Yglesias has a good point on the proposed French burqa ban: [T]his sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be [...]

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I’ve been binging on TED talks these past few days, among them a 2002 lecture by Daniel Dennett on memetics. Most of what he has to say is by now pretty familiar to anyone with a scintilla of interest in the topic, but I was intrigued by the analogy he offered up between contemporary globalization [...]

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AP reports: Hawaii’s state Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill Wednesday to celebrate “Islam Day” _ over the objections of a few lawmakers who said they didn’t want to honor a religion connected to Sept. 11, 2001. The Senate’s two Republicans argued that a minority of Islamic extremists have killed many innocents in terrorist attacks. This [...]

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James Joyner flags the following from Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right: Belief in a deity (or deities), and the desire to worship it or them, is an almost universal aspect of human nature. This not something that can be wished or indoctrinated away, and it’s pointless and maybe even destructive to try. It’s far better, surely, [...]

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I’d been meaning to write something along the lines of this post by Yglesias for a while: Conservative pseudointellectuals who want to convince you they have some special scholarly insight into The Muslim Mind by invoking taqiyya as, more or less, a synonym for lying. Now, granted, I only took one undergrad course on Islam, [...]

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Yglesias, as is his infuriating gift, makes one of those points that seems glaringly obvious only after he’s said it. To wit: If you assume their goal is to persuade people to agree with them, the “New Atheist” strategy of being an enormous douchebag seems counterproductive. Since folks like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, even [...]

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So, at some point you’ve probably seen that absurd clip of Kirk Cameron and some Aussie preacher arguing that the banana is “the atheist’s nightmare,” because its perfect adaptation to human food needs implies a divine creator. This would be a hopeless argument under any circumstances, of course. (Obvious first question: Then why aren’t all [...]

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The Templeton Foundation has discovered that if you want to create the appearance of a lively exchange of divergent views, just ask a dozen people to answer a short question so insanely vaguely worded that you can be assured no two of them will actually be answering the same question. For instance: Does science make [...]

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