Winter’s Haven

Here’s Peter Williams’s tidily formatted version of Aquinas’s “Degrees of Perfection” argument for the existence of god:

1. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like
2. But ‘more’ and ‘less’ are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum
3. [...]

That is today’s wonderful news for all Konquistoradors. The Apple/KDE rift will be healed, our beautiful web browser shall be spared a future of hopeless marginalization.
Hooray!
(After writing this, I started to wonder if “Konquistorador” is even a real word. Apparently not: a Google search comes up mostly empty. I still think “Konquistorador” has a better [...]

From Physorg.com:
Swiss council workers had to chop down part of a tree to clear a German truck which got stuck in a narrow dead end because of its driver’s blind faith in his onboard navigation system, police said.
The 37 year-old driver, who was looking for the factory where he was due to drop [...]

In the comments to a previous post, a reader calling himself “Deep Thought” said that he believes in god based not on blind faith, but rather based on logical evidence. I asked him to show me the evidence for the existence of god, and he pointed me to an article by Peter Williams. The article [...]

Some blogs offer daily collections of links; I offer them at highly irregular intervals. But today is a link day! Rejoice!

Will Wilkinson explains why it is silly to claim that materialism is incompatible with free will or morality.
An Angry Toxicologist demonstrates that Natural != Safe. The moral of the post: stay far, far away [...]

I recently discovered the comic strip Thad Guy, which might be described as a love child of Dinosaur Comics and xkcd. Thad Guy often takes a comically twisted look at substantive philosophical issues. Here’s one of my favorites:

…and that guy’s dangerous-looking goatee really ties the strip together.

In response to the latest vague warnings from the Department of Homeland Security, Radley Balko of Reason patiently explains how the DHS is — quite literally — terrorizing the American public. The article is quite good; go read it.
I’m not posting this because I have anything insightful to add. I’m posting it because I [...]

I’m going to explain what “Equality Under the Law” means. This post is motivated by a thread at Friendly Atheist. Here is the question, posed to FA and readers by a theist, which started things:
[most people believe] that everyone is equal, and deserves equal treatment under the law.
But how do you prove this? In [...]

The 70th Carnival of the Godless is up at Friendly Atheist. Most of these pieces, of course, aren’t really directed at theists. The case against the existence of god(s) has already been made eloquently many times before. But it’s heartening to hear some other voices raised against all the madness in the world.

In the comments to my previous post on consequentialist libertarianism, Joe Otten wrote:
I think I view attempts to do good through government with a healthy skepticism, and that libertarians generally view it with unhealthy outright hostility.
It is hard to see how something like state education has had perverse consequences. We would probably still be semi-feudal [...]