religion
pharyngula | March 15, 2008That's the sentiment Terry of Rapture Ready expressed. Don't believe me? Here's the direct quote:
There are two important statistics to note:
1. Each month about 160,000 people visit Rapture Ready.
2. Every year, the mortality rate claims around 1 percent of the population.
Internet usage by the elderly is somewhat lower than that of the general population, but it still means that hundreds of you people who are reading this right now will not be here the same time next year.
For you folks who become part of the mortality figures in the coming days, I commission you with the same task:…
jrosenhouse | March 14, 2008Chris over at Mixing Memory argues, both in this post and in the subsequent comments, that he is. I think that claim is deeply silly and trivializes the term fundamentalist. I've been mixing it up with Chris and some of his readers in the comments to his post. Having spilled so many words on the issue, I figured I might as well get a blog post of my own out of it. So go have a look and let me know what you think!
oracknows | March 13, 2008I happen to be in Chicago right now attending the annual meeting of the Society of Surgical Oncology. It's a meeting that I try to make it to almost every year, and usually it's a necessary update to my knowledge base. Consequently, I only just this morning noticed my fellow ScienceBloggers Mark Hoofnagle, Mark Chu-Carroll, and P.Z. Myers piling on the latest example of the sexist misogyny that is Vox Day, this time in (where else) WorldNetDaily, in an article entitled The real assault on science. Vox's article, in essence, views the application of Title IX to science education to increase…
razib | March 13, 2008Steve Waldman has been blogging some of the major arguments from his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. He says:
As for their religious beliefs, someone in the comment thread said I was being incoherent or contradictory by saying the Big Five (Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington & Madison) were neither Deists nor orthodox Christians. Again, we're viewing this through a somewhat warped lens. "Deist" and "Orthodox Christian" were not the only two spiritual choices. For one thing, each Founder was slightly different from each…
pharyngula | March 13, 2008Religion can be a force for peace, love, and understanding — at least when it provides an opportunity to beat up on those evil secularists. Turkey is an excellent example of where the creationists want to take us: it's the one country in the world that beats the US in its level of ignorance about biology, and the Christians and Muslims are happily collaborating to promote theocracy there.
Read the account — that's our future if the Discovery Institute has its way.
gregladen | March 13, 2008Wikileaks has this:
208 scanned pages relating to the Church of Scientology's former "Office of Special Affairs" employee and subsequent apostate Frank Oliver. The documents are dated between 1986 and 1992 (inclusive), when, according to the file, Frank Oliver was declared a "suppressive person" and ex-communicated. Fank Oliver should be able to verify the material and has appeared in the media before on subjects relating to the church. Starting on page 107, the document shows that at the time of writing the Church of Scientology was actively engaged in black propaganda (especially concerning…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2008The New York Times is reporting that Michael Heller, a Roman Catholic Priest and cosmologist from Poland, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize. The Christian Science Monitor offers some further details here.
In case you are unfamiliar with it, the Templeton Prize is a 1.6 million dollar (!!) prize given out to those attempting to reconcile science with religion. Typically it goes to people with genuine scientific credentials who are nonetheless willing to utter comforting bromides about how science and religion are two sides of the same coin.
I'm not familiar with Heller's work, and short…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2008This paper (PDF format) by British philosopher Simon Blackburn is getting some attention in the blogosphere. Let's have a look.
Blackburn addresses the question of what it means to respect religion, from the perspective of an atheist. The essay is perfect, by which I mean that it says exactly what I think needs to be said on this issue.
Particularly important is the distinction between different kinds of respect:
`Respect' of course is a tricky term. I may respect your gardening by just letting you get on with it. Or, I may respect it by admiring it and regarding it as a superior way…
tqa | March 12, 2008
Someone once pointed out that when a dog pisses on a fire hydrant, it's not committing an act of vandalism. It's just being a dog. It's possible to use that analogy to excuse a creationist who takes a quote wildly out of context, I suppose, but I don't think it's really appropriate. Creationists might indulge in quote mining with the same casual disregard for public decency as a male dog telling his neighbors that he's still around, but, unlike dogs, the creationists are presumably capable of self-control. We've simply grown blase about their propensity for twisting other people's words…
pharyngula | March 12, 2008People in India were told that there was a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary floating in the sky, so about 50 of them suffered burned retinas by staring at the sun. I think we can see that religion definitely attracts stupid people to its ranks.
I sure hope no one tells them that if you hit yourself on the head with a hammer real hard, you'll see swarms of angels dancing everywhere around you. Or, more likely, that if you mail all your money to a preacher, you'll get rich. But no one would be that sadistic, would they?
purepedantry | March 12, 2008A Christmas present, maybe? Maybe not.
A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more interesting than that.
Persinger is a proper scientist. The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious experiences: epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, for example, can produce mystical experiences and visions. Persinger's helmet stimulates these temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic fields through the skull, and in…
razib | March 11, 2008Chris at Mixing Memory has a post up, Respecting the Religious (or the A-Religious), pointing to a Simon Blackburn working paper, Respect and Religion. I enjoyed Blackburn's Think, but the chapter on God left me a bit cold. Blackburn is a philosopher, and his thoughts reflect that training. If I believed that religiosity was grounded in the sorts of arguments presented in Summa Theologica, I would take more interest in philosophical deconstructions of theism. As it is, I doubt that this is the case, a reality which Summa Theologica's author, St. Thomas Aquinas, acknowledges as well.…
gregladen | March 11, 2008I remember, when I was getting to know Amanda, carefully exploring certain key issues such as this. It actually didn't take long to find out that we had almost identical political views, and perspectives on science, rational thinking, religion, and so on. (I say "almost" only because there is room for variation, but I can't think of any actual differences in perspective ... only differences in level of attention to various issues).
Anyway, here is a piece by Aaron Rowe in The Wired on the topic:
While searching for a soulmate on several online dating sites, I caught myself disregarding…
pharyngula | March 11, 2008This is the real goal of the New Atheists: no indoctrination, just kids questioning their indoctrination. Keep on asking those questions!
gregladen | March 10, 2008It turns out that most of our elected representatives, in the U.S., are going to hell. I just found out. Do you want to know why?
Do you remember the dust up regarding newly elected Congresmember Keith Ellison (of the Fabulous Fifth District, Minnesota)? Ellison is a Mild Muslim (has never been seen wearing a suicide bomb belt, etc.) liberal democrat. When he was on his way to Washington, the right wing crazy people got all upset over the prospect of Ellison taking the Oath of Office on the Quran instead of the Christian Bible. My advice to Ellison, which I think he summarily ignored…
pharyngula | March 10, 2008We've got some new additions to the Deadly Sins, the ones that will get you consigned straight to hell as soon as you die.
"You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour's wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos," he said.
Bishop Girotti said that mortal sins also included taking or dealing in drugs, and social injustice which caused poverty or "the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few".
He said that two mortal sins which…
pharyngula | March 8, 2008Several people have asked me to dig into this and post something on Pharyngula, but I really don't want to — the more I look at it, the more I recoil in baffled disgust. Cedarville University, one of those bizarre Christian colleges that just makes me want to gag in the first place, has terminated the contracts of two tenured faculty, David Hoffeditz and David Mappes, in their biblical studies department. Right away, I oppose the action of the university on general principles: short of engaging in some kind of criminal behavior, it's a key part of academic freedom that tenure means the…
pharyngula | March 7, 2008We have a couple of more eye-witnesses to the start of Dawkins' lecture tour in Arizona, Jim Lippard and John Wilkins. Lippard gives an interesting account, while Wilkins…well, I guess Dawkins interrupted his lecture to walk up the aisle, smack John with a truncheon a few times, rifle his wallet, and as he was stalking away from the poor guy crumpled in his seat, hissed that he was the atheist pope and he could do anything he wanted. At least, that's what I imagine must have happened, and John hadn't quite recovered from his concussion before he started writing his complaints.
First of all,…
pharyngula | March 7, 2008Religion is colliding with the law all over the place.
A Malaysian woman was jailed for worshipping a teapot. It was a very large teapot, two stories high; does that help? There's also a wonderful Catch-22 in the story — Malaysia allows freedom of worship, but under Sharia law, apostasy is a criminal offense, so she can be arrested for violating Muslim law.
In a sensible contrast, Britain has voted to take blasphemy off the law books. Good news, you English — blaspheme all you want! I expect a chorus of "goddamns" in the comments now.
The US isn't quite so rational, since we've got…
pharyngula | March 7, 2008Everyone has been sending me this story about how a researcher has deduced from the crazy talk in the bible that Moses was high on drugs. I don't believe it. Sure, it's possible, but the information is insufficient, and the hypothesis is unnecessary.
Look at Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Robert Tilton, Billy Graham, Kathryn Kuhlman, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, Ted Haggard, Kent Hovind, Oral Roberts, Aimee Semple McPherson, Peter Popoff, Benny Hinn, Fulton Sheen, Charles Coughlin, and every single little podunk charismatic and fundamentalist preacher you can find in any town in…