We live our lives for our life's sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we're dead.

religion is to misogyny as disease is to misery - not the sole cause, but a significant contributor

We live our lives for our life's sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we're dead.

Plantinga has written a short, 5 page summary of his views on evolution and naturalism, and it’s lucid (for Plantinga) and goes straight to his main points. The workings of the man's mind sit there naked and exposed, and all the stripped gears and misaligned cogs and broken engines of his misperception are there for easy examination. Read it, and you'll wonder how a man so confused could have acquired such a high reputation; you might even think that philosophy has been Sokaled.

Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again.

Silence is an argument in favor of the status quo. A refusal to address an inequity is a strategy for maintaining that inequity.

We godless lack that certainty, and we know the world is a complex place that requires compromise and is not ruled by a moral force - virtue is subject to negotiation, and is found in working together with others to find mutually satisfactory solutions. Good is not absolute, it is an emergent property that arises from successful networks of individuals. It is also something that is measured by evidence: we look at the good that people do, not the promises that they make and never keep, or the lies that dovetail nicely into dogma. Competence is a virtue. Intent is meaningless without action.