By Mathew Goldstein
There are good secularist commentators on some topics of interest who are worth reading, listening to, or watching. I am sometimes tempted to promote some of their commentary. I will start here with this commentary in Skeptic by Helen Pluckrose titled Why Secularists Calling for a Christian Revival Are Wrong. Another good article (although I consider it to be slightly flawed) in Skeptic is by Robert Deanor titled Sex is Binary?. Skeptic.com allows non-members to read two articles.
A third set of worthwhile commentaries is in a video of a discussion sponsored by the Free Speech Union titled The War on Science Author Panel Discussion that is well over one hour long if you have the time. Some people dislike that book and advise people to not read it, other people think the complaints are trivialities. I consider the complaints to be well justified and encourage people to read the book. Science is a wherever the evidence takes us enterprise. Efforts to limit what results can be publicized and what topics can be funded and researched to avoid offending people who take offense because they mistakenly associate those results with negative social consequences hinder science without actually furthering any worthwhile social goal. We need to know what is true and false to understand what we can do, and what we should do, to promote human welfare. Knowledge is foundational, ethics that is built on ignorance is unreliable. How the universe operates is itself ethically indifferent which renders ethics more important which in turn renders knowledge of how the universe operates more important if we want to promote more ethical outcomes overall. From this perspective, religious and secular critical social justice motivated censorship get the sequencing wrong. They mistakenly claim that morality comes first and the only facts that it is acceptable to publicize or try to obtain are those facts that match a predetermined vision of which facts are themselves moral. The correct sequence is facts first and from the facts we evaluate what we can do and should do to enhance human welfare.
