johann hari

Johann Hari: Why is it wrong to protect gay children? – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent

Hari lays the smackdown on Melanie Phillips, who thoroughly deserves it.
(tags: politics homosexuality education religion uk johann-hari daily-mail)

Ethical First Principles

A brief introduction to various sorts of ethics (virtue, deonotological, consequentialist). Some interesting comments about what causes us to reject various systematisations of morality and whether our rejections are legitimate.
(tags: morality ethics philosophy)

Ignosticism

"Ignostics take issue with a question so fundamental it's often overlooked: What do you mean by "God"? Is "God" a coherent or cognitively meaningful thought? Is it premature, or even possible, to have a serious discussion about a vacuous concept?" Interesting: I tend to find discussion of the evangelical Christian God meaningful, but I have no idea what it would mean for some other sorts of god to exist.
(tags: ignosticism philosophy religion god)

Why The King’s Speech is a gross falsification | Film | The Guardian

The Hitch reckons it's rather too kind to Churchill and a bit too kind to George. Still a good film, but worth bearing in mind that it's not history.
(tags: history uk movie film hitchens europe nazis wwII war churchill royal christopher-hitchens)

A True Story Of Daily Mail Lies (guest post)

The Daily Mail are lying bastards. Who knew? (OK, probably you all knew, but it's worth seeing a specific example of outright fabrication of a story and refusal to apologise).
(tags: journalism law libel media daily-mail dailymail defamation newspaper newspapers)

Awkward ‘Christian tweet’ of the day!? | Jesus Needs New PR

Complementarian bad boy John Piper with a warning for us all (well, those of you who have daughters, at any rate).
(tags: complementarianism john-piper funny crazy christianity religion incest alcohol)

Did Vikings navigate by polarized light? : Nature News

Interesting, maybe even true.
(tags: physics history science)

Verbal Judo: Diffusing Conflict Through Conversation

An ex-English Professor and ex-Cop, George Thompson, who now teaches a method he calls "Verbal Judo", a primer on communications techniques, focusing on defensive & redirection tactics. This is a link to the Less Wrong thread where there's a comment giving a summary, though the video is good too (but long, as 1:30).
(tags: language psychology rationality video lectures negotiation persuasion)

YouTube – What Atheists Can Learn from the LGBT Movement :: 2010 Secular Student Alliance Annual Conference

Greta Christina gives an hour long talk, which is pretty interesting. One thing I learned was that I probably wouldn't want to live in America, if atheists there have it as bad as LGBT people, though I suppose a lot of it depends on where you are and who you mix with. Interesting bit at the end on how if atheists "win", atheism won't mean you're special, super-rational or whatever: I think we can see that in this country, certainly.
(tags: homosexuality lgbt atheism greta-christina video youtube)

NEVER WAKE UP: THE MEANING AND SECRET OF INCEPTION

Seems to make sense. Obviously, contains huge spoilers. Via Penny Arcade.
(tags: inception film movie science-fiction sci-fi dreams)

The slow, whiny death of British Christianity : Johann Hari

Johann Hari gets all strident neo-toxic sceptical neo-atheist (you missed "shrill" – Ed.): "As their dusty Churches crumble because nobody wants to go there, the few remaining Christians in Britain will only become more angry and uncomprehending." He's right about "whiny", though.
(tags: christianity religion atheism secularism uk hari johann-hari)

Don’t Be Ugly By Accident! « OkTrends

OKCupid, the dating site, took data from uploaded photographs and used it to work out some interesting stats. The better the camera you use for your pic, the hotter you look. iPhone users get laid more. Using a flash makes you look older. And so on. Interesting stuff. Via Mefi.
(tags: photography statistics research dating iphone okcupid sex relationships)

Aretae: Cognitive Antivirus

"Suppose that you are a bear of very little brain, or perhaps an average human on the street, of nearly average proportions, intellect, and character. What is the best thing you can do, belief-wise, in order to make your life better. I am beginning to believe that you should believe in your parents' God, and go to church on Sundays. God and tradition are perhaps the best and strongest way to avoid believing really stupid stuff that could actually mess up your life, or others' lives." Via the Less Wrong threads on undiscriminating scepticism.
(tags: religion epistemology rationality cognitive-bias)

FT.com / Reportage – Immigrant Muslims in Belleville

"Yet there are two main reasons the Belle­ville scenario looks more likely than the Eurabia one. The first is demographic: no serious demographer expects Muslims to become a majority in any western European country. The second is attitudes: only a tiny minority of French Muslims appears to want to establish a medieval caliphate in Europe. In surveys, most French Muslims say that they feel French… Many of them no longer observe Islam. And although here and there Muslims have made France a little more north African or Islamic, the influence seems to be more the other way: Muslim immigrants are being infected by Frenchness."
(tags: islam europe religion anthropology culture immigration demographics eurabia)

Johann Hari: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent

"What can make tens of millions of people – who are in their daily lives peaceful and compassionate and caring – suddenly want to physically dismember a man for drawing a cartoon, or make excuses for an international criminal conspiracy to protect child-rapists?" Anyone, Bueller, anyone?
(tags: atheism catholic christianity culture evil fundamentalism islam johann-hari pope religion mohammed cartoons)

Less Wrong: Undiscriminating Skepticism

"Since it can be cheap and easy to attack everything your tribe doesn't believe, you shouldn't trust the rationality of just anyone who slams astrology and creationism; these beliefs aren't just false, they're also non-tribal among educated audiences. Test what happens when a "skeptic" argues for a non-tribal belief, or argues against a tribal belief, before you decide they're good general rationalists."
(tags: culture rationality scepticism eliezer-yudkowsky)

WebSequenceDiagrams.com – Make Sequence Diagrams with one click

Nice tool for drawing message sequence charts: sort of the MSC equivalent of GraphViz.
(tags: design development programming software tools msc message sequence diagram)

Is Obama About To Become Just Another War Criminal?

"Aghanistan is not a country, it's a criminal enterprise" – Evert Cilliers wonders what America is doing there, a question you might also ask about the UK.
(tags: drugs politics war afghanistan taliban pakistan islam)

George Carlin – Religion is bullshit.

Carlin's classic routine on religion, in which he tells us how he worships the Sun and Joe Pesci. May be "strident".
(tags: religion video youtube funny atheism humour god carlin comedy)

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD —  By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

The Edge introduces and gives us an excerpt from Goldstein's novel. The 36 arguments (and their rebuttals) are included in the excerpt, handily: the moral argument and the cosmological argument are in there.
(tags: religion philosophy god atheism books morality)

Caveman Science Fiction

From the same people who brought you "Dungeons and Discourse": Caveman SF.
(tags: comics scifi funny science satire comic humour)

The Open Road London (1927)

Colour footage of London in 1927. Pretty amazing stuff.
(tags: london video history youtube archive)

Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent

The stories of former Islamists who came back from the brink, and just what went wrong to put them there in the first place. "From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation. "
(tags: islam religion politics terrorism culture war hari johann-hari jihad islamism)

I talk a lot about religion on here, but mostly about generic theism or Christianity. I don’t tend to talk about Islam, partly because I don’t know as much about it as I do about Christianity, and partly because I like my extremities the way they are.

Still, I was interested in the reaction to Johann Hari’s article in the Independent, Why should I respect these oppressive religions?. The Independent uses LiveJournal as a blogging platform, so you can comment there using your LJ account.

Hari says those who want to prevent criticism of religion (notably Islam) on the grounds of “respect” are gaining influence in politics, especially in the UN. He rightly says that this is a bad thing.

The article was published at the end of January, but the comment threads on it are still busy. simon_gardner has been working hard for the cause of secularist neo-atheist militant secularism (he doesn’t seem to get the point about induction, alas, but expat2009 doesn’t really explain it very well either).

The Statesman of India published Hari’s article and ended up with a small riot on their hands. The editor and publisher were arrested for “hurting the religious feelings” of Muslims. As jwz once observed, the Universe tends to maximum irony.

Back here on LJ, the Muslim commentators on the Hari’s post seem very interested in whether people are allowed to deny the Holocaust (and also in something called “Zionists”: from what I can gather these are the equivalent of evil spirits in the Muslim belief system). I can’t think why that’d be, but I’ve been trying to pin some of them down on the matter.