A Thinking Reed

  • On becoming politically predictable

    I haven’t done much political blogging lately, which in part has to do with the fact that (1) my core interests generally lie elsewhere and (2) I think you, dear reader, can probably get better-quality political blogging elsewhere. Another reason, though, has to do with the fact that, over the last few years, my political…

  • Friday Metal: Finnish folk metal edition

    You read that right. The video has a kind of Lord of the Rings vibe.

  • Ruse on The Moral Landscape

    Philosopher Michael Ruse takes a sledgehammer to Sam Harris’s new book on morality: I don’t know what Harris studied in his philosophy courses as an undergrad at Stanford, but they don’t seem to have penetrated very deeply. He denounces philosophers before him (including myself, I should admit) without really addressing the challenge their arguments pose…

  • Chimps, morals, and God

    This Frans de Waal essay and the accompanying video discussion with Robert Wright, on the evolutionary roots of morality, are worth checking out. De Waal’s argument is that moral impulses exist in our non-human animal relatives–particularly our closest relatives, the primates–and that we can see morality emerging along a continuum as a completely “natural” phenomenon.…

  • The thorn in the flesh and the “weakness gospel”

    I’m reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book The First Paul, and it’s really good so far. I may have more to blog about the overall themes later, but for now I just wanted to note one interesting tidbit. There has been a lot of speculation about the “thorn in the flesh” that Paul…

  • Human “exceptionalism” as moral exclusion

    In his review of Wesley Smith’s book that I linked to below, Angus Taylor puts his finger on exactly what has long bothered me about Smith’s rhetoric of “human exceptionalism”: Even if can be shown … that all human beings deserve an elevated moral status, it is not clear why this elevated status should entail…

  • Spoiler alert!

    This trailer for the 1956 John Huston/Gregory Peck film version of Moby-Dick gives an awful lot away. Maybe they were assuming most people had read the book? I haven’t seen it yet, but the New York Times liked it quite a bit.

  • Friday Metal: Darkest Hour, “Demon(s)”

  • Friday links

    – Chris Hayes: Postcard from Palestine – Endangered red wolves being hunted to extinction – Tea partiers fantasize about a “constitutionally pure” government – Jean Kazez on Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape – On not really believing in heaven – Corporations gain privacy rights as people lose them – Soldiers against torture – A…

  • “God loves you beyond your wildest imagining”

    This video from Bishop Gene Robinson has been making the rounds as part of the “It Gets Better” campaign: Bishop Robinson doesn’t tap-dance around anything. He simply says that those who tell gay kids that they’re “intrinsically disordered” or “an abomination” are “flat-out wrong.” I wonder how many young gay or lesbian people have never…