I was thinking today about the famous split at CFI (it came up in my dispute with Nathan at Facebook), and I looked again at the Affirmations of Humanism. At the first two of them, actually, because I stopped there. Check out the second one.

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

Well exactly. This is what I take gnu atheists to be doing! But exactly. Deploring efforts to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms is what we’re doing. So what’s the problem?

I asked Nathan that, but more civilly this time, and got a very civil reply. We have different … Read the rest

Ho hum. The “help help those god damn pesky atheists are ruining everything” campaign keeps rumbling along. Christopher Stedman covers the “interfaith” outreach branch, and we already know who covers the “how is this helping?” branch; now we have a new branch, the “skepticism isn’t atheism” one, courtesy of Jeff Wagg.

I can see how Vic Stenger’s talk could be appropriate for a skeptics conference, but this really looks like an atheist conference to me…In fact, it looks like an anti-Christian conference.

Aha – the ever-popular move from atheist to “anti-Christian” – the ever-popular insinuation that disagreement with religion and religions is actually hatred of and aggression against religious people. The ever-popular pretense of superior niceness while in fact making … Read the rest

I watched a bit of Eugenie Scott’s talk at the Secular Humanism party again, via a post on it by Jerry. I watched the bit where she talked about The Feeling of bonding with her infant daughter, and the fact that “it is the meaning of the experience that is important.” Science can’t – you know the rest.

A commenter made a very good point about this idea.

Tell you what; if accomodationalists feel (heh) that they must use emotions to show that science doesn’t know everything, and there is room for the supernatural, how about accomodationalists only use descriptions of other feelings such as post-natal depression, racism, bigotry etc. and point out that their benevolent, all-loving god gave