I was reading Tom Clark on the emptiness of supernaturalism and was prompted (not for the first time) to think about the idea of objective morality.

…it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to find in impersonal Nature any sort of validation for our moral intuitions, intuitions which evolutionary accounts suggest had adaptive value, whether or not they reflect objective values. Yet we ordinarily suppose our moral norms do reflect something objective, something that’s independent of them but which they accurately reflect. This moral logic says murder is objectively and intrinsically wrong, period, so we’re right to strongly feel that it’s wrong.

We do strongly feel that murder is wrong, but that’s because we’re the kind of beings we are; a different kind … Read the rest

Just what I keep saying – Karen Armstrong’s ‘God’ is all very well but it’s not what most believers mean by ‘God’ – to put it mildly. If a ‘United Church of Christ and American Baptist minister’ (you’re allowed to ride two bicycles like that?) doesn’t buy her version of god, why should anyone else?

[H]er pastiche construct of the divine, intended as a greater god, reduces the divine to an ethereal “it” describable in ethics as compassion and as transcendence in metaphysics, but unrecognizable in any of the world’s living religions as God. Even she doesn’t pray to it.

Just what I keep saying. Yet Armstrong is pretty emphatic that her pastiche is the real ‘God,’ is ‘God’ properly … Read the rest

Cardinal Francis George, who is President of the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference, has noticed that the natives are getting restless. He observes that US secularism is moving from taming religion to rejecting it.

The new atheism has its followers…In Chicago, we now have atheist clubs in high schools. We didn’t have those five years ago. Kids I would have confirmed in the eighth grade, by the time they’re sophomores in high school say they’re atheists. They don’t just stop going to church, they make a statement…I think it’s something of a fad, because of the aggressiveness of this new atheism. It captures people.

Yes? Well what does the Catholic church do? It ‘captures’ people, doesn’t it? At least, if … Read the rest