GQ magazine ranks Salt Lake City and Provo among the worst-dressed cities in the country. Our fashion sense aside, Utahns are still counted among the best looking people. Maybe it’s all that plastic surgery.
Harrison Ames argues that the frequent use of corrective words and phrases like “rather” and “in other words” in the Book of Mormon is more consistent with dictation than inspired translation.
A preview of this year’s Sunstone conference, August 3-6 in Ogden.
New rule: When you lose your religion, you must blog about it. In keeping with this rule, ex-Mormon Tyler Young has posted his essay “Why I Left” as a public Google doc.
Introducing the new Scientific American blog network, home to dozens of science-oriented blogs.
How Google is changing your brain and impairing your memory.
If non-Mormons in Utah were their own state, polls show that it’d be the bluest state in the union. And given that Mormons are the most conservative religious group in the country, that makes Utah the most polarized state.
The New York Times covers the Hill Cumorah Pageant, the Mormon spectacle you won’t see on Broadway.
BYU law professor Frederick Gedicks gives a lecture on the LDS Church’s demographic trajectory, noting that the church’s growth in the last decade has been stagnant and that nearly as many people are leaving the church as converting to it.
You Are Not So Smart reminds us that we’re bad at assessing and understanding our own feelings.
LDS scholar Grant Hardy lists 10 things everyone should know about the Book of Mormon.
5 myths atheists believe about religion. And by way of rebuttal: 5 faulty arguments religious people use against atheists.
How gay marriage became thinkable for a generation of young Americans.
Dalai Lama: “I am a Marxist, but not a Leninist.”
A Fox News anchor declares on air that Romney is “not a Christian”—a claim that went totally unchallenged by her fellow co-hosts.
Do atheists belong in the interfaith movement? This is a question of particular interest to SHAFT, as we occasionally get invited to participate in interfaith discussion panels.
Business Week on why Mormon missions produce business and civic leaders.
A University of Chicago study found that a person’s morality changes with age in large part due to evolving brain circuity.
Mormons aren’t known for their sense of humor, but this clip from “Latter-Day Night Live” is a pretty funny parody of church talk cliches. This Mormon cover of Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You” (retitled “For the Strength of You”) is not so funny, however.
An unscientific online survey of ex-Mormons yields some interesting results.
164 years ago yesterday (Pioneer Day), Mormon pioneers settled what is now Utah in order to freely practice their religion and nontraditional marriage. How appropriate it is then that yesterday was also the first day that gay marriage is legal in New York, the birthplace of Mormonism.
Bill McKeever of Mormon Research Ministries explains his techniques for witnessing to Mormons.
ABC 4, a Utah news station, found it newsworthy that Jon Huntsman said “bullshit” in a casual interview with Esquire.
Dr. Richard Carrier debated Christian apologist JP Holding on the textual reliability of the New Testament.
A majority of medical students surveyed believe that doctors should be allowed to object to any procedure that conflicts with their personal, moral, or religious beliefs.
Ron Howard and Dustin Lance Black are working on a new project: a film adaptation of Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.” And Ricky Gervais is coming out with a new show about an atheist that dies and goes to heaven.
Austrian man and “Pastafarian” wins the right to wear a pasta strainer in his license photo.
Apologist Josh McDowell tells Christian youth that the internet is the greatest threat to their faith.
Common Sense Atheism on why and how to debate charitably.
I apologize for not being my normal prolific self lately. Maybe I need a brief stint in prison; it seems to remedy writer’s block.
When news of the bombing and massacre in Norway broke, many people suspected the culprit to be a Muslim extremist. Yet it turns out that the killer Anders Breivik may instead be a Christian fundamentalist. Sam Harris argues that European nationalism and racism is more to blame, however.
Uganda made news last year with its consideration of a bill that’d make homosexuality a capital offense punishable by death. Africa’s LGBT community has new cause for concern, as Ghana moves to arrest all gays and lesbians in that country.
KSL investigates the case of the missing ‘t’ in Utah’s peculiar pronunciation. I never thought I had much of an accent myself, but when I went to New York for a secular leadership conference, my nickname was “country boy.”
Mormon.org is a site where Mormons can create profiles with which to share their faith. The LDS Church monitors the site closely, so I am surprised that this unorthodox/uncorrelated profile is still up.
There is a longstanding divide between Israel’s secular Jews and the right-wing rabbinical community. That divide has widened recently as hundreds of conservative rabbis endorse a book, the King’s Torah, that justifies the killing of non-Jews.
An atheist confronts President Obama at a townhall last week over his position on federal subsidies to religious organizations.
Prominent atheists share their reasons for nonbelief with the New Statesman.
The Catholic Church makes a $50 million dollar bid for a large crystal Cathedral, which I think looks like something out of “The Wizard of Oz.”
Bible scholar Bart Ehrman discusses his new book Forged and writes in the Huffington Post the top things that didn’t make it into the Bible.
Woody Allen interviews famed televangelist Billy Graham, and they actually seem to enjoy each other’s company.
“Nightline” does a special on exorcism in America.
Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? Philosophers Leibniz and Heidegger find this to be the most fundamental question. But perhaps the question is ill-posed.
Atheist writer Austin Cline explains the principle of Occam’s Razor.
> “Utahns (especially SLC residents) are still counted among the best looking people”
Well yes, that highest rate of plastic surgery per capita has to be good for something (other than vanity…)
I’ll spare you from look at the conversation itself, but r/Atheism had a post on how a lot of r/Christian people were justifying–biblically–the massacre in Norway.
Remember the story where God sent bears to kill children?
I give 5 stars to Austin Cline’s article on William of Ockham. I generally agree with William of Ockham, that God is not provable from within the material universe. I prefer, with Ockham, enjoying the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion (using Stephen Jay Gould’s terms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria). I am still intrigued by the 5th ‘proof’ of a governing god given my Thomas Aquinas (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/aquinas3.html), but only consider it a possible hint rather than a proof.
Ockham’s nominalism has been very useful for science. If platonist Forms are more real than their physical instances, then one only ponders metaphysical truth and ignores empirical science. Ockham’s nominalism allows us to consider a thing as real, to consider a think in isolation, and to study a thing that owns its properties. The thing is a thing to itself — study it. This is useful for empiricism, but it moves western views toward extreme individualism. The west tends to forget that the thing is only ‘the thing’ in the context that it is found. No thing is ever found in isolation.
Now I am just rambling.
Last comment. I am not convinced by the argument against “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The paper stated the question was meaningless. I don’t believe that it is a meaningless question. However, I put the question in the category of the magisterium of religion (see above). Choose your answer — my answer and my reasoning to obtain the answer is metaphysics not physics.