Tom Flynn replies to James Croft on the subject of ritual.

First he points out that once a religious ritual is removed from its original (religious) context, it becomes something different. Why? Because religious ritual is about or addressed to a supernatural entity, and secular ritual isn’t, and that’s a big difference.

Believers direct their singing toward the supernatural; naturalists disbelieve that the supernatural exists. In other words, in the single case when activities that were ritualistic in congregational life are transplanted into humanist – even religious-humanist – practice, the motivations for engaging in that behavior do not – cannot follow along with them. The other-referring practice of ritual hymn-singing becomes non-other-referring when dragged into a naturalistic setting.

And that … Read the rest

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I posted about Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? last month, here and here. I was addressing the fact (discussed by Richard Carrier on an article by Ehrman in the Huffington Post) that Ehrman says “we have” sources that we don’t actually literally have, because they didn’t survive. I confirmed that he does it in the book too (because Richard didn’t then have the book), and that it had jumped out at me. There are other things to say about the book though.

First, however: there are more places where his wording is (in my view) too realist about hypothetical early sources that have not survived.

In a passage where he is talking about the NT evidence (Galatians … Read the rest

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There’s this thing called Skepticon, and the next one (5) is November 9-11, and because we are Special here at FTB, we can tell you how to order a Skepticon 5 T shirt and get a free gift. (How Special is that?!) (No I don’t know what it is. I’m assuming it’s a secret decoder ring, because what else could it be, but I don’t know.)

Here’s what you do: you enter a Special Code in the Special Code section. Can you do that? I thought you could.

The Special Code is:

FtButterflies

Unless of course you decide you’d rather get a different code from a different FTB blogger.

… Read the rest

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There’s a new Jesus and Mo…which Jesus kicks off by pronouncing the Koran overrated.… Read the rest

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I’m reading Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s collection of essays Making Minds and Madness: From Hysteria to Depression. It’s about what one might call the epistemology of psychoanalysis, and its relationship to things like reputation and fashion and consensus. There’s a bit on page 160…

The fact is that psychoanalysis managed to impose itself in significant sectors of twentieth-century society as the only psychological theory worthy of the name and the only psychotherapy capable of theorizing its own practice. In such locations, calling into question the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, or infantile sexuality could – and still can – provoke the same incredulous hilarity as do Kansas creationists or members of the “Flat Earth Society.” There, psychoanalysis has become indisputable, incontrovertible. It

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Excellent piece by Dan Fincke the other day, on why Dawkins wasn’t wrong or mean to say at the Reason Rally that patently absurd religious beliefs should be as subject to mockery as any other patently absurd beliefs, and in fact more so, since their very immunity helps people to go on being included as “Catholics” and other brands of believer when in fact they aren’t really believers at all.

While the media has largely ignored The Reason Rally, the one most popular bit of news that seems to be traveling around and getting criticized is Richard Dawkins’s recommendation to the crowd that we should incredulously and mockingly ask people who say they are Catholic whether they really believe in

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The archbishop is at it again. This time it’s “enough of all this selfish focus on how you are marginalized because you’re a woman or black or gay – we are all in this together so shut up about it and let the nice straight white men keep running things as we always have, ok?”

Of course he doesn’t put it quite that way. Well naturally not – you don’t get to be an archbishop by putting things that way. (Oh yes? What about George Carey then?) He puts it in the usual grand archepiscopal way.

In Cardiff he was joined a group of teenagers debating the idea of “identity politics” which he said amounted to saying: “This is

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A nice write-up of a chat by David Cameron to some religious bossies.

He starts by saying he welcomes the Easter message as being one of hope, but at the same time admits that he has problems believing a word of it – particularly the resurrection! Even so, he welcomes what he calls the “Christian fightback” in Britain.

It is not clear what this “fightback” is against but he measures it in “the enormous reception of the Pope’s visit.”

However, the Pope’s visit – as the Catholic Church’s own research showed – was a comprehensive flop.

And if it hadn’t been, what would he be doing rejoicing about it anyway? What is this deranged assumption that all of a … Read the rest

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The French approach to autism was discussed a couple of months ago, too.

A controversial new film by French documentary filmmaker Sophie Robert, screened  last week at an autism  conference here in Philadelphia, reminds the world that in France these  thoroughly discredited and dangerous ideas still hold considerable sway. The film, Le  Mur or The Wall, already viewed  tens of thousands of times on YouTube, is calling attention to the ongoing  stranglehold that psychoanalytic theories still have over autism treatment in  France.

The film’s interviews with prominent French psychiatrists leaves the viewer  wondering whether in France treatments for pediatric developmental disorders are  stuck in some sort of bizarre Freudian time warp. These ideas have been so  thoroughly debunked in

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