One commenter on Josh’s post asked for just one example of another “way of knowing” and another was ready with an answer.

Let’s see … do you has a “significant other” … a person you love? How do you know that you “love” that person? Note that I am not asking about hormones or brain chemistry (unless, in fact, you have measured your hormone levels or your brain chemistry in order to decide if, in truth, you “love” that person … in which case, I feel very sorry for you). The question is how YOU know you love that person.

So…the claim is that there are “other ways of knowing” and one of them is knowing you … Read the rest

Josh Rosenau did a second post about ways of knowing and vampires and knowledge and a whole slew of other things – a very long, tangled, complicated post that still didn’t manage to clarify what he is trying to say, which is why I asked a couple of questions as soon as I’d read the post, but answer came there none. As Josh Slocum pointed out yesterday, trying to get clarification from Rosenau is very like trying to get clarification from Chris Mooney – hopelessly futile. This is especially ironice because he says ‘I think there’s some sort of progress underway in the comments to my original post.’ Well if he thinks that why doesn’t he help out a little … Read the rest

It’s B&W’s birthday again. Well actually it was a week ago, but other things were more urgent to post, and I’m always late anyway, so close enough.

Seven years old. Why, when B&W started, there were no proper roads between Missouri and Oregon, and credit default swaps were things that no nice girls would wear after nine in the evening. When B&W started Pepsi hadn’t been invented yet, and dogs still wore corsets, and families still gathered around the radio to listen to Jay Leno make fun of Jerry Seinfeld’s dinner jacket. When B&W started people still thought Cream of Wheat was food, and you could get a pound of assorted chocolates for a penny, and milk arrived at the … Read the rest

What nice people there are running Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s upper house of Parliament has condemned the presidential pardon of a journalist sentenced to 20 years in prison for downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam…The upper house “expresses its strongest concerns and annoyance and considers this decision contrary to the Islamic values and the laws in place in the country”, said the statement signed by the speaker of the upper house on Monday. It called on Kambakhsh to serve his term, and said that those convicted of apostasy and hatred of Islam must be punished.

So the upper house of Afghanistan’s Parliament thinks apostasy and hatred of Islam in the form of downloading an internet article about women’s … Read the rest

Josh Rosenau talks about ‘ways of knowing’ and the non-empirical nature of the claims made by most religions.

It’s certainly true that the Jewish Bible can be read as making a number of empirical claims, for instance about the timing of human origins…But that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible for the last couple thousand years. Maimonides, writing well before any of the modern squabbles over evolution, explained:

“Ignorant and superficial readers take them [certain obscure passages] in a literal, not in a figurative sense. Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain the figure, or merely suggest that the terms

Albert Mohler the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so obliging and has saved us so much trouble – at a stroke he has rid us of the obligation to keep answering the charge that “New” atheists are all wrong because they ignore sophisticated theology and are talking about a crude old version of God that nobody believes in anyway.

Mohler points out that the Wall Street Journal paired articles by Dawkins and Armstrong were not articles by an atheist and a theist but articles by two atheists.

Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our “primitive” belief in his actual existence — thus freeing us to affirm merely a