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Here’s to the many moments gone by already and the many more to come in the new year. Your Thoughts?
Archive for December, 2011
Question about Atheists and Self-Consistency
December 31st, 2011 
Eric Steinhart [Please head over to the newer post On Defining Atheism and Atheists.] Consider the following description of a human being X: X believes that a personal God exists and X believes that a personal God does not exist. I’m interested in which of these options you’d say is correct: (A) There is no person who [...]
On Preachers Who Don’t Believe in God
December 31st, 2011 Eric Steinhart As a counterpoint to the infamous posts on atheists who believe in God, I offer Dennett and LaScola’s work on preachers who don’t believe in God. Here is a Dennett and LaScola paper and here is their forthcoming website called The Clergy Project. But wait! Surely no atheist would believe in God! And surely no [...]
The Logic of Creation
December 31st, 2011 Eric Steinhart At a very high level of abstraction, Sabin characterizes the god and goddess as symbols for two aspects of natural creative power (natura naturans, being-itself as the power to be). She says that “The God represents, among other things, power unmanifest; the spark of life. The Goddess gives this power form” (2011: 117). We experience [...]
Posted in Atheism, Cosmology, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion and Science, Wicca 
15 Comments »Creation Stories
December 31st, 2011 Eric Steinhart Many religions have creation stories. The Judeo-Christian creation stories are found in the first chapters of Genesis, which is the first book of the Bible. There is no need to repeat the Genesis stories here. It can be agreed that there are some metaphorical or analogical correspondences between the Genesis stories and our best science. [...]
More on Religious Diversity among Atheists
December 30th, 2011 Eric Steinhart [I did a short post on this two days ago; I’ve since dug further into the full Pew report and found more and stranger religious diversity among atheists.] The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducts the US Religious Landscape Survey. The survey is statistically sound, and thus its percentages can be reasonably extrapolated [...]
Posted in Atheism, Culture, Featured, Law & Politics, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion, Religion and Science 38 Comments »Revelation versus Manifestation
December 30th, 2011 Eric Steinhart The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are religions of revelation. As is well-known, these religions are derived from the experiences of religiously privileged individuals (prophets, messiahs, inspired writers) to whom it is alleged that God spoke. These religions say that God revealed special information to these privileged people. This information comes neither from our [...]
Dennett Debating Plantinga At The 2009 Central APA
December 30th, 2011 Daniel Fincke This morning PZ is drooling over the book Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (Point/Counterpoint) because it features a debate between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett, and because he is seriously jonesing to see Plantinga get pwned. Well, thanks to YouTube, one can hear it instead! Below is an audio recording of their debate at [...]
Tags: Wiccan Theology and Sexual Equality
December 30th, 2011 Eric Steinhart An intriguing feature of Wicca is that sexual equality is built directly into its theology. The Farrars stress the balance of male and female polarities in the divine (1981: ch. XV). Buckland urges gender equality: “both the God and the Goddess are important and should be equally revered. There should be balance” (1986: 22, his [...]
Posted in Atheism, Ethics, Featured, Feminism, LGBTQAA, Paganism, Sex, Wicca, Women's Issues 5 Comments »The Increasing Prevalence of Woo
December 29th, 2011 Eric Steinhart The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted a survey which reports on the percentages of belief among respondents. The survey is statistically sound and thus indicates that similar percentages hold in the American public. The percentages are: 24% believe in reincarnation, that people will be reborn in this world again and again. And [...]
Criticizing Wicca: God and Goddess
December 29th, 2011 Eric Steinhart According to several Wiccan texts, the Wiccan ultimate deity manifests itself in two forms, the male god and the female goddess. The first way to think about the god and goddess is realistic. This is theological realism: the god and goddess are both real things. They exist. A Wiccan who thinks like this is ontologically [...]
On Participation in Being-Itself
December 29th, 2011 Eric Steinhart On Tillich’s view, since the divine is being-itself, all humans participate in the divine simply by existing. But that participation is not experiential. Any experiential participation in the divine can only be through the distinctive ways in which humans exist. We participate in being-itself through our own being. Since you are material, you experience being-itself [...]
Religious Diversity among Atheists
December 28th, 2011 Eric Steinhart The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducts the US Religious Landscape Survey. The second report in this survey tells us that: Among atheists, 21% believe in God; 12% believe that God is an impersonal force; and 6% believe that God is personal. Among atheists, 12% believe in heaven while 10% believe in hell. [...]
The Wiccan God and Goddess: Reality and Mythology
December 28th, 2011 Eric Steinhart The Farrars have an intriguing discussion of the ontological commitments of Wiccans to their god and goddess. Their discussion has three parts: (1) the realist thesis; (2) the anti-realist antithesis; and (3) the pragmatic resolution. The more detailed version of the Farrar’s discussion goes like this: (1) The realist thesis says that the god and [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Wicca 7 Comments »Charts of the Year
December 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Andrew Sullivan has opened voting for The Dish‘s annual awards and,as always, the nominated posts make for a fascinating recap of the year. What has most mesmerized me are the charts:
Wicca and the Problem of Evil
December 28th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Many Wiccan writers criticize Christians for dividing the ultimate deity into a purely good God and a purely evil Devil. They deny this division. Buckland writes: “the idea of dividing the Supreme Power into two – good and evil – is the idea of an advanced and complex civilization. The Old Gods . . . [...]
The God and the Goddess
December 27th, 2011 Eric Steinhart On the basis of their own texts, presented in an earlier post, it seems like Wicca affirms the existence of an ultimate deity. On my analysis, the Wiccan ultimate deity is the ultimate immanent creative power of being. It is an entirely natural power and it appears that the concept of the Wiccan ultimate deity [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Wicca 5 Comments »Criticizing Wicca: Rationality
December 26th, 2011 Eric Steinhart According to the Farrars, “Witches [that is, Wiccans] are neither fools, escapist nor superstitious. They are living in the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages” (1981: 105). The Farrars write that “Many witches are scientists and technicians . . . If modern witchcraft did not have a coherent rationale, such people could only keep going [...]
See You in the New Year
December 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Hi everybody. Sorry my posting has remained sparse this month. Wrapping up the semester for 9 classes’ worth of students is proving more grueling and time intensive than teaching the 9 classes all semester was. Plus, the family needs time over the holidays. Fortunately, the blog has been in Eric’s extremely capable hands. So, possibly [...]
The Definitive Christmas Meditation
December 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Robert G. Ingersoll sums up better than I ever could my thoughts on Jesus. He gets to the heart of why it has always rankled me when people who do not believe he is God nonetheless fall all over themselves to stress how admirable he was as a “great moral teacher”: IX IS CHRIST OUR [...]
Atheism and Wicca: The Road Ahead
December 25th, 2011 Eric Steinhart I’ve been doing a long series of posts on atheism and Wicca. I’m working out the idea that atheistic and neo-pagan communities have more in common than they might think, and that, as American religiousity continues to shift away from Christianity, those two communities will increasingly be blended into each other. This will be messy [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science, Wicca 8 Comments »It’s Christmas Eve, So You Know Who Is Going To Visit…
December 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke No, not Santa Claus—as it turns out, he doesn’t exist. The Flying Spaghetti Monster, on the other hand…
Atheism and Wicca: The Discussion So Far
December 24th, 2011 Eric Steinhart I’ve been doing a long series of posts on atheism and Wicca. I’m about mid-way through– after taking break for the weekend, I’ll be back on Monday with posts about the Wiccan god and goddess; then on to the Wheel of the Year, reincarnation, and magic. At this half-way point it’s a good idea to take [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion, Religion and Science, Science, Wicca 32 Comments »A Christmas Song From Tim Minchin
December 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke “White Wine In The Sun”: Your Thoughts?
Pure Objective Reason
December 23rd, 2011 Eric Steinhart As immanent, being-itself is just the ultimate nature of every natural thing. So, how does this immanent being-itself manifest itself? It manifests itself in all the categories of nature. These are the categories of naturalistic ontology. To use some language from Nicholas of Cusa, these categories are derived from the self-unfolding of being-itself. This unfolding [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science 15 Comments »
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