Archive for the ‘THE LONGEST CON’ Category
Open Season
Human rights conventions extend the same protection to religious beliefs as to skin colour, ethnic origins, sexual orientation, disability and so forth. The Organization of the Islamic Conference, however, has attempted – so far unsuccessfully – to induce the UN explicitly to equate criticism of religion with racism. This is a category error; beliefs have […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Prologue
Behind The Wizard’s Curtain
Anyone who claims that he knows absolutely that no cosmic intelligence exists is a fool, but this is not what atheism is actually about. Such a position ought more properly to be called adeism, since Deism is the belief in a god that does not intervene. What atheism denies is theism, the idea that the […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Prologue
Buggy Software
If there is one common argument for religion that has little merit, it is the appeal to the near-universal human predilection for religion. When almost everybody believes something, this can have only two explanations: either the truth of that something is so overwhelmingly obvious as to be undeniable by all but the perverse; or else […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Design Fault
Feeling Is Not Cognition
People complain that we think too much and feel too little. In fact it is the other way round. Any culture that follows the verb “to feel”, not only with a direct object but also with the conjunction “that”, thus making a propositional statement, is necessarily in big trouble. “Feeling” that something is or is […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Design Fault
Racism And Rheumatism
It has recently been suggested that what we call racism is a runaway process starting from something that is biologically adaptive but taken way too far, in much the same way as obesity is what happens when the body’s legitimate needs for fats and sugars meet modern refined food. We seem hardwired to be inordinately […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Design Fault
Pulling Our Strings
It is old news that when we have an infection, our bodies do things that are of no value to ourselves but considerable value to the vectors of the infection; “coughs and sneezes spread diseases”, just as our mothers taught us, and that is why they happen. The disease makes us do things in its […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Design Fault
Catching The Religious Cold
I am not particularly enthusiastic about meme theory, at any rate when it becomes a monovariable explanation. Religion is certainly something done to most of us, but that is not the same as it being done to all of us; the danger of meme theory is that it may get the profiteers from religion off […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Design Fault
Whatever Happens, Is Nature.
People talk about God, or miracle-workers, breaking the Laws of Nature. This is a foolishness that comes from a particularly ill-chosen metaphor. Nature has no laws, only habits. We would be much better advised to call regularities of phenomena by a different name, one that does not suggest cops and robbers. If someone were to […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
A Great Tautology
“It is true enough that everything had happened as fate had decreed.” Thus the Heike monogatori. Such locutions are common in every religious culture. But what, I would ask, does a decree of fate mean other than that something happened? Are there two things going on here, fate and things happening, or only the one […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
A Miracle, A Miracle!
The word “miracle” is actually a synonym for “wonder”, but in Latin: mirare, to wonder, also the root of words like admirable, mirror and so forth. Now, when “wonder” is used to describe an occurrence, as in Signs and Wonders, this is actually an elision for “an event at which people wonder”. It is not […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion And Conceptual Muddle
