Category: Religion
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In adding a clause to Hegel, Marx remarked once that the great world historical events occur twice: first as a tragedy, and then as a farce. For a 21st century version, I propose adding that it’s getting harder to tell the difference. I am of course talking about North Carolina’s infamous HB2, which requires trans*…
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By: Samir Chopra CS Lewis' Mere Christianity is rightly acknowledged as a masterpiece of Christian apologetics; it is entertaining, witty, well-written, clearly composed by a man of immense learning and erudition (who, as befitting the author of the masterful Studies in Words, cannot restrain his delightful habit of providing impromptu lessons in etymology.) Lewis is said to have induced…
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I recently talked to a US theologian, who just got a job in a really difficult market. He was reflecting on the challenges facing theologians. You can either work in a secular university, in a religious studies department. Those jobs generally discourage you from making any normative claims, or recognizing religious authorities. Or you can…
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By Gordon Hull No, this is not clickbait. Sometimes, the headline tells the story. Gregory Holt, aka Abdul Maalik Muhammad (the Court uses the “also known as” language when referring to him, and I am not sure about the status of the two different names), an inmate in an Arkansas state prison, wanted to grow…
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What do philosophers think about religious disagreement? This is a brief survey (takes about 5-10 minutes) to find this out. The survey is aimed at academic philosophers, by which I mean people who hold a PhD in philosophy or are graduate students in philosophy. If you fit these criteria, please consider participating. Participation is fully…
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In a forthcoming paper, John Schellenberg forwards the following argument: anatomically humans have been around 200,000 years. That's a very short span of time for any species, and only in the past few thousand years ago have we been reflecting on the world around us. If we our species survives even as long as Homo erectus did,…
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By: Samir Chopra In writing about Brittany Maynard, the twenty-nine year old cancer patient who has scheduled herself for a physician-assisted suicide on November 1, Ross Douthat asks: Why, in a society where individualism seems to be carrying the day, is the right that Maynard intends to exercise still confined to just a handful of states? Why…
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Although over half the world' population are theists (according to Pew survey results), God's existence isn't an obvious fact, not even to those who sincerely believe he exists. To put it differently, as Keith DeRose recently put it, even if God exists, we don't know that he does. This presents a puzzle for theists: why…
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There's a non-trivial chance that I'll be teaching an introductory philosophy of religion course for the first time this up and coming semester. When I took the class with Robert Koons when I was an undergraduate we mostly used Mackie's The Miracle of Theism. It was pretty good, but I'm sure that better books must…
