will they voraciously read all about it, they'll judge him for it."
(tags: charlie-brooker football injunction)

Link blog: funny, sam-harris, rapture, science

Paul Wright — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:15:06 +0000

YouTube - Tim Minchin's Storm the Animated Movie: Tim Minchin's beat poem about New Age bullshit has an official animation to accompany it. I'd not seen it before: thanks to gjm11 for linking to it.
(tags: funny religion new-age science)
The Daily Mash - Biblical apocalypse leaves much of Britain unchanged: Mother-to-two Emma Bradford lives in Penzance, where a horde of creatures straight out of the painting Garden of Earthly Delights is on a bloody rampage.

She said: "They're scaly and bulbous-headed and they soil the streets with their demon fire-piss.

"And then they have a kebab."
(tags: funny rapture religion uk)
The Blog : Morality Without “Free Will” : Sam Harris: Sam Harris asks how the neuroscience of free will, or the lack of free will, should affect moral questions. I don't think people have libertarian free will, so it's nice to see Harris arguing that this doesn't mean an end to morality.
(tags: sam-harris free-will morality philosophy neuroscience)
Honolulu Magazine | The Secret Life of Storage Units in Honolulu: What people do with their storage lockers. Including running a business from them...
(tags: storage culture housing)

Link blog: spam, economics, internet

Paul Wright — Mon, 23 May 2011 11:15:23 +0000

How Modern Spam Works | MetaFilter: Researchers try buying stuff advertised in spam, following the money. Link is to the mefi thread since one of the researchers turns up to answer questions in the comments.
(tags: internet economics spam)

Link blog: roleplaying, psychology, science, youtube

Paul Wright — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:16:08 +0000

The Reason We Reason | Wired Science | Wired.com: "new theory of reasoning put forth by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. In essence, they argue that human reason has nothing to do with finding the truth, or locating the best alternative. Instead, it’s all about being able to argue with others" And that's why we have confirmation bias. There's some dialogue in the comments about how it's not as hopeless as it may sound.
(tags: science psychology research cognition rationality brain bias)
YouTube - Roll a D6: Just in case there's anyone who hasn't seen this yet...
(tags: video youtube music dungeons-and-dragons roleplaying)

Link blog: psychology, science, sex, dan-savage

Paul Wright — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:15:07 +0000

Savage Love by Dan Savage - Columns - Savage Love - Dan Savage - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: Excellent sex advice columnist Dan Savage responds to criticisms that he advocates an "anything goes" approach to sex at the expense of fidelity.
(tags: sex dan-savage advice marriage monogamy)
What Do Women Want? - Discovering What Ignites Female Desire - NYTimes.com: Interesting stuff on the differences between male and female sexual responses.
(tags: sex psychology women science)
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones: "How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link." Amusing for the number of comments which say "But vaccines really do cause autism" etc. etc.
(tags: science psychology belief neuroscience rationality bias)

Morality again

Paul Wright — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:21:51 +0000

Here's what I currently think about morality. Perhaps the pros in the audience can tell me whether this has a name.

It is very hard to come up with a general theory about what makes something right which isn't open to objections based on hard cases where the theory contradicts our intuitions (consider the dust speck problem if you're a utilitarian; or the thought that God might command us to eat babies, if you're a believer in Divine Command Theory). Russell Blackford says:

I've seen many attempts to get around the problem with morality - that it cannot possibly be everything that it is widely thought to be (action guiding, intrinsically prescriptive, objectively correct, etc.). In my experience, this is like trying to get rid of the bump in the carpet. The bump always pops up somewhere else. We have to live with it.

Call something an "intuition" if it's something we just seem to feel is true. Perhaps there's no empirical evidence for it, perhaps it even doesn't seem to be the sort of thing there could be empirical evidence for. There's a question of whether intuitions are reliable, but since one of the things we want from a theory is that it seems compelling, and the abovementioned problems with the conflict of theory and intuitions typically result in us not finding the theory compelling, a successful theory seems to involve satisfying our intuitions (or at least, our meta-intuitions, the means by which we can change some of our intuitions, since there are convinced utilitarians who really believe in torture over dust specks, Divine Command Theorists who believe God can justly command genocide, and so on).

In the case of free standing feelings that we ought to do something regardless of other benefits to us (assuming that such feelings exist and aren't always just concealed desires for our own benefit, for example, the pleasure we get by doing good), it seems that our upbringing or genes have gifted us with these goals (even in the case of the pleasure, something has arranged it so that doing good feels pleasurable to us).

Assuming that we could work out any particular person's process for deciding whether something is right, we could possibly present it to them and say "there you go, that's morality, at least as far as you're concerned". There's the amusing possibility that they'd disagree, I suppose, since I think a lot of the process isn't consciously available to us. I think the carpet bump occurs at least in part because the typical human process is a lot more complex than any of the grand philosophical theories make it out to be.

We might also encounter people who disagree with us but are persuadable based on intuitions common to most humans, humans who aren't persuadable, human sociopaths, or (theoretically) paperclip maximizers. In the cases where someone else's morality is so alien that we cannot persuade them that it'd be bad to kill people for fun or turn the Earth and all that it contains a collection of paperclips, we can still think they ought not to do that, but it doesn't really do us much good unless we can enforce it somehow. I see no reason to suppose there's a universal solvent, a way of persuading any rational mind that it ought to do something independent of threats of enforcement.

And that's about it: when I say you ought or ought not to do something, I'm appealing to intuitions I hope we have in common, or possibly making a veiled threat or promise of reward. This works because it turns out that many humans do have a lot in common, especially if we were raised in similar cultures. But there's no reason to suppose there's more to it than that, moral laws floating around in a Platonic space or being grounded by God, or similar.

I don't find that this gives me much trouble in using moral language like "right" and "wrong", though to the extent that other people use those terms while thinking that there are rights and wrongs floating around in Platonic space which would compel any reasoning mind, I'm kind of an error theorist, I suppose, but I don't suppose that everyone does do that.

Morality again

Paul Wright — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:21:51 +0000

Here's what I currently think about morality. Perhaps the pros in the audience can tell me whether this has a name.

I've seen many attempts to get around the problem with morality - that it cannot possibly be everything that it is widely thought to be (action guiding, intrinsically prescriptive, objectively correct, etc.). In my experience, this is like trying to get rid of the bump in the carpet. The bump always pops up somewhere else. We have to live with it.

Link blog: mackie, phones, scientism, christianity

Paul Wright — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:15:09 +0000

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club: On moral evaluations: Blackford points out that morality doesn't require anything spooky or metaphysical to be rational and non-arbitrary, so long as we're prepared to accept that "[w]hatever judgments we make do not compel all comers, regardless of their desire-sets, to act one way or another on pain of making a mistake about the world or something of the sort."
(tags: philosophy morality ethics error-theory mackie russell-blackford)
"Have friends who are atheists? Agnostics? Into Wicca? Or New Age?": Mefi discovers "Dare2Share", which is one of those worldview based Christian evangelism things where they're training Christians to understand other people's worldviews (which is good) as a preamble to converting them to Christianity (which would be bad). I've linked to Mefi rather than the site itself as the Mefites discussion is interesting. The site has cutesy names for their examplars, like "Willow the Wiccan" and "Andy the Atheist", so the Mefi crowd have come up with a few of their own.
(tags: metafilter apologetics christianity evangelism worldview)
New Statesman - The bugger, bugged: "After a chance meeting with a former News of the World executive who told him his phone had been hacked, Hugh Grant couldn’t resist going back to him – with a hidden tape recorder – to find out if there was more to the story . . . " Coppers taking backhanders from journos, oh my. No wonder the Met dragged their feet about the phone hacking case.
(tags: news journalism crime phones privacy surveillance police hugh-grant hacking)
Scientism « Why Evolution Is True: Jerry Coyne: "when used as a derogatory adjective, “scientism” means this:

the practice of applying rationality and standards of evidence to faith.

For religious people and accommodationists, that practice is a no-no. That’s why the adjective is pejorative."

I think there is something which we could validly call "scientism", namely the belief that science can answer all our questions, or that all questions reduce to scientific ones, or something. However, Coyne's point stands: "scientism" is often code for "how dare you ask us for evidence?"
(tags: scientism science religion jerry-coyne)

Link blog: philosophy, atheism, sean-carroll, edinburgh

Paul Wright — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:15:08 +0000

"Don't Talk to the Police" by Professor James Duane: Of course, in the UK, we don't have an unqualified right to silence, but this stuff's interesting anyway. There's a follow-on video where a police officer responds and says the professor is right :-)
(tags: law video police legal lectures rights)
Try Thinking | Here lieth the thoughts of SiânyB: "I do (despite appearances) totally understand the importance of prayer for some people – I know people who use it as a kind of meditation to clear their heads, to unburden their guilt or to enter some kind of celestial lottery of hope. But, given current world events, the message ‘Try Praying’ is a grimly obscuring lens through which to view your surroundings."
(tags: religion culture advertising prayer edinburgh christianity)
Sean Carroll: Does the Universe Need God?: Top theoretical cosmologist Sean Carroll wrote a chapter for the Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, and this is it. Interesting to compare Carroll's stuff with other popular science about the Big Bang.
(tags: philosophy god science bigbang big-bang sean-carroll physics cosmology)
The Blog : Being Mr. Nobody : Sam Harris: "Imagine a language in which, instead of saying ‘I found nobody in the room’ one said, ‘I found Mr. Nobody in the room.’ Imagine the philosophical problems that would arise out of such a convention. " Sam Harris quotes Wittgenstein to explain why he doesn't like to call himself an atheist.
(tags: wittgenstein atheism philosophy language sam-harris)
Fixing HTTPS: Glyph, of Twisted Python fame, talks about ways to fix HTTPS, presumably in the light of the recent attacks on certification authorities.
(tags: https security internet encryption)
AC Grayling: 'How can you be a militant atheist? It's like sleeping furiously' | Books | The Guardian: Graying mocks the people who call atheists militant and fundamentalist, and talks about his new book: "But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that really concerns me the most."
(tags: philosophy religion atheism grayling books)

Link blog: hell, funny, agile, humour

Paul Wright — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:15:14 +0000

John Norman, the philosophy professor who created the barbaric world of Gor: io9 interviews John Norman, the famous complementarian and author of the Gor novels.
(tags: bdsm fantasy book scifi gordon-brown john-norman complementarianism)
Advice God: Like Advice Dog, but Advice God! I'm snaffling some of these: "UNCONDITIONAL LOVE/WITH CONDITIONS".
(tags: religion atheism funny god humour)
YouTube - Christopher Hitchens drops the hammer: "It's considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who are unbelievers and say 'Now are you going to change your mind?'" Well, yes, that's anticipating-as-if there's a Hell, say. But if we're going to apply the norms of discussion fairly, I like Hitchens' idea of atheists going round religious hospitals. :-)
(tags: christopher-hitchens death religion hell conversion)
Hell and linoleum | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "What would it feel like to believe that anyone really deserved eternal conscious torment? Is it even humanly possible?" I think that Georges Rey's "meta-atheism" is correct on this point: most Christians don't anticipate-as-if there's a Hell, though claiming to believe it and still worshipping a monster is bad enough. berneray's comment is good, read that as well.
(tags: hell christianity religion andrew-brown)
Random Thoughts on The Roles of Leading and Following « Swungover: Via CW at Lindy. There seems to be much more debate about this than there is in ballroom, perhaps because ballroom's more conservative anyway, perhaps because it's settled by "you're shorter, therefore you're going backwards so I can see over you".
(tags: dancing lindy leading following swing)
New Statesman - Making marriage harder: "the world would be a far happier place if marriage was harder and divorce easier" - an interesting proposal from the New Statesman's legal correspondent.
(tags: marriage funny law)
At last an IT supplier that tells it like it is - The Tony Collins Blog: "No platitudes, just straight talking on govt IT from Martin Rice of agile software company Erudine." I've heard tales of middlemen charging government the Earth to take an £100/year hosting account and install Wordpress on it. Glad to see someone speaking up.
(tags: government economics politics uk waterfall agile IT)

MerchantCircle take over Bloglines and start spamming

Paul Wright — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:20:47 +0000

Many years ago, I signed up for Bloglines. It's a service which aggregates the feeds from various blogging sites, so you can read them in one place without having to do the rounds of your favourite sites looking for updates. (On LiveJournal, your friends page serves the same function, and you can add the feeds of external sites if you're a paying customer).

I left Bloglines for Google Reader when Bloglines became unreliable. Google Reader is nice: it looks clean, and there's an app for it for my Android phone. I recommend it over LiveJournal, which is dying of spam; and Bloglines, for the reasons I'll now get into.

A while back, Bloglines was taken over by a company called MerchantCircle. They sent me an email to say they were the new owners, which is fair enough. As far as I remember, I hadn't logged into Bloglines since I moved to the superior Google Reader service, so I just ignored it.

Yesterday I got an unsolicited bulk email (spam) from MerchantCircle advertising a service not related to Bloglines. Worse, the link they offered to unsubscribe from their mailing list didn't work, as it required a login and password (first mistake: removal links from mailing lists should authenticate the user sufficiently to get off the list). Worse still, giving the email address to which MerchantCircle sent spam to the "forgot password" box gave an error saying that the address was not known: MerchchantCircle don't even know who they're spamming. Logging back into Bloglines doesn't give an "unsubscribe" option either.

I consider Bloglines/MerchantCircle to have gone rogue. I've removed the "subscribe with Bloglines" buttons from my blog, and advise anyone else who still has those buttons to do the same. Use Google Reader instead: Google don't spam.

Edited to add: MerchantCircle have emailed back to apologise, saying they had a "weird glitch" in their email system which caused some Bloglines users to get MerchantCircle emails. In recognition of this, I'm downgrading them from "rogue" to "incompetent".

Link blog: psychology, consciousness, science, brain

Paul Wright — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:15:07 +0000

Form Constants and the Visual Cortex | countyourculture: "There are common visual concepts which cut across boundaries of culture and time and reflect what it truly means to be human. Near death experiences are often associated with seeing a “light at the end of a tunnel”. In the Bible, God appeared to Ezekiel as a “wheel within a wheel”. Spirals and concentric circles are commonly found in petrogylphs carved by cultures long dead. Similar visual effects are reported during extreme psychological stress, fever delirium, psychotic episodes, sensory deprivation, and are reliably induced by psychedelic drugs."
(tags: science consciousness brain religion)
Is long-term solitary confinement torture? : The New Yorker: "The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?" Well, yes.
(tags: psychology torture prison politics)
Boogie Nights: Or "A reflection on the history of porn", by interactive fiction author Adam Cadre. Cadre ends up saying that the way forward is to produce more "good" porn, something that people in the recent porn debates on my friends list on LiveJournal also suggested. (Links to nudity, and one small topless photo at the bottom of the main article.)

LiveJournal comment notifications, part deux

Paul Wright — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:16:49 +0000

LiveJournal coughs to their crimes, sort of

So, LiveJournal finally sort of owned up to getting blacklisted for helping spammers, as mentioned previously. This posting is their response to the situation. They say they're doing the right things, although you do have to wonder what took them so long.

They didn't name Spamhaus or properly explain why they'd been blacklisted, so I explained in the comments.

The spice must flow

Notifications are coming through now because LJ have changed the IP address of their outgoing mail server from 208.93.0.128 (the address of www.livejournal.com) to 208.93.0.49 (which calls itself mail.livejournal.net, but isn't accepting inbound mail). The blacklisting for the old address is still in place. The spammy journals specifically mentioned in the SBL listing seem to have been suspended, though.

It's not clear if this change of IP address is part of some agreement between Spamhaus and LJ or whether LJ think they can avoid the blacklist and continue to ignore complaints. If it's the latter, I'm fetching popcorn. It's the work of a few keystrokes for Spamhaus to block LJ's entire address range, and I vaguely recall they've been happy to do that in the past for people who've taken the piss.

(Disclaimer: I'm not Spamhaus, I just used to hang out on news.admin.net-abuse.email in the 1990s, when it was cool).

Link blog: japan, christianity, earthquake, pakistan

Paul Wright — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:15:08 +0000

YouTube - PASTOR ULTIMATE FIGHT: OK, so remixing videos of Pentecostal services is like shooting fish in a barrel, but you've got to love the person who though of turning it into an 90s video game.
(tags: funny pentecostal video youtube charismatic christianity)
Blogging in App Engine: Still vaguely toying with ditching LJ, and this looked interesting.
(tags: appengine python blog bloggart)
William Hague accused of 'anti-Christian' foreign policy - Telegraph: "Cardinal Keith O’Brien accused the Foreign Secretary of doubling overseas aid to Pakistan to more than £445 million without demanding religious freedom for Christians and other religious minorities, such as Shia Muslims. " I think O'Brien has a point: nobody should be coerced into conversion, and it's clear that Christians need some protection from the Religion Of Peace.
(tags: religion politics aid pakistan islam christianity)
Stop Being Wrong: A Moral Imperative: C.S. Lewis wrote that "You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house." Wrongbot points out that to behave ethically one must have correct beliefs as well as the right theory of normative ethics.
(tags: ethics philosophy rationality morality wrongbot)
Some Perspective On The Japan Earthquake: MicroISV on a Shoestring: "Japan is exceptionally well-prepared to deal with natural disasters", and apparently, the system worked.
(tags: japan earthquake engineering culture)
Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now! • The Register: "Japan's nuclear powerplants have performed magnificently in the face of a disaster hugely greater than they were designed to withstand, remaining entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage. The unfolding Fukushima story has enormously strengthened the case for advanced nations – including Japan – to build more nuclear powerplants, in the knowledge that no imaginable disaster can result in serious problems."
(tags: science nuclear safety physics japan earthquake)

LiveJournal comment notifications

Paul Wright — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:51:27 +0000

Postings in news have been a bit cagey about what's going on with comment notification emails. They've mentioned that there's a "third party" involved. It turns out that LiveJournal have got themselves blacklisted by the Spamhaus Block List for providing spam support services, in this case, hosting websites for spammers.

This is why comment notifications aren't getting through: the SBL is a widely respected and widely used email blacklist. They're not saying LJ are spammers or indeed sending spam email, they are saying that LJ aren't taking down journals set up by spammers, so they're effectively helping the spammers to spam. Most email spam directs the mark to a website, so providing those websites is a serious matter to Spamhaus.

This is worrying: it means LJ probably aren't responding to complaints about hosting the spammers' sites. I think Spamhaus would have tried sending email to abuse@lj, though possibly not under their own names, as you want to be sure that reports from ordinary users are handled correctly, same way as restaurant reviewers don't book saying "I'm Jones from the Times". The detailed information from Spamhaus lists a huge number of spammy journals, and at least a couple of them were still there when I tried them. This doesn't bode well for LJ's future, to my mind.

livredor brought this to my attention. There's a thread on a news posting discussing the problem. azurelunatic (who is head of anti-spam for Dreamwidth) has more here, and I've commented on their posting.

UK Census 2011: what would Nicky Gumbel do?

Paul Wright — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:52:23 +0000

Top Christian Nicky Gumbel, of Alpha Course fame, has a point when he says that cultural Christianity isn't worth much if you've never never darkened the doors of a church (save for weddings, Christenings and funerals) or accepted Jesus as your personal saviour or been slain in the Spirit or whatever.

I'm not sure the success of the Census Campaign would do much more than annoy those Christians who like to bang on about how this is a Christian country in online discussions. But that seems a worthy goal, so I'm happy to support it.

You never know, it might even help get the bishops out of the Lords, which would be even better.

The poster on the right wasn't endorsed by Gumbel or McDonalds (in fact, I'm told Gumbel got the quote from Keith Green): it's a mashup from Hampshire Humanists which Crispian Jago found. His site has plenty of other census posters for you to enjoy.

Link blog: homosexuality, christianity, law, foster

Paul Wright — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:15:08 +0000

Misplaced outrage over High Court “ban” on Christian foster parents | Gavin Drake: Gavin Drake, a Christian journalist, points out that the judgement on foster parents doesn't do what the right wing press think it does (in fact, it does very little at all), and that the Christian Legal Centre are lying bastards (I paraphrase).
(tags: religion clc christian-legal-centre law foster homosexuality christianity)
Stephen Law: The case of the Christian would-be foster parents: "It's not the Christianity that's the obstacle. It's the bigotry (which happens to be religiously motivated)."
(tags: bigots homosexuality christianity law stephen-law)
Johns & Anor, R (on the application of) v Derby City Council & Anor [2011] EWHC 375 (Admin) (28 February 2011): The full text of the judgement in the recent case of a dispute between some Pentecostal Christians and Derby Council over whether the Christians' views on homosexuality made them unsuitable to act as foster carers. Paul Diamond, the barrister who takes a lot of these "help! I'm being oppressed!" cases on behalf of bigoted Christians, gets a bit of a kicking from the judges, which is fun. The judges' reasons for their decision, and the limits of it, are worth reading for how they differ from the hysterical reporting in the right wing press.
(tags: religion christianity foster law homosexuality)
Mervyn King is right. If the banks face no risk, we shall all go down - Telegraph: "They are the trade unions of the modern era, sick dinosaurs that crush ordinary citizens, writes Charles Moore." Blimey, and this the Telegraph saying it.
(tags: uk banking corruption banks politics economics)
Hamlet and the Methods of Rationality: This is fun...
(tags: rationality hamlet parody)
Gender Differences and Casual Sex: The New Research «: Revisiting that "I've noticed you around, will you go to bed with me?" study (as popularised by popular beat combo "Touch and Go") and disputing the conclusion that women just don't like sex: "the only consistently significant predictor of acceptance of the sexual proposal, both for women and for men, was the perception that the proposer is sexually capable".
It being a feminist blog, they then go against the science the other way and say that perception of risk is a much higher factor than the study suggested (the study thought it was an effect, but not the primary one).
(tags: science sex feminism gender)