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Being an ethics professor myself, I didn’t need a study to tell me this! A fun experiment: Oddly, however, we found no relationship whatsoever between professors’ expressed attitudes about the morality of consistently responding to undergraduate emails and their actual behavior. 83.0% of professors said it was morally bad not consistently to respond to undergraduate [...]
Archive for June, 2009
Ethics Professors No Ethically Better Than Other Professors
June 30th, 2009 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Hypocrisy, Moral Psychology, Philosophical Ethics 
Tags: Experimental Philosophy, Professors 
No Comments »Daily Hilarity: “The Reason For Everything and the Purpose of Life”
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Bill Maher reads from Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life for an encore… “Rick Warren, he knows God–Knows him? He talks about him like they were in the Rat Pack together”
Posted in Atheism, Bill Maher, Hilarious, Religion Tags: Flood, Noah, Purpose Driven Life, Religion, Rick Warren No Comments »Free Speech is Sacred
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Old news from when I was not blogging that I want to make sure I have a post which is a resource on this topic. Lou Dobbs and Christopher Hitchens with invaluable report on UN Resolution And for more about the issue of the Orwellian UN resolution against “defamation of religion,” these two articles by [...]
à tout à l’heure, Shane
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke For those of you who have followed along this last week, Shane and I have volleyed back and forth 7.5 times in a vigorous, rigorous, and somewhat wide-ranging debate primarily aimed at establishing whether or not religious faith constitutes an illicit appeal to arbitrary authority and whether religions, therefore, can be denounced on epistemological grounds [...]
“You’re An Atheist Because You Want To Sin”
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Austin Cline has a really nice reply that points out the unintelligibility of this old ad hominem: It is simply nonsensical to insist that people don’t believe in some particular god simply because they don’t want to be held accountable to that god. Do Christians disbelieve in Zeus because they don’t want to be held [...]
Sincerity, Hypocrisy, and Mark Sanford
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I loathe witch hunts over people’s personal lives. What interests me are some observations on sincerity and hypocrisy which seem apparent to me watching the bizarrely unself-aware and narcissistic way that Sanford has acted as though he is a character in the Bible or some other morality tale in which he is the star. I [...]
Posted in Ethics, Hypocrisy, Moral Psychology, News Discussion, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion Tags: Duality, Freud, Jonathan Haidt, Lack of Self Awareness, Mark Sanford, Narcissism, National Review, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Sincerity, Vice No Comments »Experimental Philosophers Profiled On BBC
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Click here for a half hour audio broadcast, introducing the basic notions of “experimental philosophy,” the new movement causing waves in moral philosophy the last few years.
Religion in the US Military
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke A report from Al-Jazeera English “We’re government paid missionaries when we leave here.”
Palin As Your Heavenly Father
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I don’t think anything could say God-complex any clearer than this: When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
Andrew Sullivan Lets Loose On Palin (Again)
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke The last year or more I’ve been a devoted reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog. But it was the last three months of the presidential campaign that I have the warmest nostalgia for and much of that time his blog painstakingly logged ever one of Sarah Palin’s lies and character flaws. It was a great source [...]
Swedish Couple Raises Child Without Gender
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke They won’t tell anyone the sex of the kid, here are their reasons: “We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mold from the outset,” said the child’s mother, “Nora.” (The paper used fake names for the entire family to protect their privacy.) “It’s cruel to bring [...]
Posted in News Discussion, Philosophy Tags: Biological Sex, Gender, Philosophy, Sweden, Transgender No Comments »Camels With Hammers Special Election Night 2008 Coverage
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Al Franken won.
Posted in News, Uncategorized Tags: 2008 Election, Al Franken, Minnesota, Norm Coleman, Politics, Senate, Tim Pawlenty No Comments »“Every One is Gay”
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Found this story through LoveAtheism.com—Democrats get into power and all of a sudden the entire animal kingdom has gone gay: Examples of same-sex behavior can be found in almost all species in the animal kingdom — from worms to frogs to birds — making the practice nearly universal among animals, according to a new review [...]
Posted in Homosexuality, Music, Uncategorized Tags: All Apologies, Biology, Birds, Dogs, Frogs, Music, Nirvana, Uncategorized, Worms No Comments »The President’s Speech On LGBT Issues Yesterday
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In case you missed it, here’s a link to the video and one to the transcript. Dan Savage isn’t blown away: my first impression after a quick read is that Obama wants credit for all the great stuff he’s asked Congress to do for gay and lesbian Americans—and he’s only asked Congress to do this [...]
My One Michael Jackson Song
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke So, the other night I checked my computer and realized that not one of the 10,259 songs on it were by Michael Jackson. Then today I was randomly listening to the Simpsons soundtracks for the first time in years and it hit me. There is one song from Michael Jackson (even though he didn’t actually [...]
Against Faith and In Defense of Naturalism and Induction
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke It should not be necessary for understanding this post, but in case you’d like to catch up on the full debate with Camels With Hammer Reader/Debate Spar Extraordinaire Shane leading up to this post, here are the previous installments: Objections to Religious Moderates and Intellecuals 1 Objections to Religious Moderates and Intellectuals 2 Objections to [...]
Posted in Atheism, Authoritarianism, Authority, Evidence, Faith, God, Miracles, Naturalism, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Religion Tags: Anomalies, Christology, Hume, Inductive Reasoning, Justification, Non Overlapping Magisterium, Philosophy, Propitiation, Religion, Supernaturalism, Superstition, Trinity No Comments »Daily Hilarity: “Possession”
June 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Legal blogger Eugene Volokh writes the following about the attempt to rid a teenage boy of a “homosexual demon” “Come on You Homosexual Demon”: That’s a line from an apparent “gay exorcism,” according to ABC News. The article saus that “Robin McHaelen, executive director of the Manchester-Conn., True Colors,” “a nonprofit group for gay and [...]
Posted in Homosexuality, Law, News Discussion, Religion Tags: Child Abuse, Demons, Eugene Volokh, Possession, Religion No Comments »The Alluring Annie Clark
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke The former member of Polyphonic Spree and back up singer to Sufjan Stevens, Annie Clark goes by “St. Vincent” for her own albums and is pretty unconventionally awesome. Here she is live—both St. Vincent – “Now Now” from scheduletwo on Vimeo. and then St. Vincent “The Strangers” from Lake Fever Sessions on Vimeo. St. Vincent [...]
Posted in Indie Rock, Music, Videos Tags: Acoustic, Annie Clark, Music, Polyphonic Spree, St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens No Comments »Challenges To Evolutionary Psychology
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Interesting arguments. I’m not sure how many of them threaten the credibility of either evolutionary psychology or sociobiology as disciplines themselves , rather than specific morally and politically unpleasant theses advanced by particular theories derived by scientists working within those fields. And these arguments force evo psych and sociobiology to incorporate a view of the [...]
Posted in Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Psychology, Rape, Sociobiology Tags: Genetics, Infidelity, Jealousy No Comments »Genesis As A Scientific Account
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Our Caveman Brains
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke No one is immune—the question is whether we cultivate or counteract our natural cognitive fallacies. A professor at the University of Guelph, Prof. Davis has spent the past 20 years paying attention to the use of such seemingly benign phrases: “It was a sign,” “Thank God” and even “Good luck.” To him, such phrases reflect [...]
Posted in Epistemology, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion Tags: Epistemology, Philosophy, Religion No Comments »Graphs Suggest Secular Countries Less Corrupt, More Peaceful
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke An interesting graph: Here’s Tom Rees’s interpetation of the data: the graph (as shown on the right) shows a dramatic and strong relationship between religiosity and corruption. This does not mean that religion causes corruption. A more likely explanation is that a common, third factor explains both. And the obvious explanation is wealth. Rich countries [...]
Posted in Abortion, Atheism, Religion, Sociology Tags: Corruption, Global Peace Index, Peace, Poverty, Religion, Secularization, War No Comments »Rainfall Caused By Frogs Marrying
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke If they want rain so much, they should just move to New York! Thanks to Atheist Nexus for the link to this video and this summation of the story: “More than 250 people in northern Bangladesh have attended a wedding ceremony between two frogs as part of a ritual to bring rain to the parched [...]
Posted in Epistemology, Religion Tags: Epistemology, Frogs, India, Religion, Superstition No Comments »Voyage That Shook The World?
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke PZ Myers with news of a creationist film coming: They’re doing it again. There’s a new movie being released, The Voyage That Shook the World, that you can tell from the tagline — “One man, one voyage, one book ignited a controversy that still rages today” — is creationist trash (hint: there is no scientific [...]
How Best to Support the Iranians? Larison vs. Hitchens
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Daniel Larison excellently states the case for personal support for Iranian freedom but non-involvement by the US government: Something that I don’t quite understand is why anyone would conclude that silence or minimal comment condemning the Iranian government’s violence by government officials requires that private individuals refrain from expressing their moral support. There has been [...]
Posted in Christopher Hitchens, News Discussion, Religion, World Affairs Tags: Daniel Larison, Iran, Politics, Religion No Comments »
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