The position of the moderate Muslim is unenviable. Conservative Muslims castigate you as apostates and heretics. Right-wing Americans lump you with the terrorists and fanatics. So extreme has the anti-Muslim fervor become in the United States that Donald Trump can call for temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the country—and his poll numbers go up! … Message to Moderate Muslims

Racists and Bigots are allowed to to speak and to advocate their racist and bigoted views in the USA, but other countries have laws against such hate speech, so Donald Trump could be blocked from entry into Britain. ============================ =============================== More than 360,000 people, angered by Donald Trump’s call to ban the entry of Muslims … TRUMP: His Bigotry & Hate is not Welcome in the U.K. or Israel

In previous weeks the top two Republican candidates for president were (1) an ignorant racist bigot (Trump), and (2) an ignorant religious nut case (Carson).  I used to think that about 1/3 of the Republican party was brain dead, because that is about the portion of Republicans who still believe Obama is a Muslim and … TRUMP: Make America Hate Again!

Note: This may be a tad technical for some readers. In my postings here at SO I recognize that many readers are not academic philosophers, so I try to walk a line that balances philosophical accuracy with accessibility. Here I go into somewhat greater detail and depth on an issue that non-philosophers may regard as … Norms as Hypothetical Imperatives

Victor Reppert posted this on his Dangerous Idea blog under the title “Why Not?”: “OK, suppose you think that religion really does harm, and we really have to do what we can to stamp it out. Most of us don’t have the opportunity to help establish or eliminate religion by the use of violence. But … Violence Against Religion?

There is often discussion of the resurrection apologetic here at SO. Some newcomers to the conversation may be put off by the complexity of it all. In hopes of providing a user-friendly introduction to the context of the debates, I offer the following: Innumerable scenarios could be and have been advanced about the fate of … Jesus End: The Formal Possibilities

I got a correspondence this morning from a reader who identified himself as having been raised in a strictly orthodox Jewish environment. One argument that he had often heard concerned the historicity of the stories about Moses, the Exodus, and the delivery of the Law at Mt. Sinai. I cannot reproduce these arguments here since … Moses and Myth

Atheist author and blogger Dan Arel as recently written that he was wrong in his previous response to the critiques of Islam by “new atheists” such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2015/10/i-was-wrong-about-new-atheism-sam-harris-and-islam/?ref_widget=popular&ref_blog=secularfrontier&ref_post=six-findings-from-experimental-science-which-disconfirm-theism To admit in public that one was wrong requires a greater commitment to honesty and truth than to ego, and this is rare. … Is Extremism Political, Religious, or Political/Religious?

PBS is hosting a series on the brain, appropriately titled The Brain hosted by Rice University Neuroscientist David Eagleman. I watched the first episode last week and found it highly informative and entertaining. People have wondered what scientific achievements of the 21st Century could rival those of the 20th Century—relativity theory, quantum physics, DNA and … Does the Brain Construct Reality?