Science
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Richard Dawkins, generally lauded for his attacks on Christianity, discovers that some religions are still protected classes in the eyes of the enlightened world. I guess I find it amusing because it's two factions of the neo-Enlightenment snarling at each other, and especially because of the wildly inapplicable use of the weapon of first and
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In case you missed it in the comments on the previous post, here, courtesy of Rob G, is David Bentley Hart's extremely sharp, in every sense of the word, commentary on a book in which Daniel Dennett explains the phenomenon of religion to us, and advises us as to how to rid civilization of it.
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Found this in an old SNJ (I will be sorting through them for a while) and rather liked it (Dennett, if you don't recognize the name, is one of the aggressive atheists, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea). I had just read a piece in which he predicted that religion would soon wither away, now that
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…as I have, whether an object dropped through the upper surface of a bubble would also pierce the lower surface, or instead arrive at that location after the bubble had finished bursting and was no longer there. Of course the result would vary with the size of the bubble etc., but this answers the question
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It's more about his new venture, which is a series of carefully researched answers to questions like "What would happen if you pitched a baseball at 90% of the speed of light?" But interesting for fans of the comic as well: A Conversation with Randall Munroe. (Short answer to the baseball question: 'The answer turns out
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We were talking about these a couple of months ago. This one is from a neurosurgeon, who had previously believed that consciousness is an entirely material phenomenon. "But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it." I have not read the Newsweek article to which the short notice above,
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A fascinating story from the Sunday paper, by environmental reporter Ben Raines: it seems that the sea-floor-shifting power of Hurricane Katrina exposed the remains of an old cypress forest, now 60 feet (roughly 20 meters) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and 10 miles (16km) from land. In other words, 10,000 years or
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Really out there. Somewhat awe-inspiring. And there's this to look forward to.
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"Alien earths may be plentiful" This one and the variant about life probably existing on a jillion other planets. They never have any real evidence, and although the details may vary (like the stuff about the metals here), it's always nearly pure conjecture and speculation. The fascination of the modern secular mind with this stuff is
Light On Dark Water 