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• The book Shopping for God and Mormonism. Interesting discussion in the comments.

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• FPR on John's account of Christmas is Revelation. I bring up 1 Ne 11 which is tied to Rev 12.

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• FPR on Myth analysis and Mormonism. I tend to take the poststructuralist skepticism although I confess I have a lot of myth-criticism books on my shelf.

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• Against Evolutionary Psychology explanations of women with narrow waists and big hips. EP in my view oversimplifies things and produces "just so" explanations. I honestly can't figure out why they are so popular in the press.

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• Should cousins be banned from marrying? Would anyone want to anymore? For some reason I always think of rural areas where people have lived stably for a long time with little outflow or inflow of populations. Where is that true now?

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• Razib on the follies of economics. I don't know enough to say much beyond noticing that many economic majors have horrible math skills. Not all do of course. But when math is such a big part of modeling it always left me with heavy skepticism towards the profession. Undoubtedly unfairly so since there are many very well versed in math and statistics. I'm also skeptical of the "rational actor" model that is behind so much.

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• ... the production of spontaneous facial expressions of emotion is not dependent on observational learning but simultaneously demonstrates a learned component to the social management of expressions... (HT: Gene Expression) Not that surprising all things considered. I suspect most human phenomena ends up being about 50-50 learned vs. wired. But there's still a lot of folks who push the nurture basis way too much.

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• Happiness and those around you. Argues your happiness doesn't depend upon your friends.

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• Reading Burn After Reading. Coen meet Freud.

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• Public vs. Public Morality

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• Vallicella on Eliminative Materialism. Also see his post on what Eliminative Materialism is.

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• Richard refutes Anselm. I think just thinking through all the ways to refute the ontological argument are interesting. It's an excellent problem to think through. I like Kant's existence is not a property approach best. Marion also has a discussion about whether the ontological argument is ontological at all. I'm not sure I agree with Marion (on numerous things) but it is interesting.

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• Far Side reenactments (HT: BCC)

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• What is the Mormon answer to the meaning of life? I always took us as more Nietzschean than Utilitarian. That is I think happiness isn't the meaning of life but merely something we obtain while pursuing it.

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• Nauvoo polygamy. Fantastic discussion that made me reconsider several things. (Although the trolls come in after a while) Also a the earlier post on the same which has some great comments as well.

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• FPR on the Divine Council in Hebrew literature.

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• Brains and spirituality. Or why discovering cognitive units for spirituality should be expected and not be shocking to the religious person.

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• Intuitions of free will. Not at all unexpectedly different people have different intuitions.

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• The Sorites paradox and non-standard arithmetic. Great post. This issue of vagueness is one of my favorite philosophical topics.

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• Volokh makes the case that voters of both parties are ignorant. The scariest thing about our democracy is how elections are rarely decided on the issues.

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• More Entries

Reading Club: Ostler 2

OK, I’m back to commenting on Blake’s book. Some of you might recall that I started a reading club on Blake’s recent book Exploring Mormon Thought: Of God and Gods. Unfortunately life took a turn for the very busy and I wasn’t able to make it very far. So here’s my next [...]

Reading Club: Ostler 2 - My Views

Someone asked about my view of the Godhead so as to better understand the Ostler Reading club and my comments. Of course we all have biases and the most pernicious ones are the ones we may not be consciously aware of. So let me answer this a bit.

Reading Club: Ostler 1

OK, this is the first in the long delayed Ostler reading club. The book is Blake Ostler’s Exploring Mormon Thought: Of God and Gods. This is the third in Blake’s series on Mormon theology. It’s also quite different from the two that went before in that it is less about formal philosophy. [...]

Ostler Reading Club Schedule

OK, I know some people wanted an update on the reading club. As you recall that was supposed to have started the first week in September. However I found myself working 12, 18 and even a few 20 hour days for most of the month. Needless to say philosophical writing ended up [...]

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