Category Archives: religion

True Meaning

Posted on 2013-05-20 by TJ

A friend recently used the acronym “SMH” and I had no clue what it meant, so I looked it up via one of those search engine thingies all the cool kids are talking about. It linked me to an entry … Continue reading →

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More Things That Are Not Arguments

Posted on 2013-04-22 by TJ

I recently had some interactions with anti-gun-control people (there is a lot of that about) in which one of them offered the following statement (which is not an argument): “if someone is really intent on hurting someone, even if they … Continue reading →

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Supernatural Explanations

Posted on 2013-04-01 by TJ

Before talking about supernatural explanations, it’s a good idea to say something about explanations in general. An explanation is a causal account of a particular situation based on general principles, laws or abstractions. Causal accounts are general, explanatory accounts are … Continue reading →

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Why Isn’t the Germ Theory of Disease Mentioned in Scripture?

Posted on 2013-02-24 by TJ

My text for the day will be the Gospel According to Lister, in which he recounts the revelation God gave to His beloved prophet, Pasteur: And in those days there was a great sickness in the land, and the people … Continue reading →

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Blur

Posted on 2013-02-05 by TJ

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. There is a lot of stuff entailed by that claim: the whole of actual scientific practice, in fact. The specific sciences and subdisciplines all have their … Continue reading →

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The Mess That’s Texas

Posted on 2012-07-14 by TJ

The Republican Party of Texas (RPT) has released a platform that is so over-the-top stupid and self-contradictory it reads like a parody of itself. The brain trust of the RPT begins by affirming that governments in the US ought to … Continue reading →

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Some Notes on the Higgs

Posted on 2012-07-04 by TJ

It looks very likely that the Higgs boson has been observed at CERN. There’s a lot of careful, discriminating, detailed and precise analysis to be done yet, but the data so far are consistent with a Standard Model Higgs, which … Continue reading →

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The Consequentialist Conversion

Posted on 2012-04-02 by TJ

Most people are uncomfortable with deontology, the practice of making moral choices in accordance with fundamental principles and regardless of consequences. The people who are comfortable with it are usually pretty scary. We call some of them “fundamentalists”, for obvious … Continue reading →

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Losing Religion

Posted on 2012-04-01 by TJ

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes is an absolutely fascinating, compelling, humane and curious book. It is a mix of personal memoir and linguistic field study and theory by Dan Everett, who spent a good chunk of the past thirty years … Continue reading →

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Escallating Violence Against Iran is the Road to War

Posted on 2012-02-05 by TJ

I know a little bit about the development of nuclear weapons, and I am comfortable saying that if Iran wants them, Iran will get them. There are a few tricks, but basically everything from Manhattan is now public, and what … Continue reading →

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