I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to Mary Eberstadt's satire on atheism. The main benefit I got from it was excellent counter-arguments about theism/atheism and the aesthetic (e.g., Chartres) and moral (see later)high ground. One point she makes is that abortion is the key issue of our day and the theists have been right on this. Another is the fact that atheists like Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have argued for infanticide and bestiality respectively. If these are heinous yet acceptable in principle to atheists, then the claim that an atheist is as likely to be moral is problematic. Furthermore, she notes an excellent survey that correlates theism/atheism with generosity/selfishness respectively when it comes to giving $$$ to charity. Finally, her comeback to Dennet's reference to atheists as "brites" is to point out "the woman problem," i.e., that women are more likely to believe in God than men: so the question Eberstadt poses is, does Dennet believe that men are brighter than women?
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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