As you know if you’ve followed this site for the past two months or so, the media have taken it upon themselves to declare the end of the Era of New Atheism. The time of the Four Horseman is gone, they say. Dawkins is now irrelevant, and New Atheism is giving sway to a kinder, […]
Well, I thought I’d seen it all, but this Japanese commercial for a smartphone, brought to my attention by alert reader Jon, beats all. It’s a huge xylophone, placed in a hilly Japanese forest, that plays Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring as a wooden ball rolls down it. Fantastic—do not miss this one! Imagine […]
That’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is apparently holding a science festival on April 12-April 21. Not a bad idea in the home of Harvard and MIT. But what are these events doing there?: April 14, 10:00am – 11:00am Science and Spirituality Sunday – Life, the Universe, & EverythingFirst Church Somerville UCC, 89 College Avenue, just north of […]
THE CLAIMS “The question of truth is as central to [religion's] concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusionary […]
Sam Harris is peeved, and rightly so. Two recent articles, one in Salon by Nathan Lean and the other in Al-Jazeera online by Murtaza Hussain, have mounted nasty (and misguided) attacks on New Atheism because of its perceived “Islamophobia.” I’ve previously dissected Lean’s piece (see the first link), and Hussain’s is just as bad. Here’s […]
Christ has risen, and so has the bile of Nathan Lean, author of a particularly nasty bit of atheist-bashing in Salon, “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheist flirt with Islamophobia.” It’s so over the top that it made me wonder about the guy who wrote it. Lean, it turns out, is a graduate student at Georgetown […]
The New Statesman, like other British publications including the Guardian, has recently decided to solicit some pushback against New Atheism (NA). It includes the latest trope in critiques of NA: they decry it on the grounds that we don’t suggest ways to meet the human needs satisfied by religion. Most of the anti-NA pieces never […]
It seems to me that the only reason the Guardian still employs Andrew Brown is that his ridiculous columns elicit blog traffic by those who wish to refute him. I read him for the same reason I smell the milk when I know it’s gone bad, and I’m rarely disappointed. His latest piece, “Atheists need […]
UPDATE: Reader “GJG” notes that Grayling’s review is available for free here. I’m not sure what has happened to primatologist Frans de Waal, a man whose work I’ve greatly admired, for he’s been on a bender against New Atheism, using all the familiar tropes about the movement being both militant and “religious” in nature. One […]
Here’s an equation: BioLogos + Templeton = Apologetics funded by a ton of money. That’s precisely what’s happened with BioLogos’s “Evolution and Christian Faith” program. The Templeton Foundation has anted up nearly two million bucks for this, handing it to BioLogos in their futile attempt to bring evangelical Christians to an acceptance of evolution. The […]
