Reading Time: 3 minutes Hello readers! I haven’t contributed to Johno’s blog in a while. I’ve been busy struggling through doing some important things to further my graduate school career as well as watching my country crumble into an oligarchical wasteland before my eyes. I’ll be entering my 5th year of my PhD program at the end of the summer, […]
ethics
Posted inGeneral
Ha! This is More Amusing than Religious
Reading Time: < 1 minute Here’s a serious philosophical Facebook page with a large funnybone. Check out the cartoons.
Posted inEthics and Morality, The Secular
Atheists and Morality: Moral Oughts
Reading Time: 5 minutes Religionists so often bang out the claim that atheists have no basis for a moral ought. Take this comment, from another thread (Atheists and Morality: On Christian Theories of Ethics): Moral obligation ( ought ) and moral prohibition ( ought not ) make absolutely no sense in an essentially and ultimately meaningless existence. All you […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, The Secular
Atheists and Morality: On Christian Theories of Ethics
Reading Time: 7 minutes I was recently railing against naive claims that some theists mistakenly throw about. Let me give you some more of the chapter I wrote for John Loftus’ book Christianity Is Not Great, a continuation of that last post: On Christian Theories of Ethics I will endeavor to run briefly through two major Christian ethical theories to see […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, The Secular
Atheists and Morality: Defining Our Terms
Reading Time: 9 minutes Let’s set the record straight. I’m tired of hearing stuff like this: “Then the Catholic Church is wrong.” Wrong answer. For a genuine atheist, there is no wrong. All you should say is that your opinion is different. Let me give you some of the chapter I wrote for John Loftus’ book Christianity Is Not Great: Chapter […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
How Utilitarian Are You?
Reading Time: < 1 minute There is a very short utilitarian questionnaire from the University of Oxford Practical Ethics blog. Check it out. I scored 45, which is somewhat utilitarian. http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/test/how-utilitarian-are-you-the-oxford-utilitarianism-scale/ Where do you score?
Posted inEthics and Morality, Psychology
Virtue Signalling – Everybody Does It. All of the Time.
Reading Time: 5 minutes I am going to share my views on this apparently recent phenomenon called virtue signalling. Jeremiah Traeger recently wrote a super article on it here at ATP. He’s good, that man. Let’s define it again, as per Wikipedia: Virtue signalling [sic] is the conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing standing […]
Posted inGeneral
I Drew the Line at Canaan
Reading Time: 9 minutes I’d like to tell you about the last time I was able to stomach going to church. First, you have to realize that this was the culmination of years of struggle and tension for me. Back when I was still a teenager, I had only been a devoted Christian for two or three years before I […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Philosophy, The Secular
Dan Fincke on moral objectivity
Reading Time: 8 minutes Dan Fincke, blogger and philosopher over at the Patheos atheist channel at Camels With Hammers is always producing great content. With his permission, I am reblogging a really good piece on the term “objective” which gets bandied around with wild abandon. I am not a fan of it since, as a conceptual nominalist, mind independent abstract ideas beg for a Platonic realm of sorts, such that objective rather begs the question.
Posted inGeneral, Religion
Does the Christian Faith Make People More Loving?
Reading Time: 11 minutes I grew up Christian and I still live in a culture that is Jesus-soaked—or perhaps as Flannery O’Connor once called it, Christ-haunted. It’s not so much that the Christians I know really make a habit of doing the things Jesus talked about doing. It’s more that the spectre of a Christian vocabulary lingers in everything […]