We're not teaching Plato at Texas A&M

Plato is off the philosophy course list for one class, at least, at Texas A&M because he somehow might say something anti-wingnut about race or gender:

Professor Martin Peterson submitted his syllabus for PHIL 111, Contemporary Moral Issues, for review Dec. 22. On Tuesday, his department head told him he had two options: remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, including readings from Plato, or be reassigned to teach a noncore philosophy course. The email, obtained by the Tribune, gave Peterson until the close of business Wednesday to decide. Peterson responded that he would revise the syllabus, saying he plans to replace the Plato readings with lectures on free speech and academic freedom.

Then, A&M regents came up with this spin:

In a statement to the Tribune, A&M said the decision did not amount to a ban on teaching Plato and that other sections of the same course that include Plato – but do not include modules on race and gender ideology – had been approved.

Sure now. 

As many may recognize, per Literary Hub, "The Symposium," with its multiple sexes (not genders, LitHub, see Wikipedia) as far of its human origin story is the trouble spot. Its relatively open celebration of pederasty is also surely an issue.  

Top posts, 3rd quarter of 2025

 Similar to my main site, but on a quarterly not monthly basis, once again, here's a roundup of the most-read items of the last three months of 2025. Not all are FROM that time period; "evergreen" items will be marked.

No 10: Did Leon Festinger commit some sort of research fraud? It looks that way. While this won't demolish the idea of cognitive dissonance, it certainly leaves some of its stronger claims on weaker ground. 

No. 9 was my snarking on Bart Ehrman's retirement announcement; the retirement lecture referenced there is here, talking about "our flawed manuscripts."

No. 8? My brief, and latest, callout of r/AcademicBiblical moronity, focused on James McGrath.

No. 7? From 2022, my in-depth discussion of the great ahistoricity of the book of Acts.

No. 6 is my discussion of my Goodreads review system. 

No. 5 is definitely evergreen, from 2009: "Paul, Passover, Jesus, Gnosticism." 

No. 4? Did Josephus actually write the Testimonium Flavianum? Contra a crudely apologetic book, he most certainly did not; in fact, the author's effort backfired. 

No. 3 was my callout of Massimo Pigliucci both for his top 10 existential questions and his use of AI to help formulate them. 

No. 2, from way back in 2007: "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha." 

No 1, I wrote about the non-immigration portions of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops' November statement, and how it reflects convergence of lay Catholics and lay Protestants along religious lines.

The Nones are still not reviving

 Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta takes a look at new Pew et al data on where the Nones are at.

 Beyond the reasons why, most of which are obviously, one demographic issue, which should also be obvious, is of note.

People leave organized religion (or move from one to another, too) for the most part before age 30. So, if Catholics or Protestants are losing the early adult young, either due to active decision or passive drift, if they don't get them back soon, they never will.

In other words, as Merikkka moves more and more to a non-White majority (it already is natally), it moves if somewhat more slowly to a smaller Christian majority. Most the rest change in the 30-49 age range.

But, beyond most the obvious ones?

Churches are losing people because of increased politicization. And, of course, we're NOT talking about "librul" mainline Protestants. Will the winger churches, especially the ones, whether denominational or independent megachurches, who are not just winger but full MAGA, listen? Probably not. Rather, if anything, they'll circle the wagons.

And, per an earlier piece, Charlie Kirk's martyrdom (sic), semi-officially by many of those wingnut Protestants including the LCMS wingnut Lutherans of my birth, but NOT Rome, has NOT spurred, at least in the few months since, any great revival. 

The Second Great Awakening, and even more, social Christianity of the early 20th century, actually offered something to working-class Americans. The modern success gospel preached by conservative evangelicals, especially outside denominational structures? No.

I don't think the current "holding steady" will pick up massive Nones steam for another decade. After that? Possibly moderate Nones steam for mild growth. By 2050, the US may be where western Europe was in 1950.

The stability is probably due to older Boomers and what's left of pre-Boomers turning back to religion in their later years, especially if they have health problems and even more, psychological turmoil. But, since younger generations are less and less religious in the first place, that will happen less and less in the future. Also, COVID was a one-off mini-bump for organized religion. 

Ignoring the possible roots of Hanukkah, throwing secularists under the bus

Shock me that the "pergressuve" Texas Observer would do this, but it gave TCU prof David Brockman the space to do exactly that.

At the Observer, Brockman talks about how the religious of Texas can take comfort in "sparks of light" to battle the current political darkness.

With Judaism,  he ignores that Jews of Maccabean times got lucky (and weren't all that up to that point, as Yonathan Adler attests on purity, on festivals and Sabbaths, and more, including the actual targets of Antiochus Epiphanes), and also ignores the likelihood that Hanukkah came from the Persian, Zoroastrian, Yalda Night, also known as Chelle Night. Both former Iranian Jews and Syriac Christians (shades of Saturnalia?) have dipped into it, and we of course know the many other Achaemenid influences on emerging proto-Judaism. We don't know if it was first celebrated for eight days; that was derived from Sukkot. The story is from the "deuterocanonical" 1 and 2 Maccabees; the "miracle of the oil," which was seven days, not eight, is pure myth and comes from the Talmud, several centuries later.

Diwali? Not even a winter festival. Brockman is kissing the butt of vague religious pluralism. Also, Sikhs and Jains observe it, not just Hindus.

With a purely lunar calendar, Muslims don't have a solstice event. And, since he also kisses the butt of the Neoplatonist/Gnostic Kabbalah, one wonders if Brockman is a Zionist.

As for this:

One need not subscribe to any religion to recognize and draw strength from this insight. The idea for this essay came to me during a visit this fall to Houston’s Rothko Chapel, which transcends religious boundaries and embraces people of all religions and none. Avowedly multifaith and ecumenical, it stands in stubborn protest against the divisiveness and hatred metastasizing across our nation.

Multifaith and ecumenical is not secularist. Besides, I can get insight about the daylight portion of days lengthening again while hiking and birding.

Finally, a reminder that Laplace is "the reason for the season." 

In the Pink is not "in the pink" with me with spinning Christmas legend for political reasons

In The Pink Texas finds the true meaning of Christmas badly misspins the story behind the Lukan nativity myth to present an interesting, and politically supportable story about the Trump administration and religions right wingnuts, and an interesting sidebar, with no follow-up, about American Catholic political issues.

I am referring in specific to the second half of the piece.

First, of course, it never happened.

This cannot be stressed enough. There's not a shred of historicity in the Lukan narrative, starting with the fact that Quirinius was not governor of Syria until 6 CE, long after Herod's 4 BCE death. From there, it's noted that his census applied to Judea because it was under direct Roman control, so even if Jesus was born then, if Mary and Joseph lived in the Galilee still ruled by Antipas, it wouldn't apply to them anyway. And, Roman censuses didn't require you to move to your family's ancestral home town anyway. 

Second, within the story AS STORY, Jesus and Mary weren't refugees; they were following a lawful political order. 

I should add that this is far from the first time I've seen this claim, so let's look at the appropriate verses from Luke 2 (vv 1-3):

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 All went to their own towns to be registered.

See? Not refugees. 

Third, it (natch) goes on to blend Matthew's story (which also, of course, didn't happen) with Luke's. 

And, they're not refugees in Matthew, either, because Mary and Joseph are living in Bethlehem the whole time up to this point. Now, AFTER Jesus' birth, they have to flee Herod in Matthew's story, and so are refugees — fleeing from a Roman client kingdom into direct Roman control. The best modern analogy would be fleeing Puerto Rico for the United States itself.

Above all, though, beyond the conflation, the Matthean birth narrative didn't happen either. The real Josephus, not a Eusebian interpolator, surely would have mentioned a cavalcade of Persian astronomers looking for the Messiah.

Beyond THAT? Misinterpretations of Micah 5:2 aside, we don't even know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Look at Nathaniel's sneer in John 1:46. Look at the polemics Jesus has with Jewish leaders (which hint that John knew of the illegitimacy claim, just like Matthew and Luke may have) in John 8, while we're here. 

As for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops condemnation of ICE earlier this year? 

Yes, that happened. But, it didn't invoke the Lukan nativity.

It also ruled on a bunch of other things that librulz and leftists don't like, and that also illustrated issues of religious-political matters in US Catholicism.

The big issue for this secularist is that he doesn't like misappropriation of religious traditions for political reasons at all. 

A second issue is that this seems to promote Christian exceptionalism. And yes, just like there are both liberal and conservative Cafeteria Catholics, you can have liberal (political, theological or both) Christian exceptionalists. 

There are plenty of texts in the Tanakh that also talk about refugees or similar. There's also passages in the Quran. Outside the three Abrahamistic religions, Buddhism has a long history of talking about compassion for refugees. (I'm not sure what Hinduism might say.)

And, of course, so does secular humanism. 

In an era where a certain percentage of refugees in/to the United States are not Christian, it might be good to avoid Christian exceptionalism of the liberal brand as well as the conservative brand. 

Old polling by Pew, Gallup, etc., about how atheists (to use the A-word!) are mistrusted more than gays broke out people by political stance and found this tilts right. That said, “atheist” is used by centrists and even some librulz to mean “spiritual but non-religious,” and I have personal experience on this. Early in the dating process, many years ago, when a woman I had met found out that, no, it really meant that, she dropped me like a hot potato. This academic research piece about Gnu Atheism gets exactly at that:

First, by focusing directly on the issue of decline, it addresses an aspect of new atheism that has thus far been overlooked in scholarly research, most of which has focused on longer-term patterns and trends. Second, in accounting for this decline, the study makes a conceptual contribution by highlighting the role of ‘atheism’ as an empty signifier—a term or phrase that can be filled with varying meanings by different individuals or groups, but which ultimately lacks a fixed or stable signification. ... Thirdly, the paper adds to our conceptual understanding of new atheism by drawing on insights from social movement theory, focusing in particular on the idea of a social movement lifecycle. ...  The fourth principal contribution of this study is that it seeks to link the internal dynamics of the atheist movement to the wider sociopolitical and cultural context, in particular to the rise of identity politics and an intensification of the culture wars in the United States. Within the existing literature, these factors have been relatively disconnected.

Emphasis mine in the above. Give the whole thing a read. This is part of why I'm not a Gnu Atheist, but it's also part of why I don't use the "A-word" in general. It's an empty signifier. Secularist indicates more of what I do believe in, as far as sociology of religion, rather than what others say I don't believe in, as far as metaphysics. It's that I have a methodologically and philosophically naturalist focus on the world as is.

It should also be noted there are conservative — generally libertarian conservative — secularists, as well as liberals, and leftists (of some sort) like me. 

 

Wait, you used an AI bot to ask what the top 10 existential questions should be for naturalists?

I thought this was a Poe when Massimo first said this in this Substack piece, but the list itself is real, and nothing really objectionable.

What I am currently playing with in my mind is a type of empirical naturalism inspired by Einstein’s contention that, when it comes to knowing and navigating the world, “experience is the alpha and omega of all our knowledge of reality.” By this Einstein didn’t mean that theory—mathematical, logical, or otherwise—is irrelevant, but rather that theory is limited to the formal description of possible worlds. The only way to narrow down those (infinite) possibilities to the one, actual world is by way of empirical evidence, as imperfect and tentative as it may be.  

So, as an exercise in empirical naturalism, I asked my AI assistant, Claude, to list the ten most consequential existential philosophical questions it could think of, to which I’m going to provide what I think is the answer that comes out of an empirical naturalist stance. I will not, in this essay, be able to provide much justification for my answers, though I provide links to previous essays and reserve the possibility to come back to some of these topics in the future. Let’s see what came out of the exercise!

Yes, even if "Claude" is based on your past philosophical scrivenings and ruminations, this seems like ...

Cheating, first? An AI bot doesn't have empirical engagement with the world like you or I. AI ≠ I. Second, it has no theory of mind, nor an actual mind, to be reflective or ruminant the way we are.

I could go meta, and whether I personalize an AI assistant or not, ask AI to analyze these questions and answers.

Instead, let's go AI in a non-snarky way and postulate this as one of the 10 questions:

"How serious of an existential threat is AI to the future of humanity?" 

I mean this for non-capitalist reasons, unlike Sam Altman or whomever.

So, which of Massimo's 10 to replace, then?

No. 3 on free will is low-hanging fruit and also something on which he's changed his mind. He used to defend the idea of at least something like free will from at least the worst of determinism. And, his new answer is wrong.

Maybe another of the 10 should be replaced as well as this? This deserves more thought. 

And this has gotten more thought, starting with the same day I saw Massimo post this.

Driving to work, I then thought of a second question, along the lines of:

"How dangerous is political liberalism for the future of the earth?"

Then I realized that wasn't quite right, and the question that really needs pondering is:

"How dangerous is neoliberal capitalism for the future of the earth?"

Both this and my first question are about the possible powers of human self-destructiveness, not framed by any of Massimo's 10. So, I either toss free will AND one other, or two others not free will, or expand my list to 12 while tweaking some of his.

Or so I thought, until an hour or two later.

I then realized, walking to a store, that there's another issue Massimo missed.

"What is the role, and degree of power, of fate, luck or chance on human life?"

This is not any sort of New Agey, or ancient pagan religion, personification of any of these, or otherwise making them metaphysical, of course.

It's actually not just human life, of course, either. Per Steve Gould, the whole "movie" of the unfolding of evolution on earth is massively contingent. Per cosmology, things like the creation of our Solar System, and certainly the details of the moon's formation, are massively contingent.

So, I can combine the somewhat related issues of free will and "selfhood" into one, and add three new questions for 12, or keep them separate for a baker's dozen.

And, see, I popped up three questions with half an hour of off-and-on pondering on my own, no Claude needed.

There's also the metaquestion, riffing on my first two, about how self-delusional individual humans can be, as well as self-delusional as a species, including in the face of possible self-destruction. Hell, that's a 14th question right there:

"How self-delusional is the human species, including about its own future and its own possible self-destructiveness?"

Instead of AI, reading Cormac McCarthy or some other dystopian fiction (Massimo himself links to Philip Dick as part of defending determinism. And wrongly so, per what he quotes. Rather, Dick should be seen, in the quotes phrase, as defending actual existentialism, per Massimo's starting point, or maybe a Camus-type absurdism, but he's not defending determinism. [Sigh.]) 

In a follow-up piece, Massimo makes clear that he's serious about determinism, or at least rejecting free will in a way beyond my "mu" to the canard of "free will VERSUS determinism." It's a false dichotomy. Indeed, I told Massimo myself that more than a decade ago. I forgot he was already "there" then. 

Well, his sense of determinism comes off as a type similar to what I semi-mocked at an old site of his when coming from some commenters as nothing more than tautological. These commenters seemed to hold that rejecting ontological determinism, of a mind "out there," required determinism. It does not. And, he should have known that then.

For Massimo, who has long touted the idea of emergent properties, free will or something like that can be such, just like consciousness itself.

 At least he's not making a category mistake like Sapolsky. That said, here's more of my thought. 

Finally, there's this note from Massimo that opens him up to the charge of hypocrisy on the use of AI. 

More r/AcademicBiblical moronity

I'm doing this less and less, in part because I've weaned myself from there more and more.

Nonetheless, stupidities still pop up and again, not just from the peanut gallery.

Take James McGrath (aka "ReligionProf") in this piece. Tell me how we know, outside the Christian gospel claims, that John the Baptizer styled himself as Elijah? Answer: We don't, and I hope you didn't claim that we do in your book about John.

In reality, as you should know, this is Christian appropriation of the Baptizer movement, or an attempt at it.