1. Bad Faith Awards: Vote for the winner now

Comment #94952 by Jeff D on December 7, 2007 at 3:35 am

I voted for Archbishop Chimoio early on December 6th, but after reading the text of Mitt Romney's "faith" speech, I wish it were possible to give him a write-in vote.

2. Excerpt from 'The Portable Atheist'

Comment #87348 by Jeff D on November 12, 2007 at 12:29 am

As good as Hitch usually is when he is speaking extemporaneously (and lately on the book-peddling and debate circuit, with much predictable repetition), we're fortunate that he is an even better writer.

3. Christopher Hitchens Is a Treasure

Comment #43238 by Jeff D on May 21, 2007 at 2:09 am

What comes shining through clearly in Novak's article/review are Novak's own muddled thinking, which seems to have its origin in the official muddled thinking of Christian apologetics.

"In our generation, Habermas has called for a greater tolerance on the part of atheists toward religious believers, and a kind of mutual human respect, which will demand from atheists an attempt to state honestly all their debts to the religious civilization of the West — the womb in which modern science gestated and received its dynamism."

Say what? Who among believers is calling for tolerance, let alone "greater tolerance," on the part of religious believers toward atheists and other non-believers? Yes, modern science gestated and received its dynamism in the womb of the civilization of the West. It's gross hyperbole to call it "religious civilization" in light of official religious opposition to just about every significant advance in science.

4. Atheism isn't the final word

Comment #32393 by Jeff D on April 17, 2007 at 1:55 am

My working hypothesis is that Don Feder isn't a real person and that his column was generated entirely through the use of MS Word Autotext text strings. How else to explain the tired, trite reflexive appearance of the arguments about "atheistic" and murderous totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, or how morality becomes exceedingly difficult in the absence of god?

5. Even non-believers must recognise the moral necessity of Christianity

Comment #30599 by Jeff D on April 9, 2007 at 1:48 am

". . . Despite the Professor's example, thoughtful atheism ought not to be an oxymoron."

So "thoughtful atheism" is an atheism leavened with self-doubt? Self-doubt is a virtue when one is thinking and speaking about superstitious, unverifable, unfalsifiable ideas for which there is no credible evidence. I don't think self-doubt is a virtue in atheists, but a little humility (I don't know what I don't know) is.

"There are those who would try to brush [Prime Minister Salisbury's] point aside by denying that the Christian ethic has any value, and the past 2,000 years provides them with plenty of prima facie evidence."

What Mr. Anderson labels as "the Christian ethic" is a high-quality distillation of ethical values and precepts predating Christianity by as much as a thousand years, the major parts of which independently discovered or invented in many human cultures. Christianity merely co-opted these ethical rules and grafted onto them an imaginary system of post-mortem rewards and punishments. Christian doctrine and Christian faith may have motivated many people to behave ethically and may still do so, but belief in any deity or religion is not and never has been either a necessary or a sufficient condition to ethical behavior.

"It should also be easy for Christians to argue that the Enlightenment had failed." Maybe, but those Christians would be wrong in so arguing. I don't attribute the world's current crises (including the risk of environmental and economic collapse) to the "failure" of the Enlightenment. Human beings would be doing better if the values and outlook of the Enlightenment had been more widespread over the past 200 to 250 years. No, our present mess is more attributable to the short-sightedness, the difficulty we have in seeing the long-term consequences of our actions, that seems to be inherent in our brain wiring and in our evolutionary heritage as hunter-gatherers who originally lived short lives in small bands.

6. Debate between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan

Comment #22977 by Jeff D on February 25, 2007 at 7:21 am

The only effective point that Reza Aslan made is that "modern" Islam is not as monolithic or extremist religion as would be suggested by the justifiably bad reputation and of the murderous, irrational, and desert tribalist brand of Islam (Salafist / Wahhabi / hirabah / jihadist) that gets most of the press. I am no apologist for any type of Islam, but my continuing reading indicates that there is more diversity, and more constructive thinking, going on among Muslims than is apparent from the news headlines. The death penalty for apostasy is one reason we don't hear more about these "revisionist" or "reform" Muslims.

One of the main problems with Islam (apart from the fact that it is a typical intolerant monotheistic religion) is that Muslims have had (at most) only the past 1,300 years in which to learn how to cherry pick the practical and sensible ethical precepts from the Q'uran and the Hadith and to downplay or ignore the hateful and the ridiculous aspects of Islamic dogma. In contrast, Christians have been at this for at least an additional 300 to 400 years, and Jews have had at least a 1,300 head start on the Muslims to get practiced at such cherry picking.