Category Archives: Religion

Ineffability, God thereof

Posted on Monday 25 November 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Another Andrew Sullivan post on The Dish– a few days ago, this, via Aidan Kimel and Herbert McCabe: God must be incomprehensible to us precisely because he is creator of all that is and, as Aquinas puts it, outside the … Continue reading →

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David McRaney 2, Gravity, Haiyan, GRR Martin

Posted on Tuesday 19 November 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve been meaning to close out my thoughts on David McRaney’s brilliant second book, YOU ARE NOW LESS DUMB, which I first posted about a month ago. First, let me follow up on his ‘narrative bias’ described in the first … Continue reading →

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Why Science Is Not About Faith

Posted on Tuesday 19 November 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Great post at Slate by Jerry Coyne — the original headline on the homepage has disappeared, so I’m reproducing from memory in this link: Why Scientists Have No Faith in Science The point is science isn’t about faith, not even … Continue reading →

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To put matters at their simplest

Posted on Tuesday 29 October 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Reading A.C. Grayling’s The God Argument, a simplistic title that might be better replaced by its subtitle: “The Case Against Religion and for Humanism”. Grayling is a British philosopher who has written on many topics; i.e. he’s not just a … Continue reading →

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Man in the Sky

Posted on Monday 21 October 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Via The Dish, Embracing the Void. Making the sky into a humanlike God is a shortcut to making it legible. If you believe that there is a man in the sky, you can interpret its unpredictable cinema, its colour shifts … Continue reading →

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Connor Wood on Atheists

Posted on Friday 18 October 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

The perspicacious Connor Wood, at Science on Religion, asks Why Are There Atheists?. That is, since the vast majority of humanity subscribes to one variety of faith or another, how is it that atheists exist at all? Are they some … Continue reading →

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Rights are Social Contracts

Posted on Friday 18 October 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Alternet (and Salon): America Is Not a Christian Nation and Never Has Been: Why Is the Right Obsessed With Pushing a Revisionist History? Aside from the angle about the likes of David Barton rewriting American history to conform to the … Continue reading →

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Gone with Inherit the Wind

Posted on Monday 30 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

The oddest thing about this post is, why would a community college think to schedule a performance of “Inherit the Wind” with involvement of a director and support by a religious college, Martin Luther College, in the first place? After … Continue reading →

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Is the Younger Generation Turning away from Organized Religion?

Posted on Saturday 28 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Skeptic Blog: http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/09/25/losing-our-religion/ We can all speculate about why younger generations are alienated from organized religion, and certainly there are many reasons. But knowing the current political trends in this country, we might suggest that one factor of great importance … Continue reading →

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Thoughts of a Thursday Afternoon: After the Apocalypse

Posted on Saturday 28 September 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Every human being starts from scratch: he or she comes equipped with a mind honed by evolution for survival, prone to superstitious, self-interested thinking for the same reason, but ill-equipped to accurately perceive reality, the reality that can be deduced … Continue reading →

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