Barack Obama on different points of view

I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.” That’s not the way we learn either.

Barack Obama, September 14, 2015

California's State Religion

From and the rest at the Orange County Register 

In a state ruled by a former Jesuit, perhaps we should not be shocked to find ourselves in the grip of an incipient state religion. Of course, this religion is not actually Christianity, or even anything close to the dogma of Catholicism, but something that increasingly resembles the former Soviet Union, or present-day Iran and Saudi Arabia, than the supposed world center of free, untrammeled expression. 

Two pieces of legislation introduced in the Legislature last session, but not yet enacted, show the power of the new religion. One is Senate Bill 1146, which seeks to limit the historically broad exemptions the state and federal governments have provided religious schools to, well, be religious. 

Under the rubric of official “tolerance,” the bill would only allow religiously focused schools to deviate from the secular orthodoxy required at nonreligious schools, including support for transgender bathrooms or limitations on expressions of faith by students and even Christian university presidents, in a much narrower range of educational activity than ever before. Many schools believe the bill would needlesslyrisk their mission and funding to “solve” gender and social equity problems on their campuses that currently don’t exist... 

...For the record, I am neither a Christian, nor do I deny that climate change could pose a potential serious long-term threat to humanity. What worries me most is the idea that one must embrace official orthodoxy about how to combat this phenomenon, or question its priority over so many other pressing concerns, such as alleviating poverty, both here and abroad, protecting the oceans or a host of other issues. Similarly, I have always disagreed with holy rollers like Sen. Ted Cruz, who would seek to limit, for example, abortion or the rights of gay people to marry, or would allow school prayer. 

But the new progressive intolerance now represents, in many ways, as great, if not more pervasive, a threat to the republic than that posed by either religious fundamentalists or even the most fervent climate change denier. It violates the Madisonian principle that assumed that religious and moral ideas “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.” To revoke that principle is to reduce the United States to just another authoritarian state, even if the official ideology is couched in scientific research or estimable embrace of racial or gender differences... 

...Ultimately, we as Americans – and Californians – will pay a price for this. History is replete with stories of decline brought on by enforced official orthodoxy, from Byzantium to China’s Qing dynasty, the Spain of the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or the current religious autocracies of the contemporary Middle East. As we seek to limit options and ways of thought about everything from marriage and bathrooms to how the planet operates, we don’t just persecute dissenters. We also undermine our ability to innovate, adapt and evolve as a society.

Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks there's a 'very high' chance the universe is just a simulation

From Tech Insider

We trust the scientists around us to have the best grasp on how the world actually works.

So at this year's 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, which addressed the question of whether the universe is a simulation, the answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses from others.

Physicist Lisa Randall, for example, said she thought the odds that the universe isn't "real" are so low as to be "effectively zero."

A satisfying answer for those who don't want to sit there puzzling out what it would mean for the universe not to be real, to be sure.

But on the other hand, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation "may be very high."

Tyson points out that we humans have always defined ourselves as the smartest beings alive, orders of magnitude more intelligent than species like chimpanzees that share close to 99%of our DNA. We can create symphonies and do trigonometry and astrophysics (some of us, anyway).

But Tyson uses a thought experiment to imagine a life-form that's as much smarter than us as we are than dogs, chimps, or other terrestrial mammals.

"What would we look like to them? We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence," he says.

Whatever that being is, it very well might be able to create a simulation of a universe.

Gobias Industries

via Arrested Development

"Maybe the worst bluff I've ever seen"

No such thing as a Philosophy-Free Science?

Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science, there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. 

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett, (An atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board) 

Thoughts on the Thoughts and Prayer Issue, and on "foundational and tradition-dependent assumptions"

From and the rest at CNN

"...America is deeply divided along the transcendence line. Tens of millions of Americans profess belief in a transcendent God. They include Christians, Jews, Muslims and people of many other faiths. Yet these generic labels are also imprecise; many self-identifying Christians and Jews reject the idea that God intervenes in the world in miraculous and supernatural ways.  

They may participate in religious practices. They may even pray. But they do not believe that prayer "works." They do not have a category of "forgiveness" that appeals to transcendent justice and mercy.  

They do not anticipate a transcendent world to come. Each of them lives out a kind of faith, but the content and contours of that faith is focused on the present physical world and the people in it. 

The transcendence line is not the difference between "belief" and "unbelief." Each of us lives according to strongly held commitments and values-infused beliefs. The liberal atheist who stands up for "equality" and "dignity" relies on foundational and tradition-dependent assumptions in much the same way as the religious conservative who defends "morality" and "truth."

Annoying Fundamentalists