Monthly Archives: March 2014

S. T. Joshi Work Habits; The Only Common-Sense Position

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Thinking about this topic of work habits lately, and so keyed on this passage, from this New York Times profile of S.T. Joshi, H.P. Lovecraft scholar and atheist/agnostic writer. Mr. Joshi does not teach, and he rarely lectures. For money, … Continue reading →

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Changing My Mind

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here is something I’ve changed my mind about, recently, based on the evidence. I used to think you could appeal to the rationality in any person, present evidence and establish a chain of reasoning, and cause a person to change … Continue reading →

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Evolutionary Politics

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Fascinating. Via Andrew Sullivan’s summary at Political Biology Chris Mooney looks at a book by Avi Tuschman about evolutionary accounts of politics— Conservatives, he suggests in one of three interrelated evolutionary accounts of the origins of politics, are a modern … Continue reading →

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Big Bang Evidence

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Very significant new evidence today of the so-called ‘inflation’ of the universe in the very tiny moments after the beginning. Phil Plait has a good overview of today’s announcement about direct evidence for inflation in the very early universe, just … Continue reading →

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God and Morality

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The US is an outlier among nations whose peoples believe that belief in God is essential to morality. http://www.alternet.org/belief/no-you-dont-need-god-be-good-person The trend across the world is mirrored within the US: Not coincidentally, led again by Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, nine of … Continue reading →

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Truth-Claims?

Posted on Monday 17 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Jerry Coyne links to Sam Harris’ characterization of Christianity, in a long exchange with Nature science writer Philip Ball. There are more polite versions of this, but for anyone who did not grow up with this narrative and is an … Continue reading →

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Political parties, religion, and individualism

Posted on Friday 14 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Connor Wood at Science on Religion writes about current social and political trends and where libertarians fall in the republican-democratic spectrum, and how both of those parties may be splitting into factions. Big changes are coming to politics in America. … Continue reading →

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A Fellow Heir of Carl Sagan

Posted on Thursday 13 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Friendly Atheist, this post of a Tale of a lapsed Christian who grew up in a household that mocked Carl Sagan when the first Cosmos series was aired. In my childhood home, Carl Sagan was a fundamentalist caricature of … Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker: Work Habits

Posted on Wednesday 12 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

When I remember a passage from something I read a day or two before, I think it’s worth capturing. From that Steven Pinker interview last week (originally at Mosaic), two paragraphs about work habits, and his book The Better Angels … Continue reading →

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Fox, Certainty, Arrogance, Evidence, and Cosmos

Posted on Wednesday 12 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Follow-up article in Salon about the man whose father was lost to the paranoid outrage of Fox News. (The original article on this topic inspired my explanation about how science fiction represents the antithesis of such dead-end traps of ideology … Continue reading →

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