Religion

Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind? Bernstein and D’Souza

A debate from 2014, I believe, between Andrew Bernstein and Dinesh D’Souza, hosted at the University of Texas. Arguments about religion typically fall into three categories: 1. Philosophical arguments about supernaturalism, faith and reason, the source of morality, and so on.2. Scriptural arguments about passages in the religion’s core texts.3. Historical arguments about the record […]

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Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism [Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Appendix 3 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.] Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism Martin Luther (1483-1546): “The Jews deserve to hang on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.” And: “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.”[189] Immanuel

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Haters

I’m all confused. The hot-headed Nietzsche’s startling line from his 1887 Genealogy of Morals has always stuck with me: “the truly great haters in world history have always been priests.” That’s from the First Essay, Section 7, in the context of his analysis of slave morality born of ressentiment. But now I read that, according

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W. K. Clifford on philosophical writing style

Reprising this classic from the Department of Collegial Zingers: here is W. K. Clifford on an intellectual acquaintance: “He is writing a book on metaphysics, and is really cut out for it; the clearness with which he thinks he understands things and his total inability to express what little he knows will make his fortune

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Galileo’s modern compromise: Letting science work *with* religion

In his open letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), Galileo offered a defense of science against the prevailing heavy hand of religious orthodoxy: “But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other

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