Search results for query: *

He was nice about it, but even Obama tacitly admitted that the debate was a bit of a disaster:

In regular life, the practical art of politesse demands nothing from me but such half-truths and generous abstractions as my students and colleagues are prepared to entertain. In forumland, I indulge in the temporary luxury of being uncouth, but blessedly correct.

Indeed. Accuracy is not always emotionally satisfying.

Skeptics routinely challenge the historicity of the Biblical events based on a paucity of contemporary documents describing them. But if GMark is too late to count as a plausible eyewitness account, then Origen is really too late.

In fairness, though John Shelby Spong was a bishop, he also considered himself an atheist, and his proposed reforms to the church were so considerable in scope that I'm not sure the resulting permutation of Anglicanism would have been considered Christian by most other followers of the faith. I...

They do, although this erases the implications of some important biblical passages. It is always harder to achieve translation into a more linguistically removed tongue. Romance language translations of the Bible are sometimes more accurate for this reason, being at least slightly more inflected...

The Tao which can be translated is not the eternal Tao, anyway. ;)

Painfully plausible, despite his reputation as "fightin' Joe". Then again, I think the more likely case is that he simply could not read the room, and had no idea that more than half of Americans would become uncomfortable with Netanyahu's retributive genocide as quickly as they did. He thought...

There's only so careful I'm willing to be on questions of civil rights and the equal application of the law. There were plenty of real cases of black men raping white women in the Jim Crow South. Cases true beyond a doubt. But you cannot penalize a population for the crimes of an individual, and...

Must I? Perhaps you can find contentment in the simple joy of providing me so many opportunities to say true things. I know I do.

I'd find that explanation more convincing if we'd heard it before he started fumbling.

Jesus, if only... But of course, that would just mean she was constantly at odds with the houses of Congress... It's funny how conservatives genuinely believe that one of the most painfully impotent factions in the Legislative branch is secretly ruling it, just because politicians occasionally...

No, but they are a disadvantaged class that white women were afraid to see in their changing room. Like trans folks. The racists of your childhood didn't say "I hate blacks and that's why I want to discriminate against them". They said things like "I have nothing against Ne---s personally. We...

This is a feeling, not an observation. What does it mean to be "free to do as you please"? How would a universe in which the God's favorite primates are "free to do as they please" look demonstrably, measurably different from a universe in which no primates were "free to do as they please"?

Do I? Compatiblism will need to make a clear and cohererent claim before it "has problems" with anything.

We did indeed! Clever, clever monkeys. But if you do encounter a person or book with knowledge of quantum mechanics, you should embrace it as the next step in better understanding the universe, not reject it because late medieval chemistry was good enough for your grandpappy. If you reify a...

Except that the person who used too much Glen-20 when cleaning the room that morning had a lot more to do with it than Steve did, or even you did. If they didn't overdo it with the damn disinfectant, none of it would have happened. You didn't "choose" to be irrationally angry at Steve, and Steve...

It isn't, though. It absolutely requires inputs from beyond your body in order to function at all. A brain without external stimuli and nutrients is just a lump of carbon slowly decaying into the soil, not even salvageable let alone functional. We look back on our day and think "I was mad at...

I think that's an excellent analogue, but not for the reasons you think. That claim, "I know that pushing the right hand pedal makes it go faster" is only a reasonable position insofar as it is deduced from a pattern observed in the real world. It also isn't strictly true. Sure, it will get you...

Because you are defending free will, or claiming to. Have you really never read any of the literature on free will at all? I get that you think you can discuss Sapolsky without reading Sapolsky, but you haven't even read the fundamental literature on your own side of the debate? Yes, free will...