Reading Time: 5 minutes If you, like me, are atheist, then you have no doubt had this question leveled at you as well. It’s ubiquitous in such circles, but it has no merit, really. Rather similar is the idea that if “God is dead” then we will just go about murdering babies. Let sociologist and colleague here at OnlySky […]
Philosophy
Posted inHistory
The Ides of March: Is Putin a tyrant?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Senator Lindsey Graham recently called for the murder of Vladimir Putin. He invoked the history of tyrannicide when he asked in a tweet, “Is there a Brutus in Russia?” Critics were outraged. But the logic is simple: If Putin is a tyrant, tyrannicide is a plausible response. To call someone a tyrant implies they are […]
Posted inBooks
Book review: Gunther Laird’s Unnecessary Science debunks Natural Law Theory from within
Reading Time: 4 minutes Laws like Roe vs. Wade that many secular people hold dear are under threat. Much of how they are threatened is down to the partisan nature of American politics, but it is also underwritten by thinkers who provide an ethical framework from which certain political factions can structure their legal assault. Edward Feser is an […]
Posted inDeep Dive
Life isn’t fair, so why should sports be?
Reading Time: 5 minutes To help us cope with life’s inevitable setbacks and injustices, we have developed certain aphoristic tidbits. Displayed often on bumper stickers and t-shirts, these include such sayings as, “It is what it is,” or the French version, “C’est la vie.” It also includes the PG-13 rendering of another, “Stuff Happens” (seen on bumper stickers as […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Libertarian free will doesn’t exist, and moral responsibility can’t exist
Reading Time: 7 minutes The free will argument is what got me into this whole thing years ago—it is the argument that lit the fuse to my love affair with philosophy. And, after all these years, where so many others have, my conclusions about libertarian free will have not changed. Definition o’clock: I define libertarian free will as follows: […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Divine command theory defended, and re-attacked
Reading Time: 5 minutes Having recently written a piece drawing on fellow OnlySky writing colleague Phil Zuckerman’s brilliant book What It Means To Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life, it is always nice to receive critiques of my writing. Just to remind you, the piece was about Divine Command Theory (DCT), which is the […]
Posted inPsychology
Sports are for losers: On unavoidable suffering and learning to flourish
Reading Time: 5 minutes The recent Olympic Games, the ensuing NCAA March Madness Tournaments, and all other competitions produce an exorbitant amount of one category of athlete: losers. All told, the 2022 Winter Olympic Games alone sent home more than 2,000 losers. Sports and competition itself is a uniquely unforgiving institution. It’s designed so a large majority of participants lose […]
Posted inHuman Story
The apple and the river | Jonathan MS Pearce
People are different. That’s a good thing. But in recent years, it feels like some differences have deepened to the point that we look at friends and family on social media, or even across the dinner table, saying and believing things that are just baffling to us. And we wonder: how did you get that […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Divine command theory: How the religious are often not moral agents
Reading Time: 8 minutes Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion and nonreligion and fellow OnlySky columnist, has written a superb book called What It Means To Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life that should be compulsory reading. One of the early chapters, “You Will Obey,” is well worth dwelling on as it zeroes […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Obliterating the Kalam Cosmological Argument
Reading Time: 4 minutes I love me a bit of the Kalam. Well, more accurately, a bit of criticism of the Kalam. What am I talking about? What is this Kalam? Well, the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a short, three-lined syllogism that supposedly shows that the universe required a cause for its existence, and with some mental gerrymandering, […]