I will be on the radio tomorrow

The Cleveland public radio affiliate station WCPN 90.3 FM will be having Joe Puckett and me on their morning call-in talk show The Sound of Ideas that runs from 9:00-10:00 am tomorrow (Tuesday), with a break for national news from 9:01-9:06. We will be joined by Tim Beal, a professor of religious studies at my university, whom I have known for a long time and is a very thoughtful scholar, and a rabbi whom I do not know. The show was triggered by the debate I had with Joe Puckett but will not be devoted exclusively to the question of god’s existence but will be broader and look at the rapidly changing landscape of religious beliefs.

[Update: I have just been informed by WCPN that Tim Beal will not be on the show but Peter Haas, another thoughtful scholar of Judaic Studies from our department of religious studies, and Craig Bauman, President of the University of Akron’s Secular Student Alliance, who will be calling in.]
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Return of the neoconservative zombies

As we have seen, the Iraq warmongers are like zombies, returning from the dead to once again fill the media landscape with their wrongness. Stephen M. Walt gives an excellent analysis of why the neoconservative leaders of the push for the disastrous war in Iraq continue to be welcomed into the debate. The list of reasons includes their enablers in the media and the liberal interventionists who are helping to try and rehabilitate the neoconservatives in order to distract from their own culpability in assisting them in the push for that criminal war.
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Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Collectivism

Mallory Ortberg has taken upon herself the task of imagining what the Harry Potter series of books might have turned out to be like if the idea had first occurred to Ayn Rand. She is taking each of the seven books in turn. Here is an excerpt of what Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban could have been at the hands of the famous proponent of the virtues of the free market, individualism, and selfishness.
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Post-debate reflections

So the debate with Joe Puckett went off without a hitch last night. It was a cordial exchange of views. The church seats 800 people and I estimate that there must have been about 500-600 people there. Mark Tiborsky, the person who initially acted as the intermediary between Joe and me and who is very well connected in the local skeptical community and had advertised it widely, said that the number of people he knew who had signed up to attend numbered around 60-70, so most of the attendees were religious folk, which was what I expected. Mark recorded the whole thing and will be posting it on YouTube soon
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UK bans teaching of creationism as science in schools

The UK is kind of a mess when it comes to church-state separation. Because they don’t have anything like our Establishment Clause to set boundaries on how much the government can be involved with religion, those decisions are essentially political ones. So while the British public is far less overtly religious than people in the US, their government funds religious schools even when they teach in quite a sectarian way. Meanwhile their current prime minister David Cameron and before him the odious and unctuous Tony Blair both make public statements of their religion, with the former saying that England is a Christian country.
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These people were wrong, wrong, wrong

Now that the architects of the Iraq invasion are crawling out of the woodwork trying to justify their actions, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has provided a useful service by compiling a list of some of the most egregious statements made by three of the worst culprits for misleading America back then when they thought that what they had was a glorious little war.
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Yo

I swear that I am falling farther and farther behind in my attempts to understand new tech fads. I already mentioned my mystification with the appeal of Google Glass. But that is nothing compared to what I think about the new Yo app. What does this free app do? If you and your friends download this app onto your iPhones or Android devices, then this app sends the simple message ‘Yo’ to each other. That’s it.
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