Category Archives: Religion

Prothero on The Unpersuadables

Posted on Sunday 6 July 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Another review of a review: Donald Prothero (a geology professor at Occidental College in LA, and a lecturer at Caltech), has a review of a new book by Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, that develops … Continue reading →

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Nature’s God

Posted on Wednesday 2 July 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Book review sections, especially the weekly ones in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, are useful for reading glosses on books of interest that I know I’ll never find the time to read in their entirely. Nonfiction books, … Continue reading →

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Lies and False Witness

Posted on Wednesday 2 July 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

There’s a theme here, in three posts from last week. Salon: Rise of a right-wing quack: Faux-historian David Barton’s shocking new influence This is the quality of constitutional scholarship that pervades the conservative movement these days: simple, outright lies that … Continue reading →

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Primitive Values, Mature Ethics, and the Failure of Religious Texts

Posted on Friday 27 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A point that bears repeating: there is nothing in the Bible that couldn’t have been written by ordinary people On the point of the previous post: it has been frequently observed that the Bible contains nothing that could not have … Continue reading →

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Another Ten Commandments – Actually, Two

Posted on Friday 27 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Ten Commandments That Would Have Changed the World Who knew? Valerie Tarico points out, in this post, that there is a second set of Ten Commandments a bit later in Exodus following the ones from Exodus 20 most often cited. … Continue reading →

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Ann Druyan on Cosmos

Posted on Monday 23 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon’s film critic Andrew O’Hehir interviews the actual creator and author of the recent Cosmos TV series– not Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was just the on-screen host, but Carl Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan. “Why is God telling me to stop … Continue reading →

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Links, Quotes, Comments: 20 June

Posted on Friday 20 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A post today by Amanda Marcotte, on both Salon and Alternet– Salon: Reason vs. the right: Have conservatives abandoned science and rationality? Alternet: Have Conservatives Abandoned Rationality, Skepticism and Truth? The possibility that rationality itself has become a partisan issue … Continue reading →

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Links and Quotes, mid-June

Posted on Monday 16 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Preoccupied with writing up book notes this past week (and other things), I have a bunch of linked articles to note without making any of them separate posts. From last Monday, two interesting op-eds in the New York Times. Charles … Continue reading →

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Notes on Peter Boghossian

Posted on Saturday 14 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Peter Boghossian’s book has an aggressive title, A Manual for Creating Atheists, though it is in no way as ‘angry’ as Greta Christina’s book, discussed last time. Boghossian is a faculty member in Portland State University’s philosophy department, and his … Continue reading →

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Unafraid of the Dark: Highlights from the last episode of Cosmos

Posted on Monday 9 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Passages from the last episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”. Early in the episode, he describes a thought experiment: Pick a star, any one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which is just one … Continue reading →

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