Unless you live under a rock, you would have heard about the Steubenville rape case, in which two teenage boys took advantage of a sixteen year old girl while she was inebriated from a night’s worth of drinking. The case brought forward many aspects of current popular culture that I’d like to explore, and also made me ask some very difficult questions about the nature of humanity. First and foremost, I have no doubt that the...

  Last week I posted to Twitter a comment which I thought was rather innocuous and self explanatory, but which received a rather large backlash from strangers. The comment was: I respect your right to have beliefs. This doesn’t necessarily mean I respect your beliefs. Of the many comments I received over this Tweet, one thing was completely clear. Those who demand respect for their beliefs cannot give you a reason why you...

  Humanism, as I have eluded to in the past, is not the ideal of placing humanity above the rest of the world. Humanism is doing whatever it takes to help humanity as a whole thrive. As I said in an earlier piece: Without exception, all of humanity has, at its core, a group of physical and emotional needs that need to be met if we are to meet a minimum standard of well-being in our lives. When we look at humanity and the conditions...

I am re-posting the guest blog I did over at Maria’s blog, Barrel Of Oranges, in full, because of some things I have been thinking about lately. Since I have never posted the entire article here before, this may be new to some of you, but the main reason for the re-post is to put some thoughts forward about an idea I had about something I’m calling “Methodological Humanism”. (The name is not entirely mine, however...

Image: Scuola di Atene by Raphael, via Wikipedia. Recently I read a very interesting article at the Aeon website titled Your Point Is? , by author Stephen Poole. The main gist of the article was a criticism of a book called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by renowned philosopher Thomas Nagel. The title of the book certainly sounds impressive, and promises to contain many thought...