Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 241

Enter the age of Marshall Hodgson’s “Gunpowder Empires”

    At least once, and perhaps twice, I used Daniel W. Brown, A New Introduction to Islam, 2d. ed. (Malden MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) as the principal text for my introductory course on the religion of Islam.  Along the way, I marked a few passages that reminded me of points that I myself […]

“One of humanity’s greatest achievements”

    I know, I know.  Scientists don’t know anything.  They’ve been wrong almost every time.  They’re mostly dishonest progressive hacks.  Nonetheless, these two studies will be of interest to people who aren’t reflexively anti-science:   “Millions of COVID Cases and Deaths Averted Thanks to Lockdowns: ‘One of Humanity’s Greatest Achievements’”   And scientists may […]

“But it’s still possible, right?”

    Here are few more or less unrelated quotations that I’ve drawn from Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016):   Our models are mixtures of well-tested theories, reasonable assumptions and guesses; as Richard Feynman noted, ‘it is not unscientific to make […]

Religious Minorities and Islam

    Here’s another passage that I marked in Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010):   [M]inorities who had resented Byzantine, Sassanid, and other rule believed their situation would improve under Muslim rule; time and experience under the new Muslim calphate mainly confirmed those […]

Resting (and Making a Movie) in the Plague Year

    New materials from the Interpreter Foundation, available (as usual) online and at no charge:   Audio Roundtable: Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 24 “Enter into the Rest of the Lord” Alma 13-16 The Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 24, “Enter into the Rest of the Lord,” on […]

A hint from evil to God?

    I here offer a thought that I wanted to jot down for potential future development.  (It’s possible that I’ll have another such thought later today or tomorrow, though two actual thoughts may represent my full allotted quota for this half of 2020.)  It goes as follows:   Can the problem of evil be […]

Separation of “church and state” in Islamic history

    Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), makes a very important point:   Islam actually had no parallel to the intimate links between church and state in the West, where the church itself wielded great political and economic power.  While Islamists today — […]

Faster Healing, Better Health, and Stronger Families

    It’s been a while since I’ve shared any of my notes from Paul McFate, 52 Good Reasons to Go to Church, Besides the Obvious Ones (Chicago: ACTA Publications, 2004).  So here are a few more, all of which qualify for inclusion in your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File:   Faster Healing […]

Help Wanted (for Later This Month)

    Here’s a notice that I’m also going to have sent out to the Interpreter Foundation mailing list:     A small production crew will be doing some supplemental filming for the Interpreter Foundation’s Witnesses movie project at Genesee Country Village—about half an hour from Rochester, New York, and not far from Palmyra—from 23 June […]

“Emergency COVID-19 measures prevented more than 500 million infections, study finds”

    An important new article appeared today on the website of the elite science journal Nature:   “The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic” Abstract Governments around the world are responding to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic1 with unprecedented policies designed to slow the growth rate of infections. Many actions, such […]