Jerry has a post on free will (the latest of a series) and it has set off an interesting discussion; see especially the comments by Tom Clark and Russell Blackford, and several by Eric MacDonald.

This subject doesn’t fret me the way it does some people, and I suspect that’s because I’m lazy about it. I’m lazy about a lot of things. It doesn’t fret me because I always end up thinking “but it feels as if I choose and in a way that feeling amounts to the same thing as really choosing.” That’s probably lazy because of the “in a way” or the “amounts to” or both. It’s woolly. And yet –

And yet if we all do … Read the rest

Ulrika (who did most of the steering me from place to place in Stockholm) told me on the Saturday that she had uploaded audio from the seminar to the Humanisterna site. I looked for it but couldn’t find it, possibly because it’s hiding behind some Swedish words.

But in looking for it I found something else, which is one of the pictures Ulrika took of me while we were walking to her mother’s apartment where the atheist gender group met. That stuff in the background? That’s Stockholm.

… Read the rest

You know how pundits and armchair “theologians” like Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton like to pour scorn on the idea that anybody except dopy militant clueless atheists thinks God is an omnipotent supernatural being who answers prayers. Well Paul Cliteur points out in The Secular Outlook (p 176) that there is such a thing as the Apostle’s Creed, and also such a thing as the catechism. That’s an obvious enough point, but it’s fun to see people remind us of it, or to remind us of it oneself.

Cliteur goes on to quote Armstrong in The Case for God:

Surely everybody knows what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything

I had one long-standing mistake corrected on the trip to Stockholm. I had been thinking, ever since first hearing from Christer (in January I think), that Fri Tanke was a magazine as well as a publishing company, and that it had published that article by Julian saying “The New Atheist movement is destructive.” I was wrong. I found this out when we were all out for dinner in Östermalm and talking about the hostility to overt atheism, which they talked about before I did, much to my surprise – I thought Sweden would be better that way than the Anglophone countries, but it’s not. So we were talking about this so I said very cautiously, “…And yet you published that … Read the rest

I saw a bunch of terrible movies, or bits of them, on this recent trip, what with two long flights and a few spare moments in a hotel room. I found it vaguely interesting how horrible they all were. I thought I’d say which ones they were and why I thought they were horrible in case anyone else has seen any of them too and thought so too, or thought the opposite.

The first one was on the Seattle to Amsterdam flight, and it’s the only one I saw the beginning and end of along with much in between. Spoiler alert – I’m going to say how it ends, so if you care, don’t keep reading – but you … Read the rest

I like to see professionals using their professonalism to be professional and serious and rule-following and everything.

“I can remember, 30 years ago, if a person wanted to learn about reincarnation, they would go into a bookstore and go into a very back corner, to a section called ‘Occult,’ ” said Janet Cunningham, president of the International Board for Regression Therapy, a professional standards group for past-life therapists and researchers.

See? Like that. It’s good that regression thereapists have an International Board which is a professional standards group so that they will do their regression therapy according to standards as opposed to just any old how. It makes me feel safe, and looked after, and protected, and reincarnated.

The popular