I’ve been having a frustrating moment recently as my Apple power cord has broke, leaving me unable to use my laptop regularly. I’ve ordered a power cord replacement that could come in soon, but it has been disruptive of my work life and blogging, so I won’t be able to blog reliably until my new power cord comes in. The rant continued a bit in this essay, but you’ve already got the gist of it.

Last week I wrote an article that looked into internet copyright and outlined some of the opposition arguments in detail. I am hopefully getting a shortened version of that article published in our school newspaper, the Denisonian — no doubt they’ll shorten it even further. While I do intend to, very soon, write Part II on SOPA, I wanted to publish the shortened version that I submitted for those who just want the general persuasive gist without all the lengthy analysis.

We’ve finally reached the twenty first link roundup, complete with many links to read, plus a review of the week’s blog posts and discussions.

A lot of the websites went dark last Wednesday to protest SOPA. But what is SOPA? What is the deal with this legislation? Why is it so bad? What are the arguments for and against, and what are the real facts when you cut through all the intentional and unintentional misrepresentation? As a part of my personal protest effort, I offer a summary of my research to the bottom of things.

After describing multiple ways in which God is malevolent and debunking the common excuses, it’s time to turn to debunking the very last line of defense — the appeals to mystery, like how “god works in mysterious ways” or has an unknowable purpose that justifies what he does. After debunking these and a few others, we can finally arrive at the conclusion that God is either malevolent or nonexistent, with much weight given to the idea of nonexistence.

For the past couple of weeks, three people — Bryan, Joseph, and myself — have been commenting on how quantum mechanics may disprove naturalism. I ended up writing a really long response, so I decided to make it a separate essay. It will have the added effect of moving the discussion here, freeing up the original thread for new discussions more specific to the essay’s content.

What the title says, I need to focus my work in other areas and simply won’t have the time to write again until Wednesday, January 18. See you then!

I’ve been running the Weekly Link Roundup series for awhile, which has now expanded to both document my favourite links that I read within the week and document the happenings essay-wise and discussion-wise for the links. Now that I’ve written twenty different link roundups, I want to make a compilation essay of the best-of links from all my link roundups that I’ve done to date. I will then order them here, again, in ranking, so that you can see my favourite essays of all-time, so far. I will also set precedent to do so again on the fortieth link roundup. Reading these will give you a great sense of what has inspired me to believe what I do.

The first Link Roundup of the new year is here, containing many links to read, plus a review of the week’s blog posts and discussions.

Some people wonder why it takes several dozen or more essays to explain my point. Why can’t I just explain why God does not exist or give a complete account for morality in a couple of sentences, or just one essay? Why do they need to read so much? The answer is because of the problem of large inferential distance, which I will now explain in just one essay.