Author: Ophelia Benson

Why do people believe or disbelieve?

TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

(1) Check out that tree. Isn’t it pretty?
(2) Therefore, God exists.

Alternative to what? Testing and evidence?

‘A superficially historicist, materialist case – our beliefs and assumptions are embedded in our practical forms of life – leads not only to a kind of epistemological idealism, but to the deeply convenient doctrine that our way of life cannot be criticised as a whole.’

‘Among intellectuals and in the academic world, any attempt to blame Islam for women’s oppression is stamped as Orientalism.’

‘The Epistemological Situation of Astrology in Relation to the Ambivalent Fascination/Rejection of Postmodern Societies’

Confusing religion and race is a clever trap the religious have laid for a worried government rightly anxious about race.

‘To concede that no one ever believes something solely because it’s true is not to deny that anything is objectively true.’

‘The protection built into Theory…is composed of layer on layer of ignorance.’

Deniers distort history in order to promote antisemitism and white supremacy.

‘We are born of primordial slime, not at the hands of a benevolent and concerned supreme being who lovingly crafted us from clay.’

Don’t essentialize Indianness, but you’d better get the Real India right.

How Intelligent Design Creationism Is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream

Azam Kamguian on what the anti-secularist backlash has done to education.

‘What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous?’

‘I don’t need a Hell to fear to be ethical, or a paradise to reward me for my good.’

Bernard Ortiz De Montellano on gibberish dressed up as education.

‘Whenever you’re told that you shouldn’t look into something, for some people, that is a very clear directive that you ought to keep looking.’

NAGPRA is a well-intentioned piece of legislation that has grown into a monster of anti-scientific bias.

NAGPRA proceeds from an antievolutionary perspective grounded in fundamentalist religious belief.