Richard Carrier Blogs

Fisherian Runaway Doesn’t Work Like That: Manosphere Pseudoscience Strikes Again!

Richard Carrier — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 22:24:50 +0000

I’ve been hired to critically analyze another pseudoscientific bollard from the professional misogynist Stardusk (a.k.a. The Thinking Ape): the incel-mgow argument that “fisherian runaway” proves women (read: “sluts!”) are biologically ruining men, “and it’s all their fault” (regardless of what “it” is; you can plug anything in there you like). This is yet another abuse […]

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Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination

Richard Carrier — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 17:04:47 +0000

Today I am going to offer a naturalist theory of qualia—the particulars of “what it is like” of conscious experience, like the redness of red or the floweriness of a flower’s scent or the twanginess of a guitar, or even what love or fear, or deliciousness or pain, “feel” like. My model can’t be tested […]

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Theism, Naturalism, and Explanatory Power

Richard Carrier — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 16:12:29 +0000

Last week I published an eristic analysis of an exchange of videos between Rationality Rules and Capturing Christianity, on Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? This time I will analyze a previous Capturing Christianity video, “Why Theism Best Explains Reality (philosophy nerds, get in here!)”, featuring the content creators Tim Howard and Kyle Alander defending […]

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Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism?

Richard Carrier — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 15:19:02 +0000

Of course, atheism. But in any debate with the deluded, they will claim it’s the other way around. Flat Earthers will claim the rest of us are deluded, that believing in a spherical Earth is irrational, and so on. So someone not already up to speed might not be able to tell which is which. […]

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Matt Kovacs Demonstrates What’s Wrong with Atheists Clinging to the Historicity of Jesus

Richard Carrier — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 14:32:09 +0000

I’ve commented a lot lately in my articles on the historicity of Jesus that critics themselves are now demonstrating why historicity is a bankrupt paradigm: they never have a sound or valid argument for it. Instead, they kneejerk oppose it emotionally, doing no work to even understand the peer reviewed studies questioning it (they rarely […]

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Three Models of Critical Thinking: Remote Work, Generational Wealth, and Election Polling

Richard Carrier — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 22:15:54 +0000

Three articles I read recently contain such valuable lessons for critical thinking that for my end-of-month analysis I want to summarize them for you and extract for you the general lessons you can learn from them, so you can apply them to every question in your life (whether political, philosophical, professional, or personal). Election Polling […]

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Did the Rapture Already Happen!? No. Nor Will It Ever.

Richard Carrier — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 13:24:02 +0000

“Truly I tell you, this generation shall certainly not pass away until all these things have happened,” we’re told the Lord said, “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise […]

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Did the Rapture Already Happen!? My Debate with the Full Preterist Don Preston Is Tonight

Richard Carrier — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 15:53:52 +0000

You can catch up on the strange world of Christian preterism (a view lately gaining a lot of attention, and causing a lot of panic among Evangelicals), especially “full preterism,” at Wikipedia. But in the ultra-quick: Don Preston holds that Jesus not only did predict he would return and complete the end times in 70 […]

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Is This Possible!? Giving an Amazon Sales Event a Try

Richard Carrier — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 16:40:24 +0000

I don’t imagine this is possible, but I was curious enough to try: if I can generate $1500 in sales through my Amazon Associates link, they will give me a “bonus” of $45. A whole forty-five dollars! In addition to my usual commissions on those sales of course. But hey. Is this possible? I have […]

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A Golden Example of Antichoicers Lying to Your Face

Richard Carrier — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 13:38:28 +0000

Just this week a student in one of my online classes answered a test question with a real-world example of trying to manipulate people using numbers and graphs, which they had to debunk. The example they chose (from the course text, Levitin’s Field Guide to Lies) is solid gold; and they directed me to an […]

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