Historical Humanists- Beauvoir, Simone de
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“I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.”
“Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul.”
— Simone de Beauvoir Read on…
Tag Archives: philosophy;
King Of Kings
Thoughts on Good Friday as I sat before my TV set
Today
I saw him crucified
But only on-screen Read on…
The Secular Conscience
I recently attended a talk by Austin Dacey, of New York’s Center For Inquiry. He has a Doctorate in Applied Ethics and Social Philosophy. His book, The Secular Conscience – Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, was published in 2008 and has received wide attention. Dacey began with a Bible reading: the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham prepared to obey. Isaac was saved in the nick of time by an angel who said, “Never … Read on…
Fine Structure
Sitting atop the ridge at dusk, thinking. In the untamed valley spread out before me are millions, or perhaps billions, of things, living and dead. No two of those things are the same, not down in the fine structure, or mainly even on the surface. Like snowflakes and fingerprints, each of the things that I see is an individual. Few of them are reasoning, not as we see it. Reminded then, in my mind, I look out into the world … Read on…
God is my co-pilot
PBS ran a program posing (inter alia) the question, “Where was God on 9/11?” The answer: God was in the cockpits of those planes. He was, indeed, the hijackers’ co-pilot. What they did, they did for God. You might argue that theirs was a perversion of religious faith. But people have been thusly arguing for millennia over who’s got the real truth, while religious zealots have tortured and murdered millions upon millions, century upon century, often in service to those … Read on…
Agnosticism, a personal definition
Agnosticism is simpler than it sounds, and also much more difficult. Most would define agnosticism as the view that the truth of certain claims (especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims) are unknown or unknowable. Simply restated, man cannot rationally have sufficient knowledge to either prove or disprove the existence of one or more religious deities, if any. As such, agnosticism is not a statement of either belief or disbelief. … Read on…
An Interview with Jim Haught
James A. Haught was born in 1932 in a small West Virginia farm town that had no electricity or paved streets. He graduated from a rural high school that had 13 students in the senior class. He came to Charleston, worked as a delivery boy, then became a teen-age apprentice printer at the Charleston Daily Mail in 1951. Developing a yen to be a reporter, he volunteered to work without pay in the Daily Mail newsroom on his days off, … Read on…