Michael Ruse bending over backward and kissing his own ass in his effort to be Nice to religious believers again. The pope says in his Easter sermon that humans can’t be “a chance of nature.” Ruse Understands.

Now let me try to be understanding here. I realize where the Pope is coming from. As a Christian, humans cannot be just a chance occurrence.

No kidding; we all understand that much; it’s obvious. But never mind that – what I want to know is, why does Ruse try to be understanding there? Why is he so keen to understand the pope when he never ever says “Now let me try to be understanding here. I realize where the new atheists are … Read the rest

The Freedom Rides were fifty years ago this month.

They weren’t universally seen as a good idea within the movement at the time – many people thought they were too much: too much of a deliberate provocation, too likely to trigger violence, too risky.

Well – they were a deliberate provocation, made by doing something that was entirely legal, and unexceptionable (to wit, making use of a public commercial facility). They did trigger violence, but the violence finally, after a lot of chickenshit footdragging by the Kennedy brothers, in turn triggered a federal response: when a mob attacked a church full of civil rights activists in Montgomery and pinned them inside, in fear of being burned alive, martial law was … Read the rest

Fucking hell.

Police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have filed preliminary charges against two women accused of killing their daughters.

The women, who were neighbours and are both Muslim, were reportedly furious with their daughters for eloping with Hindu men, police told the BBC.

Zahida, 19, and Husna, 26, were strangled last week after they returned home to make peace with their families.

I know it’s nothing new.  It’s just so depressing. They went home, to make peace with their families – and their mothers strangled them.

That just……..

it makes me despair. Their mothers strangled them. For marrying Hindu men.

One of the accused is quoted by the Indian Express newspaper as saying after being arrested,

I thought the first couple of paragraphs of Joshua Rothman’s interview with Patricia Churchland were more interesting than anything in The Moral Landscape. That sounds very rude, but it’s not meant to – it’s just that TML was fundamentally uninteresting to me because it sidestepped everything that’s genuinely interesting about humans and morality. Churchland, on the other hand, zoomed right in on it.

 She starts by explaining what’s most clearly known about how morality works in the brain. We know, she argues, that human moral behavior is rooted in the brain’s “circuitry for caring”—ancient biological circuitry that we share with other mammals. (When wolves care about their offspring, what happens in their brains and bodies is remarkably similar to