I thought I was being satirical when I wrote this post, justifying belief in Santa Claus in the same way that, as I see it, sophisticated believers justify belief in God. But then I realized that my post was already written 110 years ago, in the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial. Here […]
Felix Leiter has appeared in 9 of the 20-some Bond movies. But he always looks different (except for Live and Let Die and License to Kill). He’s usually white, but was once black. Not only that, but in License to Kill, one of his legs was bitten off by a shark, but it was whole […]
Over at External Delivery the Future, Lacie Cuskin is pushing an idea called “External Delivery”, that Christmas presents are delivered by an intelligent agent of some sort. Although ED proponents are careful never to name the agent in question, it should be obvious to the meanest intellect that ED is merely Santa Clausism in a […]
In Pinker’s How the Mind Works, there’s a brief passage on artifacts (pp. 327-329 in my copy) that caught my eye because of its connection with creationism. Artifacts come with being human. We make tools, and as we evolved our tools made us. One-year-old babies are fascinated by what objects can do for them. They tinker […]
It’s December, which means it’s time for the annual War on Christmas™, in which the latest volley was fired by Albert Mohler in a column about a comment of Richard Dawkins’s in which he said that he intends to celebrate Christmas like any normal Englishman who happens to like decorated trees and getting together with […]
I keep thinking off and on about writing a program to apply evo-devo to musical composition (part 2 here). There are tons of problems to solve, of course, but I may have made some progress.
Evangelicals like to tell us that sex should take place within the confines of marriage, and only for purposes of procreation. But in fact, the situation is much more complex. In his book Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987), James A. Brundage compiled a list of various restrictions on sex from religious […]
Well, it finally happened: the diocese of San Joaqin has split off from the Episcopal church, over a question of whether women and gays are human enough to hold high rank in the church. It does raise the question, though, of why they didn’t just ask God what he thinks.
I just saw the Golden Compass movie. I agree with PZ when he says that you’re going to be seeing the word “disappointing” in a lot of reviews. Mild spoilers after the jump.
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s speech, the Washington Post has an editorial that makes some of the same points that I did. Where Mr. Romney most fell short, though, was in his failure to recognize that America is composed of citizens not only of different faiths but of no faith at all and that the […]
