May 19, 2012
So some time had passed and I felt like trying again with JT Eberhard. I wrote JT, saying,
It’s been a few months, I’ve left your blog alone, are you ready for a real debate yet? Or are you content to continue engaging the “I feel God” arguments? LOL! Seriously, let’s do this. Even some of your own readers are capping on your current blogalog partner.
…to which JT responded,
May 18, 2012
So Greta Christina wrote this reaaaaallllly loooonnnng slog which can basically be expressed in the following sentence: in the marketplace of ideas, why should religion be immune from criticism?
My answer? It shouldn’t. Religion can and should be criticized like any other idea, and in my opinion, the religious should welcome this criticism. After all, I welcome criticism, because through criticism my beliefs are tested. If—like JT Eberhard—I were to shy away from criticism, then I would lose out on the opportunity to test my beliefs. If I lose out on that opportunity, I increase my chance of holding false beliefs. Therefore, criticism of religion is as essential as criticism of any other idea with far-ranging social implications.
So there you go, Greta. Your second straight answer.
April 23, 2012
I imagine nobody really cares too much about this—then again, the thread in question received over 120 comments so maybe I’m wrong—but either way there are some things that need to be clarified about the recent fiasco with JT Eberhard. First I’d like to post all of our emails that I could find:
April 15, 2012
Today’s post is a reprint of a comment I left on a thread at JT Eberhard’s blog. You can find the source article here.
JT, I would like to hold your feet to the fire. I concur with Jayman’s analysis. It’s fairly obvious to me that you *ARE* simply reading what you want to hear into the article. On what evidence do I make my claim? Well, to begin, you’ve framed the issue entirely in the context of religious tension, and completely omitted Gauchat’s salient points about other contributing factors which might also explain the data:
March 10, 2012
I’ve realized something in this latest fiasco with the judges in DBT01. I now understand why Vox, Spacebunny, et al. accused me of “entering into” the PZ Myers Memorial Debate. Technically, I did interact with the arguments more than simple judging required. Although there was no conscious intent to do so, that doesn’t change the fact. This became apparent when Matt DeStefano did the same thing in his writeup of my opening statement. He interacted with my arguments from Leviticus:
February 12, 2012
This post is a request for Vox Day (or anybody) to explain how one can reliably discern the condition of another Christian’s heart. I can’t, and when I asked Vox how he can, Spacebunny returned to her customary pattern of deleting my comments for no good reason. Here’s the story: Vox wrote a post titled Another Pattern Observed in which he not-so-temperately attacked Christian leader John Piper as “an intemperate attacker of other Christian leaders,” accusing Piper of an “insincere apology” over his use of the phrase “kicks some ass” at a particular evangelical convention. I and other commenters felt Vox may have been too quick to grab the tar and feathers, so I asked Vox how he could possibly know that Piper’s apology was insincere. I mean I get that he’s a “superintelligence” and all, but can Vox Day really know the condition of Piper’s heart?
February 10, 2012
Happy belated New Year! I don’t know about you, but I sure had a nice rest. Once I noticed that people were finding the new TWIM (presumably through Google searches), I had to step into high gear and get back in action. My apologies if the blog has seemed “dead” for a while. I assure you I’m now fully up and running and will now be responding to comments and posting in my usual manner.
If you were a regular at the old TWIM, you might have noticed that I’ve given it yet another facelift. Although, this time it’s actually more than a facelift. We went from a WordPress-hosted, generic, rigid, ugly, hardly-customizable theme to a self-hosted hand-crafted theme! The “stock” WordPress blog definitely had it’s pluses and minuses, but in the final analysis there weren’t any existing themes that had the look or features I wanted. So I wrote my own. That’s the cool thing about WordPress: a basic coding / graphic design skill set allows you one to do almost anything. It’s definitely a little Beta, but at least now I can do pretty much whatever I want with this blog (technically speaking). Please have a look around and let me know if you come across anything that looks or works funky. Are any areas hard to read? Any broken links? Any weird paragraph formatting? Page(s) not displaying correctly in some browser or device? Leave a comment describing whatever it is, and also your system, device and/or browser if you don’t mind. So far the theme seems to work well in the major browsers and on iPhones.
So what else is new?
January 21, 2012
This post was formerly titled, “Oh, There’s A Contradiction Alright!” but I changed it in honor of Angra Mainyu because it is such a shining example of the sophistry and willful ignorance so prevalent on the atheist side of contemporary philosophy of religion. Should Angra Mainyu have the wherewithall to return and play fair, and actually demonstrate that which he asserts, I’ll gladly change the title to, “cl Didn’t Get It.” You’ll see, the comment thread says it all.
Of Angra Mainyu’s blog, a commenter recently remarked,
An interesting blog with some good arguments, among others what appears to be a thorough refutation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
I thought to myself, “That sounds interesting, maybe I’ll go have a look.” Needless to say, a thorough refutation is not what I found. Thorough, yes, but a refutation… not as much so.
December 4, 2011
Every once in a while I do a blog shout-out. Last time, it was Andrés Ruiz. This time—since i’ve been absent for a while—I’ll do two: Unshielded Colliders (Jonathan Livengood) and Disputed Issues (Stephen R. Diamond). I discovered both through their comments at CSA. I like Diamond’s exploration of semantics and the way our language shapes our beliefs, and I like Livengood’s general “hold on let’s take a cold hard look at this” approach to making sense of data. Great stuff, both are now in my links.
September 28, 2011
In his post Killer Game, Vox Day, internet “superintelligence,” writes:
I don’t believe I could recommend this as a strategy for most men, but it surely educational to learn that raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman. And women, before all the inevitable snowflaking commences, please note that there is absolutely nothing to argue about here. It is an established empirical fact.
Absolutely nothing to argue about? Is he for real?