BBC Documentary: "Teenage Exorcists"

"Atheists' hymnal" from Steve Martin

Berlin on Machiavelli

"Whenever a thinker, however distant from us in time or culture, still stirs a passion, enthusiasm or indignation, or any kind of intense debate, it is generally the case that he has propounded a thesis which upsets some deeply established idee recue, a thesis which those who wish to cling to the old conviction nevertheless find it hard or impossible to dismiss or refute. This is the case with Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx. I should like to suggest that it is Machiavelli's juxtaposition of the two outlooks - the two incompatible moral worlds, as it were - in the minds of his readers, and the collision and acute moral discomfort which follow, that, over the years, has been responsible for the desperate efforts to interpret his doctrines away, to represent him as a cynical and therefore ultimately shallow defender of power politics, or as a diabolist, or as a patriot prescribing for particularly desperate situations which seldom arise, or as a mere time-server, or as an embittered political failure, or as nothing more than a mouthpiece of truths we have always known but did not like to utter, or again as the enlightened translator of universally accepted ancient social principles into empirical terms, or as a crypto-republican satirist (a descendant of Juvenal, a forerunner of Orwell); or as a cold scientist, a mere political technologist free from moral implications; or as a typical Renaissance publicist practising a now obsolete genre; or in any of the numerous other roles that have been and are still being cast for him."

 -Sir Isaac Berlin, 'On the Originality of Machiavelli' p. 315-6

Morality is culturally conditioned

by Jesse Prinz: http://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Morality_is_a_Culturally_Conditioned_Response

Catholic and Evangelical law professors produce joint statement

on theological foundations of civil law...

Full text: here

Against moral sentimentalism

here

Blasphemy law in Pakistan

by Al Jazeera:



*Update: Pakistan Blasphemy Laws Reform Will Give Death Sentence To False Accusers

Cultural Crisis

“The necessity, in the end, of yielding to hard and inexplicable realities that are beyond our control is a tragic truth…That so much of contemporary culture is characterized by [a] kind of sentimentality, by a seeming preference for false ‘closures’ over a strong and meaningful confrontation with real and inalterable pain, is a cultural crisis.”

- Daniel Mendelsohn in How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken

Thought Police?

Debate around neuroscience, law, and morality at the Huffington Post:



Source: here

• Dov Fox (San Diego, CA) Assistant Professor of Law at University of San Diego
• John Bohannon (Cambridge, MA) Biologist and Science Journalist
• Jonathan Cohen (San Diego, CA) Professor of Philosophy at UCSD
• Susan Schneider (Canberra, Australia) Associate Professor of Philosophy at UConn
• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Durham, NC) Professor of Practical Ethics at Duke University; Co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project

Un-Hired Ed

Ouch, America:

http://www.online-phd-programs.org/adjunct/

updated comments on this infograph from leiterreports


Source: Online-PhD-Programs.org

Anthropology of International Relations?

Zero Anthropology comments on Russia's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.

"Lavrov speaks on law, freedom, surveillance, and especially in the final paragraph here, attitudes of civilizational superiority that deny the dignity of others."
 here

"All those, who think that they will be able to establish laws from the epoch of lawlessness, probably act short-sightedly. It will definitely catch up with them later.

What happens with the freedom of the Internet? We were told many times, that there can be no limits by definition. As it seems, this position, which was translated at international forums, was not at all a guide for actions of those, who promoted it in public. In practice, freedom of the Internet was abused and, probably, continues to be abused, as we say, very deeply. For the time being, this is probably causing a mess, at least in terms of morals and ethics.

You can pick any sphere, and it is always better to follow the rules, to respect peoples and help them reach an agreement with each other, rather than thinking in categories of “gunboat diplomacy”, stop to be sick [nostalgic] for the colonial past, the epoch, when they needed just to whisper for everybody to show servile obedience. The world is changing today. It is impolite and short-sighted to perceive other civilisations as second class groups of the population. It will catch you up sometime in the future. We need to avoid the war of civilisations in all possible ways. We are for dialogue, for the alliance of civilisations. But in this case we need to respect each other’s traditions, the history of those communities, which become more and more significant on our planet, to respect the values, which have been created, established for centuries in these societies and were transferred from one generation to another. It is so simple – if you wish to get on well within your neighbours in your village, the same principles apply. A disregard for such principles in the international arena costs much more for taxpayers as well, and, the worst – for peoples’ lives, who then become “collateral damage”. This terrible term (collateral damage) was invented to justify the gross violations of international humanitarian law and is rooted deeply in those, who promote concepts like “responsibility to protect”, “humanitarian intervention” – when the motto of human rights is used to disrupt the most crucial right – the right to live…."

Source

Documentary: 'The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today'

"The Lord Is Not On Trial Here Today is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning documentary that tells the compelling personal story of the late Vashti McCollum, and how her efforts to protect her ten year-old son led to one of the most important and landmark First Amendment cases in U.S. Supreme Court history – the case that established the separation of church and state in public schools."
Found here


The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

"Morality without God"

Primatologist Frans de Waal argues that morality predates religion. If this is the case in our evolutionary history then it would be possible for people to have morality without appealing to God or religion.

Troy Jollimore makes the argument:

"Jollimore [...] cites Socrates’ arguments in the “Euthyphro” to assert that the need for a God-based morality is not just unnecessary, but incoherent. So why do so many remain unconvinced? Jollimore largely blames modern attempts to formulate an “ethics beyond religion,” and the Kantian and utilitarian projects particularly, for not offering a robust enough account of the moral life. Jollimore thinks the more up-to-date “particularism” of Iris Murdoch and John McDowell does a better job of integrating “theory and experience.” Their thought in turn, Jollimore thinks, owes much to the unfashionable Aristotelian notion of “practical wisdom,” and an ethical system based not on “rules,” but on character, judgement, and the virtues. “Moral particularism,” then, is a “secular ethics” that is based more in practice than in theory; it’s also one that Jollimore concedes “shares some important common ground with religious tradition.” (Copied from the NYT)

Jollimore's full essay entitled 'Godless but good' can be found here

Calvin and Hobbes on argument and compliance

Art and Religion VIIII: "Art is a Religion"

Sasha Chaitow, PhD candidate at the Center for the Study of Myth at the University of Essex, has posted some translations of L’Art Idealiste et Mystique by Joséphin Péladan.

Here is the translated 'Exhortation':

Artist, you are a priest: Art is the great mystery and, if your effort results in a masterpiece, a ray of divinity will descend as on an altar. Artist, you are a king: Art is the true empire, if your hand draws a perfect line, the cherubim themselves will descend to revel in their reflection. Spiritual design, a line of the soul, form of understanding, you make our dreams flesh. Artist, you are a mage: Art is the great mystery, it only proves our immortality.

Read more Here