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Following Jason’s lead, I figured today, Blasphemy Day, would be a good time to repost my thoughts on the holiday, originally published two years ago today. I should add the qualification that while I still endorse the Pat Condell video at the end of this post, I do not endorse his more racist and xenophobic [...]
Archive for September, 2011
Can You Respect A Creationist?
September 29th, 2011 
Daniel Fincke The ever-wise Richard Wade responds to a letter from an atheist who is struggling with how to continue to respect someone who he likes a lot and shares a lot of interests with but who has recently been revealed as a creationist. Richard replies:
On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant
September 29th, 2011 Daniel Fincke The following is a repost of an article I wrote in which I explore several possible interpretations of how God could “make things good” and explain why each makes God’s contribution to value nonsensical or irrelevant. Below the fold, I explain the problems with trusting the existing faith traditions to be special guides into God’s [...]
Alessi’s Ark’s Rendition of “Maybe I Know”
September 29th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Laura Marling was fantastic as expected last night. Her opening act was another 21 year old Englishwoman, Alessi Laurent-Marke, who performs as Alessi’s Ark. Her set was very low key, just her on acoustic guitar and behind her an electric guitarist who would back her up in modest ways. Mid-show someone called out a request [...]
Posted in Indie Music, Indie Music, Indie Rock, Indie Rock, Music, Music 
Tags: "Maybe I Know", Alessi's Ark 
No Comments »As I Watch Laura Marling Perform
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke I got very lucky and my one Wednesday night off this semester (and one of my only week nights off period this semester) coincides (tonight) with the genius Laura Marling’s one trip to New York City on her fall tour for her fantastic new album, A Creature I Don’t Know. I am about to head out [...]
Memorializing Suicides Without Heroizing Suicide
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Gay blogger Jim Burroway believes that Lady Gaga’s advocacy for the LGBT community is genuine and passionate but worries about a backfire effect of her decision to prominently dedicate a song to one of her young fans who took his life recently: as I watch this video of her performing “Hair” and dedicating it to Jamey Rodemeyer at [...]
“The Virgin Daughters”: A Documentary on Purity Balls
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Emotionally and mentally warping. Domineering. Brainwashing. Unbelievably creepy. Immoral. Click through video for the final three parts of the documentary, they are not just redundant of the material in the first part. via Musical Atheist commenting at Butterflies and Wheels. Ophelia also points us to more pictures and commentary on Purity Balls from Libby Anne. [...]
100 Year Old Letters From Ordinary Atheists Explaining Their Atheism
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke (Image via Friendly Atheist) So, last week I happened to stumble upon an old Unreasonable Faith post celebrating the firebrand atheism of Charles Chilton Moore, whose turn of the century Kentucky newspaper, The Bluegrass Blade, was like the Pharyngula of its time. (Moore even did a stint in jail for scandalously claiming that “Jesus Christ was [...]
Posted in Atheism, History, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism Tags: Charles Chilton Moore, The Bluegrass Blade 7 Comments »Speak Out For Women’s Access To Birth Control
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Daylight Atheism highlights a Freedom From Religion Foundation action alert: As you may know, on August 1st, 2011, the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Labor, and Department of Health and Human Services jointly announced new guidelines for access to preventative care. The new regulations greatly expand access to preventative care under the new health care act, [...]
Parrot (A Short Atheist Film)
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke A 20 minute Australian short film about a closeted atheist wants to be the atheist’s Philadelphia or In the Heat of the Night. Here is the trailer: Parrot Short Film Trailer from Myrtle Street Pictures on Vimeo. It looks interesting, but I admit that I am squeamish about the whole idea of self-consciously atheistic filmmaking. So [...]
Posted in Arts, Arts, Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Film, Film, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism 2 Comments »Interested In Atheist/Agnostic Knitting and Crocheting?
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Today, for the second time in the last couple of months, I have been getting an influx of traffic from the “atheist and agnostic” segment of the knitting and crocheting site Ravelry. I love that my alternatingly academic and polemical blog’s appeal is broad enough that it is getting linked to by a site with the [...]
Kinkiness vs. Experience
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke The atheist blogosphere’s most ingeniously hypothesizing scientist (Freethought Blogs’s own Jen McCreight) predicts that if only she could get her hands on Ok Cupid‘s users’ self-reported data on sexual kinkiness and sexual experience and graph them, the results would look something like this: Read More. Your Thoughts?
Batman and Catwoman Depicted Having Sex, Is It Sexist?
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Laura Hudson argues that the picture above is sexist, and especially so when taken in context of what has come before it:
Posted in Comic Books, Comic Books, Feminism, Feminism, Pop Culture, Pop Culture, Sex Tags: Batman, Catwoman, Sex in Comic Books 28 Comments »“Jar Jar Binks is George Lucas’s critique of democracy.” Discuss.
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Okay, so I posed that thesis to my Facebook friends and now I pose it to you, my Camels With Hammers readers: Jar Jar Binks is George Lucas’s critique of democracy. Discuss. To kick off the discussion, here is the hilarious Stevarious’s reply from Facebook: Every instance of democracy presented in Star Wars is rife [...]
Posted in Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Comedy, Comedy, Cutural Criticism, Cutural Criticism, Hilarious, Plato, Plato, Politics, Politics, Pop Culture, Pop Culture Tags: Anakin Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine, Jar Jar Binks, Political Philosophy, Press in Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars and Plato's Republic, Yoda 13 Comments »Lady Gaga Caught In A Bad Romance With Satan
September 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I&ob=av3e For those of you who enjoy crazy religious conspiracy theories involving Satanism, the Illuminati, the Freemasons and Lady Gaga, get out your decoder rings because have I got a forward for you (sans the pictures that interspersed the crazy text):
Posted in Music, Music, Religulous, Religulous Tags: "Satanism", "Satanism" in Music, Bad Romance, Conspiracy Theories, Freemasons, Illuminati, Lady Gaga, Paranoid Delusions 11 Comments »Questions For Those Who Oppose The Wall of Separation Between Church and State
September 27th, 2011 Daniel Fincke I imagine that nearly everyone agrees that just because you may do something legally does not mean morally that you should do it. Now, I am firmly convinced that Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of a “wall of separation between church and state” is constitutional. But, let’s say you do not. Let’s say the Founders left it [...]
Posted in Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Christianity, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, Philosophy Of Religion, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocracy, Theocracy Tags: Thomas Jefferson, Wall of Separation Between Church and State 10 Comments »Nietzsche: “‘Good’ Is No Longer Good When One’s Neighbor Mouths It”
September 26th, 2011 Daniel Fincke I argued yesterday that Nietzsche believes that there are objective standards of value for assessing divergent moralities. In reply, Juno (of the blog Letters from Le Vrai) asks what I would make of Section 43 of Beyond Good and Evil which reads, in full, as follows: Are these coming philosophers new friends of “truth”? That is probable enough, for [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Autonomy, Autonomy, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Epistemology, Epistemology, Ethical Pluralism, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Historical Philosophy, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Virtues, Virtues 3 Comments »The Camels With Hammers “Nietzsche and Morality Reader Challenge”
September 26th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In a couple of recent posts, I have begun to explicate Nietzschean texts on morality and moral values and show how they support my interpretation of him as a kind of values realist who essentially could be categorized as an egoistic indirect consequentialist perfectionist. Now there are many texts that lead people to infer that [...]
Farfoculation
September 26th, 2011 Daniel Fincke A reader from the future (to be exact, from the year 12,478 AD, which I am informed in the future means “After Dawkins” and begins counting from the time of Richard Dawkins’s death) has sent me the following stunning entry from her dictionary: farfoculation: n. (far-fok-yoo-LAY-shun) the act of slamming one’s jaw shut, and the [...]
American Values vs. Fundamentalist Values
September 26th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Contemporary Evangelical arguments for the mixing of Church and State usually fallaciously assume that for America’s most historically vindicated political, moral, and cultural values to be accepted as good and as true, either theoretically or in practice, or for these values to be preserved and advanced in future generations, Americans must accept and continue to perpetuate [...]
Posted in Authoritarianism, Authoritarianism, Christianity, Christianity, Creationism, Creationism, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Design, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State, Theocrats, Theocrats 7 Comments »Nietzsche: Moral Absolutism and Moral Relativism Are “Equally Childish”
September 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Recently Joel Marks, a career moral philosopher, concluded that the moral certitude he has felt and argued for his entire career was built as much on faith as many theists’ belief in God is. And in response he swung radically in the opposite direction and came to believe that there can be no rational objectivity [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Historical Philosophy, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Teleology, Teleology 22 Comments »Are Supernaturalists Actually Super-materialists?
September 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Ophelia plucks and highlights a comment so good and philosophically interesting from PZ’s comments section that I just have to reproduce it too. For the background, Colin Tudge falsely claimed that in Richard Dawkins’s new introduction to science for children, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, Dawkins dogmatically imposes on children a “crude materialism” that [...]
Posted in 'Nuff Said, 'Nuff Said, 'Nuff Said, Love, Love, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, PZ Myers, PZ Myers Tags: Ophelia Benson, Richard Dawkins 12 Comments »Alabama City Lets People Avoid Jail By Going To Church Instead
September 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In a ridiculous violation of the separation of Church and State, Bay Minette, Alabama is offering those guilty of misdemeanors the choice between jail and a year of church. Now, I know what many of my atheist readers are thinking–having to attend church once a week is a punishment worse than jail, but think more [...]
Like Revolution Itself In Musical Form
September 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Still the freshest music out there, now exactly 20 years after being first released—every time I hear the opening chords and first drum hits of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, it sounds to me like revolution in musical form: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg&ob=av2e Your Thoughts?
What Women Want…In Porn?
September 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Susie Bright, in an interview with Salon explains an accidental discovery: There were about a dozen women in the ’80s who started making their own movies, magazines, images, and we fought against all the naysayers. Then, to everyone’s shock, the women’s erotica movement made significant sales. Into the middle of that mix, came along a [...]
Posted in Psychology, Psychology, Sex, Social Psychology, Social Psychology, Women's Issues 7 Comments »
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