Greetings all! Alas I have joined the rebel alliance and launched my blog anew here at the totally godless Freethought Blogs, ubi veritas extrahetur! I won’t be bringing over my archives due to the difficulty of getting all the formatting right, so I have frozen my old blog and left its archives up for reference and posterity. To visit all my past bloggings just jump on over to my old Blogger page. Down the right margin there is a chronological hyperlinked archive followed by a keyword index cloud. I will also end this post with a hyperlinked list of my all-time favorite blog posts.

Introduction. For those who don’t know me, I’m Dr. Richard Carrier, historian and philosopher, author of several books, chapters, and articles in print and online. I’m most renowned for my book Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, describing a complete godless worldview and why we should believe it’s probably true (covering semantics, epistemology, science & metaphysics, ethics & axiology, aesthetics, and politics), and my book Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed, where I teach fascinating facts about the religion, culture, sociology, anthropology, and history of the old Roman world (I received my doctorate in ancient intellectual history), all while engaging in the entertaining pursuit of making a particular Christian apologist look like an idiot. I’ve done a great deal else, of course. I particularly try to write articles that fellow atheists can use, in their pursuit of philosophy or historical truth (particularly when it comes to the ancient world, or taking on Christian nonsense). I’m also an avid Bayesian. You can learn all about me and the rest of my work at my home site: richardcarrier.info.

What I’m Doing Now. Many already know, but I’m working to complete a two volume set on whether there really was a historical Jesus (I side in the negative, but with less certainty than many proclaim), the first of which is completed, peer reviewed, and due for release by Prometheus Books in April of 2012 (Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus). The next may appear near the end of that year (On the Historicity of Jesus Christ). I also have a book in peer review on Science Education in the Early Roman Empire and another waiting for completion on The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. That plus my work as a national public speaker, blogger, academic writer, and online lecturer for CFI Institute Online, keeps me plenty busy.

What to Expect Here. I’ll be using this blog to announce my upcoming public appearances, and any new publications as soon as they’re available. But I will also be using it to expound on issues in philosophy, ancient history, or Christian apologetics, as the need or mood strikes me.

Rules. Since this is my first post at FTB, I will set the ground rules here, which are the same as they’ve always been. I will be experimenting with different methods of handling comments (active moderation, etc.) until I know what works best here (see Comments Crazy! for my latest decision on that), but whatever method I use, the same rules apply: comments must be on-topic (meaning, relevant to the blog post they are attached to), if they argue against me they must argue against things I actually said (comments that don’t I’ll feel free to delete), and must contain relevant facts (merely naming authors doesn’t count, for example, you have to actually make an argument or state your facts). Obviously threats, gratuitous obscenity, prayers and other blatant violations of ettiquette also warrant deletion. But merely disagreeing with me is not a condition for deletion. Relevance is, however. This isn’t an unmoderated forum. If you want to debate issues unrelated to what I’ve blogged, please use a public forum somewhere else online. I will also block anyone who persistently violates these rules, or ignores what I’ve written even after being directed to it, or who repeatedly ignores my requests for sources, evidence, or specific errors in disputes over the truth. I will also sometimes delete comments that don’t need to be there anymore (e.g. comments that identify a typo or bad link), not because I don’t like them (I actually love them!), but because once I’ve corrected the issue the comment is obsolete.

Grandfather Clause. I will keep one exception to the relevance rule: you may add comments to this inaugural blog post that respond to anything I have blogged at my old location (in the whole archive linked above). That might make this entry’s comments section a strange, free-wheeling bizarro land of disjointed conversation, but I’ll deal. In some cases this might even generate new blogs here that can continue the thread anew.

Favorite Oldies. Here are my favorite old blog posts (except on music, which I’ll blog about later)…

Issues…

  1. Atheists in Foxholes (why you should care)
  2. Are Women Just Stupid? (asked & answered)
  3. Are We Doomed? (we’re harder to kill than you think)
  4. Atheist or Agnostic? (the debate is stupid)

Morality…

  1. Darla the She-Goat (an evil goat can teach us metaethics)
  2. Moral Ontology (the physical substance of moral facts)
  3. Goal Theory Update (moral philosophy’s version of TMI)

Politics…

  1. Does Free Will Matter? (belief in free will’s effect on social policy)
  2. Factual Politics (four-part series against anarcho-libertarianism)

Philosophy…

  1. How to Be a Philosopher (for real)
  2. Defining the Supernatural (just like it sounds)
  3. Our Mathematical Universe (a mathematical universe doesn’t prove god)
  4. Statistics & Biogenesis (the origin of life doesn’t prove god)
  5. Rosenberg on Naturalism (battling the new nihilism)
  6. Epistemological End Game (on getting out of infinite regress)

History…

  1. History Before 1950 (what makes a historian obsolete)
  2. Experimental History (yep, there is such a thing)
  3. Lynn White on Horse Stuff (clearing away the horseshit)
  4. Science & Medieval Christianity (correcting errors on both sides)
  5. Flynn’s Pile of Boners (on ancient vs. medieval science)
  6. Rosenberg on History (battling postmodernism)

Christianity…

  1. The Infidel Delusion (Christians act delusionally…again)
  2. Ignatian Vexation (why New Testament studies is fucked)
  3. Pauline Interpolations (examples of doctored texts in the Bible)

Humor…

  1. Sack Lunch
  2. Silly Questionnaires

 

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