There are several items of note at Salon today, so if you don’t subscribe, watch the little commercial, you’ll get some good bang for the buck.
- Garrison Keillor (who is coming to UMM this Saturday—a few tickets are still available!) rips into “little man” Bush.
- There’s an interview with Daniel Dennett on “Dissecting God”.
- Most important of all, we learn that Keith Knight’s wife is OK. Hooray! They cut a teratoma out of her—I really think she ought to ask to have it in a bottle to take home (teratomas can be particularly grisly and cool.)
Thanks for the pointer, PZ.
You didn’t mention the op-ed by a Danish ex-pat arguing that the Danes aree being hypocritical here (with examples of action taken against people not showing the J-man proper respect). It is not a religious zelot sort of defense, but a we-have-to-respect-all-ideas kind of argument. Drivel, so far as I can see, but something worth looking at, if only to figure out why it’s wrong, or to see some of the subtleties.
I’ll stick with drivel, though.
You may have made a sale for Salon, finally getting me to get off my keister and sign up (it only took me about five years to build up the gumption to finally stop buying issues of the New Yorker and just subscribe).
Hank Alme
Actually, today I got an ad for an ESPRESSO MAKER, so it was almost cool. Mmmmm, espresso….
Yes, today is a good day to visit Salon. I keep meaning to renew my membership so I don’t have to watch the ads every day.
Thanks for the tip and it just so happens that pith helmet blocked the add, so there were two text links, one saying get the pass and another asking if there was trouble viewing. So guess which one I clicked?
Fastest entry to salon ever !!!
I can’t open my kitchen cupboards for fear of massive piles of expired Salon day passes tipping over and pinning me to the ground, forcing me to construct a rudimentary acid-base rocket to extricate me à la Principal Skinner, however I’m willing to risk life and limb to continue adding to the collection.
I think that interview was Dennett at his best and least polemic, no? In particular, I think we get a better idea of what his books says (without having read it) compared to the earlier thread on this. He doesn’t think religion per se is built in or an evolutionary adaptation, but that it was useful and perhaps adaptive to assign as-if intentionality to external, natural forces as a way of guessing at appropriate responses to them. Add language and culture and it doesn’t seem to much of a leap from there to animism, religion, etc.
I’ve always thought Garrison Keillor was funny (I am Norwegian, after all). But, mostly through his Salon magazine column, I have noticed that he has a real, viscious antipathy toward atheists. It bugs me.