Edge runs an excerpt of Rebecca Goldstein’s new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, along with the non-fiction appendix outlining those 36 popular arguments and (rather briefly) what’s wrong with them.  It mentions, in passing, philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser’s wry inversion of the infamous “Ontological Argument”: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could […]

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Maggie Gallagher: There is a reason the Pledge of Allegiance asks us to pledge to our country “under God.” The best American tradition has never required people to surrender their first allegiance as a condition of citizenship. Well… that’s a fair guess, I suppose.  In reality, the Knights of Columbus lobbied to have the phrase added in the […]

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Thoreau over at Unqualified Offerings writes: In a report on Indonesia, the Economist makes the interesting point that urban Muslims in Indonesia are actually more likely to be drawn to more austere, fundamentalist versions of Islam than their rural counterparts.  The rural Muslims prefer religious practices that blend Islam with elements of Hinduism and indigenous […]

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I’m happy to join in a bout of public lamentation over our national ignorance of—and hostility toward—science, but I’m extremely skeptical about this story, which seems to be getting a good deal of bloglove.  The premise is that a critically-hailed biopic about Charles Darwin isn’t finding a U.S. distributor because it will be “hugely divisive” […]

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I know, I know, it’s her schtick, I shouldn’t be surprised, and certainly shouldn’t play into it by taking any notice when Ann Coulter smears feces on the walls in her latest desperate bid for another ten seconds of attention.  Still: Then there’s Barry Lynn, alleged “Christian minister,” whose stock in trade is to denounce […]

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Yglesias has a good point on the proposed French burqa ban: [T]his sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be […]

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I’ve been binging on TED talks these past few days, among them a 2002 lecture by Daniel Dennett on memetics. Most of what he has to say is by now pretty familiar to anyone with a scintilla of interest in the topic, but I was intrigued by the analogy he offered up between contemporary globalization […]

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AP reports: Hawaii’s state Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill Wednesday to celebrate “Islam Day” _ over the objections of a few lawmakers who said they didn’t want to honor a religion connected to Sept. 11, 2001. The Senate’s two Republicans argued that a minority of Islamic extremists have killed many innocents in terrorist attacks. This […]

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James Joyner flags the following from Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right: Belief in a deity (or deities), and the desire to worship it or them, is an almost universal aspect of human nature. This not something that can be wished or indoctrinated away, and it’s pointless and maybe even destructive to try. It’s far better, surely, […]

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I’d been meaning to write something along the lines of this post by Yglesias for a while: Conservative pseudointellectuals who want to convince you they have some special scholarly insight into The Muslim Mind by invoking taqiyya as, more or less, a synonym for lying. Now, granted, I only took one undergrad course on Islam, […]

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