thinktoomuch.net

The first couple of the Ten Commandments (numbering is non-trivial, traditions differ):
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them
(From Deuteronomy 5, [...]

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I wrote about Dan Dennet’s TED talk on memes before. Right now, I want to talk about a 25 second section out of it, between 5:00 and 5:25:
I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is. You have to have a bumper [...]

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While taking a look at pages on quote mining, I came across a rather silly example of how the Bible could be quote mined. In Psalm 14 (NIV) the Bible says, “There is no God”. It does, really! Yea, quote mining can be absolutely ridiculous, not so? Refrain from quote mining. Quote mining is dishonest, [...]

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UPDATE: See the comments for more on the saga. The MySpace group mentioned has been restored.
Skeptico has a post titled Sniveling Cowardly Christians. And yes, the title is justified:
Early this month, MySpace again deleted the Atheist and Agnostic Group (35,000 members). This deletion, due largely to complaints from people who find atheism offensive, marks the [...]

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We need a language with which to talk. For the purpose of this post, I choose The Matrix, because most of us have seen it, and it hopefully left a valuable impression on us. In effect, for the purpose of this discussion, I’m choosing The Matrix as our “Bible”, our corpus, defining the language for [...]

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Polls have shown that atheists are the “least trusted minority”, and that people would likely not vote for an atheist. The God Delusion cites (in the preface) a 1999 Gallup poll:
A Gallup poll taken in 1999 asked Americans whether they would vote for an otherwise well-qualified person who was a woman (95 per cent would), [...]

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Religious people often label atheism a “religion”. Atheists usually fight back, claiming it is not. I want to make a post about this silly debate. In order to prepare for that post, I would like to collect some opinions from my readers, that I can try to make it more relevant and more directly address [...]

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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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Tolerance without understanding seems dishonest. Many “atheists” simply do not understand religion. How could they? They either have not been exposed to it and do not know what it is about, or they come from a fundamentalistic background and have been hurt badly by religion. Many “atheists” simply do not understand religion, but are very [...]

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The Christians are not the only ones with a language problem. I’m sure atheists would agree that the term “atheist” is often grossly misunderstood. The history of the word is as an insult, a very negative word. Combine with that the fact that atheism lacks any memes encouraging people not to care what people think [...]

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