8 February 2012
My new book is finally done and available for pre-order at Amazon: titled Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Yes, that’s the one (or one of the two) that everyone has been asking me about. It’s been years in the...
26 January 2012
You may know there are two conventions for representing historical years: the traditional A.D. and B.C., and the chic new C.E. and B.C.E. (if you don’t know about that, Wikipedia will get you up to speed). People often ask me why I use one or the other, or what...
24 January 2012
Lucas’s new film is good but not excellent. There were elements of it that disappointed me. But it may be worth your support anyway. Here’s why… Red Tails is a movie just released honoring the Tuskegee airmen, an often unrecognized unit of black...
18 January 2012
If you are wondering what all the worldwide hubbub is over Congress’s attempt to fast-track the latest anti-piracy legislation (SOPA and PIPA) without much public scrutiny (you may be wondering, since Google has blacked out it’s logo in protest, and...
16 January 2012
Our own Ian Cromwell (the one and only Crommunist) posted today on the Schroedinger’s Rapist metaphor and the pushback against it that uses racism as an example (if you don’t know the back story, Daniel Finke provides). Ian’s thesis is this: I’ve...
12 January 2012
Did Obama sign a law granting the Presidency power to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial? No, he did not. This is yet another manufactured story from the irrational left, which simply ignores the actual facts, like so many a Tea Partier would. I have...
6 January 2012
Herod the Great (you know, that guy in the Bible who killed all those babies, but didn’t really) was a procurator. (WTF is a procurator? Don’t worry, I’ll get to that.) In fact, Herod wasn’t just any procurator. He was the chief procurator of...
5 January 2012
There’s often a lot of hostility toward “government regulations.” I’m going to muse on that today, with a long general contemplation on the whole nature of this fashionable outrage. It comes in all varieties. There are people who think laws are...
3 January 2012
A new interview of mine just went online. But you’ve got to hear the long boring story first. (Unless you don’t give a shit, then just go on to read the interview: The BestSchools Richard Carrier Interview). Recently a new “top fifty atheists in the...
2 January 2012
Happy new year everyone! Today I’m going to blog a boring administrative thing. But later this week I’ll put up something a little more interesting. With my move now to Freethought Blogs the number of comments my entries are generating within a week has...
13 December 2011
I’ll be appearing at two local events this January. I will be selling and signing my books at both events as usual. On Saturday, January 14 (2012) at the Amador Christian Center I will be participating in another debate in the Sacramento hills (Plymouth,...
9 December 2011
One ongoing question I get regards the application of my moral philosophy to animals, and whether we morally ought to be vegetarians owing to compassion being in fact a moral virtue. I replied to Peter Hurford’s apt questions about that, noting why being a...
1 December 2011
My talk at Skepticon IV on the importance of Bayes’ Theorem to skepticism is now available on YouTube (Bayes’ Theorem: Lust for Glory!). (My slides in that on the UFO case don’t show the whole text because I had to use Darrel Ray’s computer at...
28 November 2011
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...