Free Republic

Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher, who has died aged 82, was, with Richard Dawkins, a leading proponent of Darwinism and one of the most virulent controversialists on the academic circuit...

[BIG SNIP]The Quakers’[new penitentiary system using isolation]experiment revealed that the consultation of one’s inner self without outside reference or constraints, with nothing to measure one’s self against, could produce distorted human beings who became certifiably mad. Self-proclaimed gods can turn out to be a Caligula or a Jim Jones.Just as bad as the fact consulting the inner light can result in the exhibition of mad or corrupt behavior is the fact that the newly minted gods believe themselves to be entitled to demand obeisance from us mere mortals.We mere everyday humans must bow down and worship the deities among us....

What is a “bright”? It is not, as is by now well known to contemporary thinkers, the opposite of a “dim”, a “dark”, or a “slavish, easily led idiot.” No. A “bright” is a “is a person who has a naturalistic worldview [one which] is free of supernatural and mystical elements.” Further, the “ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview.” In plain words: an “atheist,” a label brights reject, for the same reason some feminists despise the term “history”—their enemies form part of the words. When this merry band of illuminators, these light-bringers to the...

Philosopher Daniel Dennett does a Q&A column at the Washington Post. He was asked, “Is there widespread media bias against Christianity?”. Here are his answers, interspersed with my comments. There is no media bias against Christianity. If it appears to some people that there is, it is probably because after decades of hyper-diplomacy and a generally accepted mutual understanding that religion was not to be criticized, we have finally begun breaking through that taboo and are beginning to see candid discussions of the varieties of religious folly in American life. Activities that would be condemned by all if they were...

God has had a lot of bad press recently. The four horsemen of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, have all published books sharply critical of belief in God: respectively, The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell, The End of Faith, and God Is Not Great. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens pile on the greatest amount of scorn, while Dennett takes the role of good cop. But despite differences of tone and detail, they all agree that belief in God is a kind of superstition. As Harris puts it, religion “is the denial—at once full of hope and...

BURLINGTON, Vt. - Lots of political candidates make campaign promises. But not like Charlotte Dennett's. ADVERTISEMENT Dennett, 61, the Progressive Party's candidate for Vermont Attorney General, said Thursday she will prosecute President Bush for murder if she's elected Nov. 4. Dennett, an attorney and investigative journalist, says Bush must be held accountable for the deaths of thousands of people in Iraq — U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. She believes the Vermont attorney general would have jurisdiction to do so.

Autocatakinetics, Evolution, and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production By Rod Swenson An Excerpt: Ecological science addresses the relations of living things to their environments, and the study of human ecology the particular case of humans. There is an opposing tradition built into the foundations of modern science of separating living things, and, in particular, humans from their environments. Beginning with Descartes’ dualistic world view, this tradition found its way into biology by way of Kant, and evolutionary theory through Darwin, and manifests itself in two main postulates of incommensurability, the incommensurability between psychology and physics (the “first postulate of...

<p>"We have always had atheists among us," the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," "but now they have grown turbulent and seditious." It seems that in our own day some prominent atheists are agitating for greater political and social influence. In this connection, leading atheist thinkers have been writing articles declaring that they should no longer be called "atheists." Rather, they want to be called "brights."</p>