uncanni

No one has ever accused me of being intellectually lazy, and I do know the difference between a troll and other silliness or just plain lack of intell...

Perhaps that's true. No public figure is going to come out and proudly announce his/her atheism. As I wrote above, my conclusion after observing the b...

Trump claims to be a christian; I'm sure all the sociopaths running corporate america do as well. That's the problem: there are millions of people who...

This is great information. I have a question: How to respond to people who make irrelevant or intentionally trollish attempts to derail your initial a...

Yes, Coben, I absolutely agree: the fundamentalists are the tools of those groups because they are easy to whip into a frenzy of self-righteous suppor...

I perceive it more in terms of its adherents' modes of behavior, the impacts it has in a given society.

Yes, indeed it does, but whose delusions cause harm to other people? Nobody here is arguing that fundamentalism is right. In my opinion, christian fun...

Fundamentalism may seem futile to us, but it seems to gain strength every day. The force of the irrational is extremely powerful: it wins over and ove...

Cuz the Inquisition would get you if you didn't mention the G word. Now the G word deployed by Descartes, for example, has caché in an albeit flawed a...

I have no problem with the hood I live in, and I'm not particularly concerned with infinity and infinite potential, except to say that I find it a com...

Amity, when I first arrived I caught heavy artillery from a few individuals (with whom I now have polite exachanges); I felt like the new kid on the b...

Fair enough, Wayfarer; in a sense, this place is philosophy for the masses and not so much the place to hammer out our academic, ivory tower positions...

Go back and look at the title of the this post. If this is not the place to think about what kinds of discussions and focus we want to see on this for...

I will do my best to "unpack" my idea so you can see what's in my mental suitcase. A generous intellectual, in my book, is patient with others, never ...

Irrelevant, immaterial, superfluous and avoidant of my point. If you go on the defensive and go wandering away from the topic, I won't play with you. ...

I think this is a weak analogy--perhaps another one of your specialties. A child learning something for the first time has nothing in common with the ...

You are too funny if you think that decisions about how we act and the ideas upon which they are based don't pertain to philosophy. Funny and silly.

Very interesting. This takes the ban on proselytizers a step further. What do you think we should do? Have a serious discussion about re-organizing th...

Interesting indeed how you jump from my opinion to the extreme opposite. I'd say a hallmark of this forum is quite a bit of confusion and digressed di...

I don't agree: we appear to have knowledge of what we are supposed to do on the face of this planet in our corner of the universe. We may not dwell on...

And yet religion has concealed massive amounts of athiests: all you have to do is look at history and it's easy to conclude that these people didn't f...

At one point I was convinced that there were some proselytizers aboard; I did get some PMs from someone wanting to witness to be but I said no thanks....

I wouldn't say that intellectual generosity is a hallmark of this forum.

It certainly won't be passed in the US with its hypocritical piety and the puritannical mask it wears while it drinks, smokes and opiates itself to de...

I have a neighbor lady who will only talk about her children and her garden club. I stopped talking with her... Yes, I had a student trying to tell me...

You shouldn't feel bad; we all need to teach our students to subvert the dominant paradigm!!! ;-}

Dear fellow teacher: I'm glad to hear about the high school textbooks, and I believe that things are improving for black Americans, little by little. ...

I teach at an HBCU and I significant number of students whose parent has been incarcerated. One girl, who's been missing for a month, showed up today ...

What a coincidence. I just posted about Michelle Alexander's book.

As Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I'd also add that probably far more black folks ...

Carpe diem, for tomorrow we die. I don't think the mindless partiers are any happier than the depressed philosophers; they just pretend to be. I am an...

I didn't know that horses could sin. That just doesn't make sense to me within the (I assume) Christian framework you're employing.

Absolutely not. That doesn't mean that I don't reconsider my actions in light of new information. As for Jesus being disowned, and "one," you lost me ...

Actually, the book of Job is in the Tanakh, and is thus not the christian god, but the god of the hebrews. That being said, I'd like to hear your idea...

Brave, ethical man--except that we seem to living in a culture that values the opposite: deny the truth at all costs--just like the lawyers for big ph...

I wasn't attracted to Hegel and read very little of him. I believe that for various German writers, it's a travesty to translate them to English; Mart...

Hi Mark, I started watching it, but it didn't grab me; I was at work anyway and distracted. But I felt like I understood the gist of what you wrote, a...

You're a deconstructionist in the finest sense of the word. Knowing that madness can never be permanently banished is a step in the right direction. M...

So you perceive the death of a star as evil? Or the big bang, or a black hold? I can't agree with that. I see evil as a strictly human action. Althoug...

I knew that, because I did read you carefully. I have been in an existential funk for weeks and if anyone said to me right now, "get over it," I'd go ...

I agree: I'm not seeking an easy resting place for my mind or my beliefs. Sometimes I think things would be a lot easier if I just knew that I was sav...

We are all pigs in the same pen, then; I certainly don't consider myself grown up yet. Maybe the 70s will usher in more maturity...

Which is what Bakhtin's notion of dialogism does. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of monologists lurking about.

I was just going to leave this forum, but decided to stay. I'm glad I did: there are some really smart, articulate people I love to read. We all have ...

It does feel good to "dominate" the discussion (although I prefer for a term like convince or enlighten to dominate) if you are able to persuade your ...

This is exactly what trolls do. I did quite a bit of reading on trolls over the summer, and you have characterized the game they play to a t. Here's p...

I can't think of two more anthropomorphic words than Good and Evil: these concepts apply to human behavior; I see no evidence of Good or Evil up to an...

Excellent question. Why do some people endlessly seek negative excitement and domination rather than collaboration? I see it fundamentally as a repeti...

It's true, but sometimes it's there and we can't pretend it's not. And at least for me, it takes time to snap out of.

I don't think that "get over it" is the right thing to say. I mean, that's pretty callous. Of course, you don't really want to talk about it with many...