In my previous post, I took issue with how Jerry Coyne crudely indicted an entire religion (Islam) based on the murderous actions of a few adherents. (And that was a perversion of the faith’s tenets, Islamic leaders say.) The way Coyne made his blanket generalization was lame. He referred to this passage in a CNN…Continue Reading…
This tweet and blog post headline is really something: Islam Apparently behind Boston bombing It’s from Jerry Coyne, the evolutionary biologist who apparently would blame environmentalism for Ted Kaczynski.
Every movement has a discourse that is shaped by people who are passionate, committed, and forceful. Some feel so certain in their rightness that they try to control the discourse and purge those deemed insufficiently true to the movement’s cause. A political example of this would be today’s U.S. Republican Party, which, as David Frum…Continue Reading…
So it looks like I’m ending 2012 in a pissing match with PZ Myers. I don’t understand why he’s making such a big issue of my quoting writers like Saul Bellow and Margaret Atwood. I haven’t suggested they are experts in science. I’m merely highlighting observations about the human condition made by literary artists—observations that…Continue Reading…
This exquisitely designed house would be perfect for PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne. I’ll expand on that (and more) in the New Year (later this week). Meanwhile, here’s something from Margaret Atwood that reminds us why religion is not so easy to stamp out in the 21st-century: I think that the religious strand is probably part…Continue Reading…
What do you think happens at death? This I don’t know, but I don’t think everything is resolved with the destruction of the body. What science has to say seems to me insufficient and unsatisfying. This is from a Q & A with Saul Bellow, one of the literary giants of the 2oth-century. He might…Continue Reading…
Two long-running debates involving the supposed purity of science have flared anew. A recent editorial in the UK’s New Statesmen that cautioned against the politicizing of science (using climate change as a prime example) kicked up a Twitter storm and has provoked numerous responses, including this one from a science policy expert in the Guardian headlined (probably to the author’s…Continue Reading…
My mother-in-law is is one of the kindest, most open-minded persons I know. A retired elementary school teacher who taught for four decades in a gritty urban district, she radiates intelligence and goodness. She stands with science on all the hot-button issues of our day, such as evolution. Now in her early 80s, she is…Continue Reading…
In her book Doubt: A History, the scholar and poet Jennifer Hecht writes about having awe for the universe without being religious. She talked about this during a radio interview: It seems that if you have a doctrine, a version of rationalism or a version of atheism that makes it so that you have to be worried about using the…Continue Reading…
Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, has just started a new blog called “The Loyal Opposition.” He explains: What’s with the title? Although I often find myself in opposition with what is going on in Washington, I’m not out to destroy government or to drag down individuals. My intention is…Continue Reading…