This is a serious question: why do people like Ben Affleck?

Sincerely, no hard feelings. Sorry I came off smug and thanks for the discussion.

The problem is that those Reeboks obscure her silver feet.

You're not really meeting my central point and I'm beginning to think you don't actually understand it. To illustrate how deep my point actually goes, New Atheists—to a one, and yes, I read all the major works during my militant atheist days—reject all ways of knowing that are not "science" as they understand it,…

I think it would be helpful if you defined science. I'll respond at greater length tomorrow, if you're interested .

That's one word for it. People tend to object that "scientism" is an empty slur, so I avoid it to steer clear of semantic tail-chasing even though I personally think it is a valid term.

You're actually wrong because you ignored the part of my comment where I wrote that New Atheism is internally incoherent, i.e., illogical and unsupported by empirical evidence contrary to your position.

I wanted to go light on the genocide.

The New Atheists are fundamentalists because their answer to literally every question is ultimately "science." They believe morality, beauty, meaning, basically any kind of value is explicable by science. The very concept that those things might originate from outside of what is scientifically describable is a…

That's a pretty good reading. Interestingly, even my (quite) Mormon mother thinks Groundhog Day is a pretty profound movie. It really does reveal itself differently to different people.

Can it be an abridged audiobook?

With selective editing, Hotel for Dogs becomes Barton Fink.

"Guess who."

Ramis, of course, is right. It's an extremely rich text, that much is for certain. I'm not a Nietzschean myself, but it just illustrates the idea of eternal return so explicitly that I can't interpret it any other way. It's interesting that Phil only progresses after he takes a risk and actualizes himself by living…

You have been very fortunate in your experiences. I only found a single Catholic parish with good music and decent liturgies in two states. It was a cathedral parish (where I also did several months of RCIA) so that's kind of to be expected. At the rest of them, the music was the Vatican II hymnal and parishioners…

That may be true, but those things aren't necessary for fundamentalism of any kind. At its core, fundamentalism is just the unwavering conviction that a certain set of principles is true and an unwillingness to entertain other possibilities.

Music in most Catholic parishes is more "On Eagles' Wings" (look it up) than "Miserere." Non-Catholics often have an antiquated sense of what contemporary Catholicism actually looks like in practice, as if it's all incense, Latin, and Palestrina. That hasn't been the case in some time.

That makes perfect sense because the New Atheists are fundamentalists.

Lots of people seem to feel that way about it. I've come to believe that it is the most Nietzschean movie ever made.

Making her first appearance since, what, 2009?