Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Truth be known, I don’t know if John Cook is a real skeptic or not – or rather, to what degree and in what situations he is a skeptic. I follow his blog on Google Reader, but my schedule has allowed me very little time for reading since I subscribed to him. So, [...]

I was pondering this poetic question all day long today, …and although my conclusions may not be quite poetic, …well, they are mine nonetheless.
I will not limit the criteria to the living, however morbid some of you might think of drinking beer with a corpse may be, I want to give the question a bit [...]

I rail periodically against retribution as a notion of justice here on the blog. I suppose it is an artifact of my interests in religion, human nature, and criminal justice that keeps this topic always relevant to me and makes me want to dwell on it at painful lengths. I spent the last [...]

Another brief quote from the master, whose worth I have sadly begun to doubt.
The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and denounce with [...]

I noticed Chris Mooney’s enthusiastic post earlier this week where he relayed some Accommodationist sounding words from Richard Dawkins. I expected that it would draw some return fire, and now it has.
See, Dawkins made these statements that express one of the important notions of accommodationism:
No, I don’t think they’re incompatible if only because there are [...]

Tim Nichols, via normblog…
2 Caveats –
1) I know I promised a different take on this subject in the past, but I’ve always managed to get stuck actually writing it…
2) Etymology is a poor substitute for definitions. I always find it irksome when I hear someone say “so & so comes from Latin for [...]

As promised, not a criticism of the right… And, not my own. Just an illustration of the kind of thinking that leads one down a dead-end alley and holds one there permanently. Illustrated beautifully in the words of James McGrath.
In brief:
(1) Both show a lack of familiarity with the basic data in [...]

Yesterday, in dealing with apologetic answers to Euthyphro’s Dilemma – which I call Euthyphro’s Lament, as it is only representative of a class of problems with moral philosophy – I suggested that there was a certain amount of scriptural support for the apologetic view that God’s morality avoids the dilemma since the grounding for it [...]

It’s true of apologists for anything – religious, political, or other sets of ideas – that they tend to misuse their intellectual tools. It’s equally true for counter-apologists, which often is a set that includes myself. So, I try to be careful, and I try to discuss matters that coincide with apologetic or [...]

*Caveat* This is not a criticism of religion. I have plenty of those, but that isn’t what I’m about here – this is a discussion of tribalism in human thinking, pure and simple. */Caveat*
Via Kleinheider comes a survey that takes up a question very similar to one I was talking to my friend about [...]