Charles Darwin,
originally uploaded by Alun Salt.

This is sheer brilliance. Alun Salt has made a set of trading cards (in the manner of Magic: The Gathering) regarding the ID/Creationism debate.

Funny is an understatement.

Well, backing technorati up with broader search terms produces even more goodness 🙂 This time I came across some very entertaining sites – Why Wont God Heal Amputees and God Is Imaginary. Both seem to come from the same person / organisation and while they do not make comfortable reading for a Christian (or Moslem or Jew), they are entertaining for Atheists. Take a look and see what you think.

As you can probably imagine, the Christian Forums website did not like it very much when someone posted a link there 🙂

Well, following the little gem I found with my last Technorati Tag search, I thought I would give it another shot and see what comes up under the God Delusion tags.

It certainly was rewarding (again). Going to the “more posts” bit on Technorati, I found these two sites which have done wonders to reset the balance.

First off, an article by Sam Harris on www.patzivota.com, titled “God’s Enemies Are More Honest Than His Friends.” Sam Harris wrote the book “Letter to a Christian Nation” which is certainly worth reading and, as you can imagine this blog post is well worth reading. I especially like the way Sam Harris has explained why he feels he is not an “atheist” and why the term shouldn’t be needed:

As I pointed out in my subsequent book, Letter to a Christian Nation, we do not have a term for a person who rejects astrology, nor do we need one. If legions of astrologers sought to bend our public policy to their pseudo-science, we wouldn’t need to dub ourselves “non-astrologers” to put them in their place. Words like “reason,” “evidence,” and “common sense” would suffice. So it should be with religion.

There is more of his writing on http://www.samharris.org/ and it is also worth taking a look at his “Ten Myths and Ten Truths” article.

In addition, and trying to move away from the public (almost professional) Atheists, there are some personal blogs which I found very endearing. In The God Delusion – First Impressions, “Harry” (a final year BioMed student applying for Medical School) writes:

[about Dawkins opinions on the excessive respect “religion” gets] and thus his staunch atheistic standpoint seems to me, a little too staunch …

Dawkins is, despite his claims to the contrary, an argumentative old man. While I agree with Dawkins that too often people can claim a belief as a shield against criticism, “Harry” is quite right with his other points that persuasion can yield a greater effect than provocation.

The main issue I have with this equitable approach, is that it is very, very one sided. People who are devoutly religious will often be very offensive, even threatening, towards Atheists as the lack of belief seems to carry the attendant lack of automatic respect. It strikes me that religious people could learn quite a bit from the Atheistic moral code…

It seems like a daily visit to the Technorati Richard Dawkins Tags is going to provide a constant supply of entertainment. At the moment, there are around five blog posts a day with that tag and while two or three of them seem to be this one (at the moment) this is not always the case 🙂

Anyway, today I was rewarded with a post on the Chris Street Blog, which reprinted a New Scientist magazine article. The article is a “review” of The God Delusion by Mary Midgley.

Now, as Mary Midgley is a long standing and well known “opponent” and critic of pretty much everything Richard Dawkins writes, I am intrigued as to why New Scientist got her to write a review of the book. I suppose they were hoping that she would be able to provide a solid “counter argument” to most of Dawkin’s writings.

Sadly, while Midgley is certainly arguing against Dawkins, it is not a review of the book. In her article she talks about how Atheism gave birth to Nazi Germany, a fallacy (Hitler at least claimed to be a Catholic in his letters to the post, and the vast majority of those who committed the atrocities were Christians) which Dawkins exposes in the book. Surely if Midgley had read the book she was reviewing, she would have been able to pass comment on how Dawkins explains the fallacy rather than repeat it.

The remainder of her review is better and she does (occasionally) make some good points about Dawkins. Most of her valid points though are not as part of a review of the book, but about Dawkins’ attitude in general. It is a shame she chose to use a “review” as an opportunity to take a shot, it does no one any favours.

One last point. Throughout the article, Midgley seems to imply that there is a form of “knowledge” which stems from religious belief. I find this unusual to say the least. She objects to Dawkin’s creating a specialist definition of “religion,” yet she is more than happy to create a form of “knowledge” which can not be verified, tested or even seen.

Trying with a smaller sized picture

As part of the drive to improve the quality, and quantity, of the photos on the blog, here are two more – taken in December 2006, with a Nokia N73 mobile phone with the first using the “negative” settings.
Let us know what you think.

A couple of days ago I made a post titled “Atheist Resurgance” which was written after I had been meandering around the results of some technorati tag searches.

One of these links took me to a blog titled “Sub Ratione Dei: A Balanced Victory” where I read some of the comments made about Richard Dawkins, and his book The God Delusion. In the post, I made the following comments:

A theology student who feels that, as a theology student he is more placed to talk about God than Dawkins. This is interesting as the God delusion is not about the Christian deity per se, but about the implications belief in a divine being have on humanity and the biological evidence which contradicts those beliefs. Maybe the author of Sub Ratione Dei feels that as a theology student they are more placed to discuss evolution and creationism than Dawkins.

Following my post here, the author of the Sub Ratione Dei blog has made the following response:

Update: This post has generated a little comment over on Why Don’t You … Blog? For one they are maybe taking me a bit too seriously (alway’s a mistake). However, I am perhaps more worried by the implicit message that I am a creationist!

Now, this isn’t the first time I have been challenged over an apparent mistake I made in a blog post, and it is unlikely to be the last, so I want to try and set the record straight here.

I didn’t think I had taken the Sub Ratione Dei post all that seriously and it was meant as humour then I apologise whole heartedly for my mistake. I never thought my post had made any implication about belief in creation, it was put in there with the evolution bit.

Critically, my comments about the Sub Ratione Dei blog post were quite minimal, I only pointed out that the Theologist felt he was better placed to discuss God than Richard Dawkins and that he was critiquing a book which he hadn’t read. The rest of the entry was a cut and paste from the original site. The God delusion book is not about a specific religion, although there are obvious Christian overtones, the principles made are equally sound if the religion in question was Zoroastrianism, Norse Gods, Roman Gods etc. Richard Dawkins may well be a “grumpy old man” but I am not so sure he has no idea what he is talking about.

Anyway, this post and the previous post, were not made with the intention of insulting anyone or starting a blog version of a flame war. I was simply aiming to highlight the disparate views which blogs with a certain tag can generate (in this instance it was Richard Dawkins). If I have caused any offence, then I do apologise.

Well, as the lightbox seems to have worked so well, I thought it was time to make the most of it and get some more photos online 🙂 Needless to say, I am going to be looking over Technorati to see what else lightbox turns up 🙂 Sadly, this is not a “high traffic” tag term, and only gets about 1-3 posts a day. Still, times may change.

This is a photograph of a house next to the stones at Avenbury.

These are some photographs of Farleigh Hungerford Castle taken in July 06.

Over time, we will look at editing some of the photo collections at Why Dont You… and showing off the results here. Feel free to get in touch and let us know what you think – or if you have a similar blog and want us to link to you!

As part of Admin’s site overhaul, I have been trying to add some of the cool word press widgets to the side bar here. So far, they have pretty much all turned out to be fairly pointless so the current crop are somewhat, erm, minimal 🙂

I did find what looked like an excellent widget to install (the cool looking “Flickr Widget“), and was duly pointed to the repository at http://www.redalt.com/External/plugins.php?p=flickr-widget. This is where things went wrong. The redalt site (which incidentally, lots of links point to for downloads) is totally unresponsive. Not only is it slow to use but none of the links actually result in downloads. Sheer madness.

However, there is another place you can find the widget – http://svn.wp-plugins.org/flickr-widget/trunk/ – and as of right now, this is working fine 🙂

By the way, it is an excellent widget!

Aside – Whydontyou has a new blog style – please let us know what you think. The current style is based on http://wpthemepark.com/themes/fallseason/ but it may change again as we are experimenting with several options.

WhyDontYou has added a few new features to it’s posts – the main one is a “light box” for inline images (note: this does not include the images on Flickr and the like).

To see how this works, click on these images:

Aside – just to let you know, we have now added a sitemap function to the blog.

CompuSkills web design service has put together a “customer service” blog which will provide advice, information and responses to frequently asked questions.

Definitely worth checking out over the coming weeks and months. If you have any questions you would like to have answers please get in touch with CompuSkills and see what can be done.

It might just be me, but my recent surf through technorati philosophy blogs (mentioned here first and then here) turned up some interesting results. In addition to the topical ones I have already mentioned, there seems a massively disproportionate number of MySpace blogs on the topic.

Seriously, pretty much nine out of ten links I have followed (the list was sorted by “freshness”) have been to MySpace blogs. Some are serious and relevant (for example this one about law and freedom – valid points even though I support banning smoking!) but by and large they are the “philosopical musings” of bored teenagers (even when written by apparent adults like this Wonder Woman religion post….).

I wonder if that pretty much sums up MySpace….

On a technological note, Technorati is still annoying. It is taking 20 minutes to index posts here, which ensures that when they do arrive in the index they are very, very far down the list in a busy topic like Philosophy. What are the other (generally MySpace) sites doing to get indexed within a minute or two?

Just to clarify the second paragraph above, out of the first fifty links tagged “Philosophy” on Technorati, only ONE was not a MySpace blog… Blimey.

It seems I posted the last article in haste as there is a new contender for the most “off the wall” philosophy tagged blog.

Take a look at this blinder (from Enigma, another MySpace user…)

As a Buddhist, I practice Nichiren Daishonin’s buddhism. I’ve been quite open about it up until a few months ago. Where I work, there are a few other people who I recently found out practic the same type of buddhism. However, there is one person – who I don’t know at all who has been imposing what I can only describe as anonymous guerrilla tactics to get other people to become aware of this practice. They have been posting magazines to the work place, which has annoyed some members of staff and leaving books around to people with messages like ‘lord knows, you bloody need it!’ That sort of shit. Not necessary. I have tried to find out who it is but to no avail.In this practice, it is through forging genuine friendships with people and showing some sort of example yourself as a human being that you introduce others, not by force or by some underhand tactics or other. It annoyed me…

ps – Anyone have any questions about Nichiren Buddhism, just ask me….:)

That is it. The wonders of MySpace seem to prevent me from looking at any other posts made to try and put this into context.

It really has left me stumped as to what “she” is going on about.