As a young boy, I was an avid reader of a series of biographical picture books called ValueTales, which illustrated such virtues as confidence, kindness, and imagination through lightly fictionalized accounts of the lives of historical worthies ranging from Confucius to Louis Pasteur and Harriet Tubman. At the same time, I was enamored of ancient [...]

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This is a bazillion years ago in Internet time, but a quick note on a line from Sarah Palin’s recent book that occasioned some controversy a few weeks back, to the effect that “morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious beliefs.” It may, of course, be true in some very narrow sense [...]

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One of the more noxious and predictable genres of social conservative screed takes the form of whining that the only discrimination we really need to worry about is the failure to make special accommodation for the sensibilities of bigots. Perhaps the ideal form of this particular whine was served up at the American Spectator yesterday: [...]

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Ned Resnikoff ponders the question. It seems to me that the answer is clearly “no,” but for a reason Ned doesn’t actually offer: It would require a good deal less than omnipotence to make a human perceptual system experience any demonstration of omnipotence you might care to suggest. So we might imagine God zipping you [...]

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If you’ve ever wondered what a lobotomy in print form looks like, search no further than this tedious, rambling piece in The American Spectator by Daniel Oliver. The author strokes his chin, at great length, over the question of why, in all The New York Times‘ recent reporting on sexual abuse by priests, “the word [...]

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Edge runs an excerpt of Rebecca Goldstein’s new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, along with the non-fiction appendix outlining those 36 popular arguments and (rather briefly) what’s wrong with them.  It mentions, in passing, philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser’s wry inversion of the infamous “Ontological Argument”: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could [...]

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Maggie Gallagher: There is a reason the Pledge of Allegiance asks us to pledge to our country ”under God.” The best American tradition has never required people to surrender their first allegiance as a condition of citizenship. Well… that’s a fair guess, I suppose.  In reality, the Knights of Columbus lobbied to have the phrase added in the [...]

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Thoreau over at Unqualified Offerings writes: In a report on Indonesia, the Economist makes the interesting point that urban Muslims in Indonesia are actually more likely to be drawn to more austere, fundamentalist versions of Islam than their rural counterparts.  The rural Muslims prefer religious practices that blend Islam with elements of Hinduism and indigenous [...]

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I’m happy to join in a bout of public lamentation over our national ignorance of—and hostility toward—science, but I’m extremely skeptical about this story, which seems to be getting a good deal of bloglove.  The premise is that a critically-hailed biopic about Charles Darwin isn’t finding a U.S. distributor because it will be “hugely divisive” [...]

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I know, I know, it’s her schtick, I shouldn’t be surprised, and certainly shouldn’t play into it by taking any notice when Ann Coulter smears feces on the walls in her latest desperate bid for another ten seconds of attention.  Still: Then there’s Barry Lynn, alleged “Christian minister,” whose stock in trade is to denounce [...]

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