religion
pharyngula | January 5, 2008The NAS has a new edition of their Science, Evolution, and Creationism publication, which is a genuinely excellent piece of work. We've used the previous editions in our introductory biology course here at UMM, and if you want a short, plainly written introduction to the evidence for and importance of evolution to modern biology, I recommend it highly. It fills a niche well — it explains the science and gives a general overview for the layman without getting distracted by the details. And if $12 strains your wallet and 70 pages exceeds your attention span, you can download an 8 page summary…
oracknows | January 5, 2008"It's a miracle!"
How many times have you heard that one, usually invoked when someone survives serious injuries that would kill most people? Personally, the use of the word grates on me and did even when I was a lot more religious than I am now. Yesterday, it grated on me when I saw this story:
NEW YORK -- Alcides Moreno should be dead.
But Moreno, a 37-year-old window washer from Linden, not only survived a 47-story fall from a Manhattan skyscraper, but will likely walk again and make a near 100 percent recovery, doctors said yesterday.
"If we can talk about medical miracles, this…
pharyngula | January 5, 2008Although this article does make a very good case that you can't be a feminist and religious at the same time. Even the most peaceful religions, like Jainism and Buddhism, treat women as inferiors.
The article doesn't mention any female-centered religions, though, like Wicca…I suppose you could be a Wiccan feminist, but you're still stuck trying to believe in crazy stuff.
gregladen | January 4, 2008Pope Evicts Astronomers Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope's summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.
The eviction of the astronomers and their instruments, reported by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, and their removal to a disused convent a mile away, marks the end of a period of intimacy between popes and priest-astronomers that has lasted well over a century.
[source]
pharyngula | January 4, 2008Those darn human rights organizations keep meddling in people's personal affairs — for instance, they think fathers and brothers shouldn't be allowed to beat or kill their wives and sisters if they have been dishonorable, and that women ought to report abuse to the police. Don't they know that violence against women is a good thing? There are perfectly good reasons for it.
Relationships between fathers and daughters or sisters and brothers also provoke argument from human rights organizations, which propose the suggested solutions for all relationships. Personally, I don't think fathers or…
gregladen | January 4, 2008Every year around this time, Pat Robertson has a meeting with god, at which god tells Pat stuff about what is going to happen in the future. After several years of this, we now know for certain that god has no idea of, or no control over, what the future brings.
This is because Pat, who is certainly not lying to us about speaking with god because he himself is a christian and thus of presumed high moral standing, usually conveys information that turns out to be untrue. The nuclear terror attack of 2007 did not materialize. The major hit on major US cities by terrorists did not occur (…
omnibrain | January 4, 2008The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in the neural system and that system is responsible for every aspect of the mind, from perception, to language, and even for experiencing the presence of a higher power.
With all of these misperceptions of the mind it isn't surprising that people could think that this soul of ours could interact with…
pharyngula | January 2, 2008John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children's Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal…
nisbetmc | January 2, 2008
Advisers worry that Benedict is not as media savvy as John Paul.
Religion like science does not speak for itself, it needs to be carefully communicated with the media and specific audiences in mind. According to Reuters, Italian film and opera director Franco Zeffirelli is offering his services to Pope Benedict as an image consultant, saying the German pontiff comes across as cold and needs to review his wardrobe. "Coming after a media-savvy pope like John Paul II is a difficult task ... Benedict XVI still communicates coldly, in a way that is not suited with what is happening around him,"…
evolvingthoughts | December 31, 2007
The Grauniad has a puff piece on what has changed the minds of "the intellectual elite". It seems Alan Alda is one of them in virtue of his screen roles... still I have to like his comment:
Until I was 20 I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days. Eventually, I realised that I didn't…
pharyngula | December 31, 2007I've been slacking off on Pharyngula lately — I've had a week to relax and get caught up on a few other things. Here, though, are a few links to ridiculous religiosity that have been piling up in the mailbox.
Cockroaches are God's wrath. And did you know Jesus had a roach problem?
Vera Ivie knows what GW Bush's problem is: we haven't been praying hard enough for him. Get on your knees now!
How to edit a webpage like Jesus.
You know what would help Christianity's image problem? If all the ministers were clowns. Oh, wait…they already are. Never mind.
Pope Ratzi has a chief exorcist (…
pharyngula | December 30, 2007Elle Jacobson is a high school student who is skipping school because she's afraid of atheists. Some parents are joining in the fear, all because of one little incident:
"This boy got up and his visual aid was a Bible and a book. And he got up and started his speech by saying 'Now, this piece of crap' and pointed to the Bible."
Jacobson said that she quickly felt threatened.
"He took the Bible and he said, 'I'm going to do this because I can. I'm going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren't going to be able to comprehend and he took the Bible and started ripping out pages."…
gregladen | December 30, 2007A town full of crazy people in Louisanna got fed up with having their telephone exchange be "666" because of the link between this sequence of numbers and the devil. So they got their exchanged changed to 749. This is very funny.
7:49 is the Bible verse from Luke Johnthat says "But this multitude that knoweth not the law are accursed." in reference to the Pharisees.
The Pharisees were the crazy people in the bible ... the fundamentalists ... who Jesus warns about, because, well, their multitude knoweth'd not the law and were accursed.
This came up again more recently in the Democratic…
evolvingthoughts | December 29, 2007
Henry Gee reviews the Golden Compass, and comes up with largely the same conclusions I would have had I been as insightful as he. A quote:
It’s a long time since I read the book, The Northern Lights, on which the film is based, so perhaps it’s a problem with the script. The bottom line is this – the whole Good vs Evil schtick is unconvincing because the baddies (the Authority and the Magisterium – that’s God and the Church, geddit? No? Oh, go back to sleep) are so unrelentingly monolithic.
And not only that, we learn so little about them. Why are they so hellbent on doing in their…
gregladen | December 28, 2007... Or so intoned the Janesville, Wisconsin student during show and tell just before he started ripping his Bible to shreds.
The school responded to this as a "safety matter."
One child felt particularly "endangered" by this show of bravado, and her father has pulled his kids out of the school and has apparently forced school administrators to treat this as a safety issue, and punish the student. The school is silent on the nature of the punishment, but insists that while the student is constitutionally protected in his decision to rip pages out of his own bible, he was being punished…
evolvingthoughts | December 27, 2007
Just to demonstrate that it is not only the Christians who have their religious fundamentalists opposing science, here's a piece that claims that the Vedas are the source of all true scientific knowledge. OK, guys, inventing zero was cool, but what have the Vedas done for us lately (apart from sectarian violence)?
pharyngula | December 27, 2007When I read this tale of woe, I have to admit I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for the victim.
The message flickered into Cindy Fleenor's living room each night: Be faithful in how you live and how you give, the television preachers said, and God will shower you with material riches.
And so the 53-year-old accountant from the Tampa, Florida, area pledged $500 a year to Joyce Meyer, the evangelist whose frank talk about recovering from childhood sexual abuse was so inspirational. She wrote checks to flamboyant faith healer Benny Hinn and a local preacher-made-good, Paula White.
Only the…
evolvingthoughts | December 27, 2007
Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated, probably by Islamist extremists. While no saint, she clearly stood for democratisation in Pakistan, and all hell is likely to break out there now.
Today, I saw The Golden Compass, after reading the book a couple of days ago. It, too, portrayed religious absolutism (and I can well understand that the Catholic Church might object, although it was clearly not the Church of our "parallel" universe being depicted). Again, women were not permitted power, despite the role played by the ironically named Mrs Coulter. The only freedom of thought permitted was in…
gregladen | December 25, 2007While making a statement about science, is it necessary ... in your opinion ... to always make a connected positive and supportive statement about religion, in order that the scientist not offend anyone who might be listening? I'd love to hear opinions on this. (There is some discussion on this at PZ Myers blog)
In the mean time, I offer a prayer, for Boxing Day.
[repost from gregladen.com]
Boxing day is the day after we celebrate the birth of the Christian God on Earth, and Boxing Day itself is the day we contemplate the meaning of, well, boxes, and where in, on or near those boxes we…
mikethemadbiologist | December 25, 2007A merry Christmas to all. (Gut yontif is Yiddish for Happy Holiday).