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hilarious stuff
Archive for July, 2009
O’Reilly The Insult Comic Dog
July 31st, 2009 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Comedy, Hilarious, Parody, Politics 
Tags: Al Franken, Bill O'Reilly, FOX News, Fresh Air, NPR, Terri Gross, Triumph The Insult Comic Dog 
No Comments »Pastafarians: The Most Charitable Human Beings
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta reports: I’ve mentioned before how atheists are atop the leaderboard at Kiva — a website that “allows people to lend money via the Internet to microfinance institutions in developing countries which in turn lend the money to small businesses…” It’s a wonderful charity. The 5,000+ members of the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Hemant Mehta, Religion Tags: Charity, Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Kiva, Mormons, Pastafarians No Comments »Coyne Vs. The Dogma That Religion Aids Moral Progress
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke As part of a 9 page critical review of Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Jerry Coyne levels more than a few incisive challenges countering Wright’s faith in religion as an indispensible aid to moral progress. Here are just a few of Coyne’s key points. First he enlists David Hume to challenge Wright’s assumption that [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, God, Historical Ethics, Islam, Philosophical Ethics, Political Secularism, Religion Tags: AC Grayling, David Hume, History of Religion, Jerry Coyne, Monotheism, Philosophy of Religion, Polytheism, Robert Wright No Comments »Religion Is Not Truth Apt, Even When It’s A Scientist’s Religion
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Rust Belt Philosophy criticizes Lisa Miller’s account of the criticisms of Collins as being an example of spineless mainstream media not willing to countenance the real crux of the challenge to his nomination: she manages to keep up the dry indifference and artificial neutrality of opinion that afflicts our media, all while studiously avoiding anything [...]
Scriptural Authority In The Early Church
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Shawn Wamsley makes some interesting and illuminating claims about patristic understanding of what made their texts authoritative. Below is just an excerpt. The entire piece is worth reading: The derivation of authority does not originate from the occasion of their writing or the exact syntax of words and vocabulary. Rather, their authority is derived from [...]
Vietnamese Painter Do Hoang Tuong
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Check out his stuff, it’s beautiful.
Religulous: “Jesus Named Barack As Antichrist”
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Joe.My.God picks up this video to which World Net Daily is giving promotion: Your Thoughts?
An Atheistic Invocation
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Pharyngula has a great find: Cobb County, Georgia is infamous for its efforts a few years ago to slap a warning sticker on biology textbooks, which might have given the impression that it’s full of southern yahoos. However, intelligent people and godless people are everywhere, including Cobb County, and they now have another claim to [...]
Call It Volitional Love Rather Than Unconditional Love
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Earlier today I posted Brendan Palla’s reply to my posts on unconditional love and love in general. In what follows, I have interspersed my replies to him within the stream of his argument. I want to open with a bit of a critique. I don’t think you’ve captured very well the notion of unconditional love [...]
Posted in Contemporary Ethics, Ethics, Love, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Plato, Virtues Tags: Admiration, Affection, Affective Dispositions, Altruism, Arbitrariness, Aristotle, Book I, Book I of the Republic, Brotherly Love, Capriciousness, Complete Love, Conditional Love, Conditions, Deontology, Fairness, Good Will, Kantian Moral Philosophy, Marriage, Obligations, Psychological Conditions, Rational Conditions, Reasons, Reciprocity and Love, The Republic, Thomas Aquinas, Tough Love, Unconditional Good Will, Unconditional Love, Universal Love, Volitional Dispositions, Volitional Love 6 Comments »A Challenge To My Critique Of Unconditional Love
July 31st, 2009 Daniel Fincke A week ago I posted twice on the theme of love, spending the first post on what I saw to be conceptual problems for the ideal of unconditional love and then focusing the second post on a constructive attempt to characterize love and then locating unconditional love within that new framework. The next day, Brendan [...]
Posted in Ethics, Love, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Plato, Virtues Tags: Book I of the Republic, Brendan Palla, Brotherly Love, Charity, Conditional Love, Love and Reciprocal Exchange, Marriage, Rights, Roman Catholocism, The Republic, Thomas Aquinas, Unconditional Love, Universal Health Care, Universal Love, Virtuous Dispositions No Comments »Is It Wrong To Advertize Abortion Services On TV?
July 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Sadly this video has been taken down from YouTube.
Posted in Abortion, Applied Ethics, Ethics, Feminism, News Discussion, Politics, Women's Issues Tags: Britain, Commercialism No Comments »Debate On Miracles
July 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Michael Shermer vs. Adrian Holloway
A Catch Up Day
July 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I’ll be spending the rest of the day working on my dissertation and teaching. I’ve moved many of the recent days’ posts to the front page in case you missed them during my flurry of constant posting during the last 4 days. Also there is a long list of blog posts in the right hand [...]
Is The Christians’ God Pro-Life?
July 30th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Daniel Florian sums up the case that indeed he is not: Dear Pro-Lifer, Your God is not pro-life. You might find that statement surprising, but I know this from your own holy book. Despite what you may have been told, the Bible is not a pro-life document. It is, in many parts, pro-death. In one [...]
Posted in Abortion, Bible, Christianity, Fundamentalism, God, Politics, Religion Tags: Daniel Florian, King David, Pro-Death, Pro-Life No Comments »Is Collins Only Being Opposed Because He’s A Christian?
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke That’s Ken Miller’s charge in reply to Sam Harris’s Op-Ed from the weekend. PZ Myers argues it’s not that he’s simply a Christian but he seems willing to inappropriately his professional judgments with religious considerations: The head of the NIH can be a Christian, a Jew, a Moslem, even an atheist, and it won’t disturb [...]
A Lie Detector Test (And How To Cheat It)
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Here’s how it works: First, he’s shown true and false statements unrelated to his allegiance in the war: “I am at a computer;” “I am at the tea house.” The task is to press a button identifying the statement as quickly as possible: A for true or L for false. Next he reads statements indicating [...]
Is Much Of What We Think About Weight And Health Wrong?
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Paul Campos argues so in this thought provoking interview with Megan McArdle, which I recommend reading in full: Obesity is defined completely arbitrarily as a body mass index of 30 or higher (175 pounds for an average height woman). Now body mass follows more or less a normal distribution, whiich means if the the mean [...]
Professors As Insistent On The Moral Imperative To Vote As To Donate
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Eric Schwitzgebel is initially surprised by the data but then does rough calculations about why it is sensible: Now is it just crazy to say that voting is as morally good as giving 10% of one’s income to charity? That was my first reaction. Giving that much to charity seems uncommon to me and highly [...]
Posted in 2008 Presidential Race Tags: Bank Bailouts, Charity, Derek Parfit, Eric Schwitzgebel, Generosity, Iraq War No Comments »Some Qualifications Of My Suggestion For Moving Philosophy Debates To The Internet
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I appreciate Professor Harman’s willingness to exchange a couple rounds of debate with me across blogs against his stated desire to avoid such exchanges and so I will remain grateful to him even if we do not hear further reply from him. Here are his reasons for rejecting my notion of having a centralized message [...]
Posted in Academic Disciplines, Education, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Technology Tags: Academia, Academic Journals No Comments »On The Pros And Cons Of Blogging As A Preferred Medium For Philosophy
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Graham Harman has an excellent (and lightning quickly delivered) reply up in response to my remarks earlier on the profession of philosophy looking into blogging as a preferred medium for more efficient and multi-vocal exchange. I’m quite grateful and want to address a few of his key observations and expand on some of my own [...]
Posted in Education, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Technology Tags: Academia, Academic Blogging, Changing One's Mind, Facebook, Graham Harman 1 Comment »The Future Of Philosophy Publishing
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Fascinating speculations from Graham Harman: Until very recently, the mere act of getting a book published was difficult enough that it carried a certain automatic prestige, provided that you weren’t publishing with some obvious fly-by-night sort of firm or a known vanity press. But of course there was and is still a certain hierarchy among [...]
Posted in Education, Philosophy, Technology Tags: Academia, Academic Presses, Academic Publishing, Blogging, Graham Harman, Internet, Publishing, Stax, Stun, Vanity Publishing No Comments »Judge This: The Ethics and Customs Of Tipping
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I love egg and cheese sandwiches in the morning. Every once and a while I go to my local diner and order one takeout. I never stay there to eat egg and cheese sandwiches but in the past I have gone there as frequently as once a week to eat dinner with a friend. But [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Ethics Tags: Bartenders, Customs, Fairness, Hard Cases, Tipping, Waiters, Waitresses No Comments »The Mother Teresa Debate
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Thanks to Unreasonable Faith for the find. Your Thoughts?
Posted in Applied Ethics, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Fundamentalism, Religion, Videos Tags: Bill Donahue, Bullshit, Mother Teresa, Penn & Teller No Comments »David Byrne On U2′s Excesses
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Via Pitchfork comes David Byrne musing on the uneasy symbiotic relationship between commercialistic pop art and pop art with artistic pretensions through which the big sell out acts make possible investment in the smaller ones which retain some credibility. A parallel situation can be found in the film industry where low budget indies are made [...]
Posted in Arts, Cutural Criticism, Indie Music, Indie Rock, Pop Culture Tags: David Byrne, Live Nation, Sell Outs, Stodola, The Late Show With David Letterman, U2 No Comments »Linking Color and Shape
July 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke A fascinating study seeks to explain why young children use the “wrong” colors for various objects when they color: Young children may colour trees blue or grass red because their memories can’t “bind” together the colour and shape of an object. Because the brain stores colour and shape in different groups of neurons, Vanessa Simmering [...]
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