Since I started this weblog on a lark over the weekend, I am open to suggestions about formatting and such. You can also place other comments in this thread which might not be appropriate for a post.
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Meta
Hello,
I was reading The Corner and noticed your appeal for comments and/or contributors. I write profusely, and some of what I write is actually good. I am a passionate Center-Right kind of guy without a social conservatism bent. I believe strongly in the Libertarian principles of the GOP, including Natural Rights, Limited Government, Personal Sovereignty/Ownership/Responsibility, Individual Freedom, etc.
Many of my writings relate to government and society, while others are more personal(poems, etc). My most extensive blog is the original–(http://thekendallproject.blogspot.com). Most of The Kendall Project is personal writing, although there are a few good articles, including a case against Evolutionary Theory that you might enjoy. My political blog (http://restorationrevolution.blogspot.com) is fairly new, and was formed as part of a grass-roots movement to redefine the American Conservative Movement. I’ve also written notes on Facebook, etc. I’m a politically active resident of the City and County of Denver, sit on a commission for the mayor, and am also a member of the Log Cabin Republicans (yes, secular, gay Republican here). I would love the opportunity to advance the cause of a Republican party dependent wholly on logic/reason without the emotional dogmas of religious belief. I would be willing to submit something for your consideration. Let me know if you are at all interested. Thank you. (The text of one of my writings is also currently on the Colorado LCR website, http://www.logcabin.org/logcabinco/index.html
While not a conservative in many respects, I applaud your efforts to help rescue conservative thought from the insanity of fundamentalism. I believe a healthy, intellectually driven conversation between conservatives and liberals is tremendously important to a healthy society and it is near impossible to have such a conversation when g-d gets in the way.
I look forward to your writing and wish you success in developing a stable of good contributors.
I need to also mention that your RSS feed is broken. The link won’t load in a browser or in any feed reader.
This one is especially for Bradlaugh and other devout evolutionists. Since you don’t believe in God, have you taken the logical next step and ascribed the creation of life on Earth to super-smart extraterrestrials? It appears that Dawkins and Frick are of this mind.
Your old excuse that evolutionism doesn’t have to explain the origins of life has already been demolished. Are you just going to maintain mutually exclusive beliefs and pretend that they are both rational?
Finally!
I think I emailed Derb suggesting this very idea several times.
I have been a National Review and Commentary reader for decades and, though enjoying and agreeing with most of the political stuff, I always felt turned off by the subtext implying that, as a reader, I could be assumed to be religious.
It always bothered me also that, though the logic behind a particular article might be impeccable, it was bundled together with other pro-religious stuff that was laughably weak and credulous.
So: three cheers for this website. Let’s not cede the intelligent skeptical community to the Left.
By the way, though an atheist, I am pro-Life. This is a question of morality, not science. I would be interested to know what proportion of other readers share this particular narrow segment of the population.
As a fan of Mr. Derbyshire’s work, I will visit regularly. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to pray for your success. (I crack me up)
Seriously, I hope you guys work hard at it. The non-snake handler segment of the movement needs more voices.
@Gerry Shuller
This one is especially for Bradlaugh and other devout evolutionists. Since you don’t believe in God, have you taken the logical next step and ascribed the creation of life on Earth to super-smart extraterrestrials? It appears that Dawkins and Frick are of this mind.
Nonsense and libelous. What Dawkins DID say, is that if there is life on other planets, something like Natural Selection is almost certainly responsible. Sort of the oppositie of your assertion, no?
Your old excuse that evolutionism doesn’t have to explain the origins of life has already been demolished.
Really? Because you say so? Evidence please.
Are you just going to maintain mutually exclusive beliefs and pretend that they are both rational?
Now you’re embarrassing yourself. Take a deep breath.
We need more on the coming war with Mexico.
In addition for our social conservative friends:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2008/11/governmet-is-devil.html
Also read the comments at the cross post at Classical Values.
Making a deal with government to “save” values is making a deal with the Devil. And you know how those work out.
A list of contributors would be much appreciated, even if it is entirely pseudononymous.
While I agree that NRO and elements of “conservatism” are too overtly religious, I’m not sure I follow the logic that suggests an “unbeliever” conservatism. Derb introduced this as “Godless Bloggers” on NRO. Why? Isn’t there a way this could be framed so a discussion of “conservatism” takes center stage, and the role of faith and religion simply takes a subordinate role?
I’m not Bradlaugh, and I’m no more “devout” an “evolutionist” than I am a “devout” “gravity-ist” or “Newton’s law of motion-ist”, but I’ll take a stab at this.
You are allowing for two theories for the origin of life — either (1) God put it together, or (2) aliens put it together.
You are neglecting at least three competing theories, one of which all scientists have to keep in mind at all times. In particular,
3) Life has always existed throughout eternity, and there was no beginning,
4) Life arose from nonliving precursors by the operation of known, or at least knowable, natural laws. (My personal favorite)
5) The Universal Alternative: Something else happened that is not accounted for in possibilities 1-4. (In other words, all our explanations are wrong, even yours.)
I’m not sure if the owners of this blog would classify me as secular, as I’d be perfectly happy with the notion that God, or several gods, or the Sons of the Bird crafted the laws of nature in such a way that life would arise and evolution would happen. But it’s also possible that the laws have existed eternally, that there was no beginning, and this universe formed in accord with laws we haven’t discovered yet. And in accord with The Universal Alternative, it’s quite possible we’re all in a computer simulation, and if you take the red pill, you’ll wake up in a very surprising world.
Your old excuse that evolutionism doesn’t have to explain the origins of life has already been demolished. Are you just going to maintain mutually exclusive beliefs and pretend that they are both rational?
Actually, it’s not an excuse, and it hasn’t been demolished. Evolution is the study of how life has developed since the origin of the first living thing(s). The study of how life arose in the first place is “abiogenesis”. Although these fields are related, they are different topics.
In a similar vein, electronics is the study of how electrons behave in the presence of energy fields and matter. One can do any number of amazing things with electronics, without having to account for the origin of electrons, or deriving Maxwell’s Equations from first principles.
Check out the blog, forum and wiki at Darwin Central. We’re conservative/libertarian mostly with interests in science and so forth and have set upon a mission to fight back against the creationist/fundamentalist nonsense.
http://darwincentral.org/
I smell a viable third party in the making. No way the elephant circus can contain the Apocalyptic Christianists and Secular Judist Conservatives under their zenophobic tent
I never though i’d get such a great view of the wilderness.
Emily,
Ps
how cute… a Log Cabin made a comment (i thought you guys went the way of the Dodo).
Nonsense. What Dawkins said is that if there is a designer (which he doesn’t believe to be the case), it is near-infinately more likely to have been a space alien that was the designer as opposed to one of your ancient mythical boogiemen, like Jehovah or Yahweh, or whatever. Further, those aliens would have, themselves, come about through evolution.
Evolution doesn’t have to explain the origin of life, because it is the study of how life evolved and evolves. Abiogenesis describes how it arose. So your statement here is simply wrong.
There are no mutually exclusive beliefs pretending to be rational at play here, except if you consider the statement, often heard by the theist, that religious belief can be “rational.”
Wow, this site is 3 days old, and the creationists are *already* at it? Anyone want to wager an over/under on when we get the “tornado in a junkyard” canard? Or perhaps a quotemine from Darwin about how the evolution of the eye “seems, I freely confess, absurd?”
Given the blog’s name, I’m surprised that you don’t have a categories related to politics, such as “Politics” or “Whither the Republicans?”.
That observation is not just a joke. A real debate is brewing over the issues of whether and how secularists and religious types might be able to co-exist in a big tent party. Although a believer myself, I would hate to see the Republicans or the conservative movement (would that I were repeating myself) lose the educated secularists to the statists and Democrats (now, I am repeating myself).
Creationist drivel should be deleted immediately. They will overrun the place like a mudslide. There are plenty of other places for their rants. There are very few places for secular conservatives.
How about a tornado in a magnet factory? Which is a closer analogy to reality: chemicals combined in preferred ways.
Another center-right, libertarian-leaning site:
http://www.wildturkeys.net
Our blog is located at:
http://wildturkeysforum.blogspot.com
It behooves secular conservatives to work together!
I’ll be interested in seeing a little more about what objectives you envision for this blog.
To stray away from the other commenters here, I’d like to express my hope that this blog will not delve into a Dawkins-Dennett-Hitchens kind of anti-religious forum. As an atheist conservative who could not care less about the modern pop-God debate, I’d just want to see a site that focuses primarily upon what we would call conservative conclusions arrived at via logical reasoning and empirical evidence. I like religion and religious people, but it is so difficult to find a place where there is no space wasted on those arguments.
Amen to that. This place is already distressingly toxic. Open comments are notoriously hard to manage and I wonder whether you have the time and inclination to do it.
Good luck, I hope you get your feet underneath you soon, before you’re washed away in a tidal wave of toxic internet opinionizing. Having one God can be tough enough to deal with, things can go absolutely loopy when you’re dealing with thousands of them, all posting on your site.
In terms of site design, you could make the headlines a bit smaller. Scrolling through the main page the individual articles don’t jump out at me.
Also, a link to Talk Origins might be good to direct creationists to.
http://www.talkorigins.org/
“By the way, though an atheist, I am pro-Life. This is a question of morality, not science. I would be interested to know what proportion of other readers share this particular narrow segment of the population.”
I’m a non-Christian (kind of a vague Deist) and pro-life. Not quite the same, but I do get riled up when people assume I’m Christian because I believe in extending human rights to the unborn.
It will be interesting to see if all comments and postings that discuss faith will be discouraged, both pro-faith and anti-faith.
I’m Jewish and of the Reform Variety. I’m pro choice because the life and even mental health of the mother takes precedence over the child. In addition even Orthodox Jews consider the unborn flesh of the mother until it emerges from the womb. In any case even the Orthodox do not consider abortion murder. More like a misdemeanor. And they even have a Bible cite to back them up. It’s the law.
Given the divergence of even religious opinion: the government should stay out. Or else there should be a Jewish exception.
Finally! I’ve been a conservative for my whole life and this is the first conservative blog I’ve been able to read. Seriously, the closest I’ve been able to stomach has been Andrew Sullivan. I hope that this blog succeeds because it’d be nice to be able to be a part of a group instead of always being the voice of reason amongst crazy people.
As far as format and layout I hope you look to quality over quantity. Who knows, at some point maybe David brooks could do some guest posts. Anyway, thanks for setting this up. It’s been needed for a long time.
I’m an agnostic in the sense that I do not believe you can prove there is no God. If he does exist I do not believe he is actively involved in human events, at least not at the personal level. At various points in my life I have attempted to be a believer. I was raised a Methodist. I look forward to reading this web site on a regular basis. I view Christianity favorably though I don’t think that I have ever truly had faith that God exists. It is good to find a forum of like minded individuals. Lately I find myself seeking out people who have a similar mindset. It would be interesting to read what has lead other people to similar conclusions and how they deal in their personal lives without religious faith. Ok, I’ll say it, instead of beating around the bush. How we deal with death. Isn’t that what is on most of our minds. Are we missing out on something by not having faith. I don’t think the focus of this blog is to advocate or advance atheism (just a guess) but it might be interesting to occasionally read posts of this sort.
“I’m Jewish and of the Reform Variety. I’m pro choice because the life and even mental health of the mother takes precedence over the child.”
In cases where the pregnancy poses an immediate threat, a woman has the right to abort as an act of self-defense. But to say the “mental health” of the mother takes precedence over the child’s right to life is just staggering, to me. Would a parent that is going out of her mind trying to deal with a difficult two year old have the same right to kill the child to preserve her mental health?
“In addition even Orthodox Jews consider the unborn flesh of the mother until it emerges from the womb.”
Orthodox Jews are wrong on this. Basic biology is pretty clear that the fetus is an individual member of the human species, with a unique genetic code.
“In any case even the Orthodox do not consider abortion murder. More like a misdemeanor. And they even have a Bible cite to back them up. It’s the law.”
I don’t care what Orthodox Jews think about abortion. They aren’t infallible.
“Given the divergence of even religious opinion: the government should stay out. Or else there should be a Jewish exception.”
You know Islam allows slavery, right? So should there be an Islamic exception to laws prohibiting the buying and selling of human beings?
Nice. Glad to see this. Been a lot of tumbleweeds blowing through this part of the right, lately.