Introduction I’ve begun attending monthly meetings of Socrates Café at the South Portland Library. Socrates Café is a gathering of citizens who get together by choice to discuss the big questions of life. Methods drawn from the book, Socrates Café, written by the program’s founder, Christopher Phillips, are used to guide discussion. The example of... Continue Reading →
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a January 2nd speech at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metairie, Louisiana, told the audience that the constitution does not require government to be neutral between religion and non-religion. The separation clause of the First Amendment prevents government from favoring a particular faith, that is true, but it is... Continue Reading →
After reading the description of my recently published book, Abdication: God Steps Down for Good, people occasionally inquire whether I’m an atheist. I tell them that I’m basically agnostic and a hopeful theist. It would be wonderful, to my way of thinking, if a convivial, non-dictatorial God existed. It’s a lonely world out there in... Continue Reading →
In a recent blog essay entitled God and War, two proposals were advanced to get God out of the war business. These proposals join six others in the book Abdication: God Steps Down for Good to form a program directed at this same goal. In the interest of complete information and full understanding, the eight... Continue Reading →
President Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney—massacred Pastor of Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina—was one of the finest I’ve heard, and deserves standing among the most important speeches in our history. Think about his problem for a moment. What could he say to the wife, daughters, extended family, colleagues, and co-religionists of a Pastor... Continue Reading →
In an earlier blog essay, Religion and the Credibility of Science, I argued that religion and science are fundamentally opposed to each other. In the book Abdication: God Steps Down for Good, I make the same claim, but with a twist, namely that the two, while antagonistic, are also allies of one another! How can that... Continue Reading →
If you happen to be asking: what in God’s name is Will doing in his recent blog entries, I’m highlighting claims in Abdication: God Steps Down for Good that appear to have been overlooked by its readers and commentators, probably because of the “abdication of God” idea featured in its title. A new reader can... Continue Reading →
In a previous entry (Planetary Crisis: Two Fundamental Assumptions), I explained that Abdication: God Steps Down for Good is fundamentally an anti-war/planet-livability story, a fact that most readers of the book have overlooked due perhaps to the inclusion of the word God in the title. In this followup entry, I explain that God is not... Continue Reading →
The legitimacy of the recently published book, Abdication: God Steps Down for Good rests entirely upon acceptance of two premises. The first asserts that our age is one of immediate planetary crisis due to pollution and climate change, and the threat of nuclear war in the not distant future. The Doomsday Clock is used to measure... Continue Reading →
Joel Achenbach downplayed the most obvious culprit in his otherwise superb account of “Why Science is so Hard to Believe” (Washington Post, National Geographic) in accounting for skeptical views toward vaccination, fluoridation, and genetically modified foods. He de-emphasized religion’s influence. Religion is arguably science’s oldest, most powerful, and persistent foe. The fates of Socrates, Giordano... Continue Reading →
