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Showing posts from April, 2016

Islamophobia and Anti-semitism - what is, and isn't, bigotry?

There's currently a great deal of talk about Islamophobia and anti-semitism in the UK press. You won't be surprised to hear me say I am very firmly against both forms of prejudice. However, I suspect many would consider me guilty of one or other. I suspect many Muslims or Muslim-supporters would consider me Islamophobic because, say, I consider the religion of Islam one root cause of much contemporary terrorism. On the other hand, I don't doubt some Jews or Israeli-supporters would consider me anti-semitic because, say, I think the attacks on Gaza were disproportionate and unjustified, or because I am broadly sympathetic to non-violent methods of Palestinian resistance, such as their BDS campaign - Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. It may well be that I am just mistaken about what is and isn't Islamophobic/anti-semitic, and I genuinely want to be guilty of neither, so I thought I would arrange various claims according to whether I consider them Islamophobic or not and

Wittgensteinian Account of Religious Belief - forthcoming in European Journal of Philosophy: pre-publ. draft.

Wittgensteinian Accounts of Religious Belief: Non-Cognitivist, Juicer, and Atheist-minus                                                                                   Wittgenstein's views on religious belief are cryptic. We have comparatively few of his comments on religion, and most of what we do have were neither recorded by Wittgenstein himself nor intended by him for publication. Here I aim to assess some of the arguments that have been attributed to Wittgenstein in support of a view about religious belief that I call No Contradiction : No Contradiction . When atheists deny the beliefs they take to be expressed by such sentences as    (a) 'God exists'    (b) 'God created the world'    (c) 'Jesus rose from the dead'    (d) 'We will face a Judgement Day' they fail to contradict the religious beliefs such sentences are used to express. Often associated with No Contradiction is a further related [i] thesis that