religion
purepedantry | September 12, 2007
In 1922, John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and champion of Progressive education, wrote an article in The New Republic entitled "The American Intellectual Frontier." The subject was William Jennings Bryan's attack on evolution that would later culminate in the Scopes trial. The argument that Dewey made was not what you would think, however. Though he was most definitely part of the the Northeastern liberal establishment at the time, he did not dismiss Bryan's attacks as indicative of rural ignorance.
Instead, he made the argument that while he disagreed with Bryan, liberals had to take…
jrosenhouse | September 11, 2007According to Newsweek there's trouble brewing at Olivet Nazarene University:
There may be some battlefields where the gospel's “blessed are the peacemakers” holds true. But despite the work of a growing number of scholars and millions of dollars in foundation funding to find harmony between science and faith, evolution still isn't one of them. Just ask biologist Richard Colling. A professor at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois and a lifelong member of the evangelical Church of the Nazarene, Colling wrote a 2004 book called Random Designer because--as he said in a letter to students and…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2007tags: terrorism, religion, streaming video
All religion has a very bloody history and the fact that people still subject themselves to this brainwashing shows that most people are mindless idiots. Don't believe me? Watch this video that will remind you about what happened on September 11th, six years ago. [5:27]
pharyngula | September 10, 2007The Minnesota Family Council is a spawn of Dobson (it's got "family" in the title, so you know it's got to be evil), and it's usually one of those organizations that lobbies to get legislative support for their hatred of women and gays. They are not nice people. If you're ever in this state and want to see some splendid examples of calcified brains, this is the group you want to track down.
Anyway, they're starting a new training program: the Minnesota Worldview Leadership Project. It's the weirdest thing. Apparently, it's a seminar and discussion series that is supposed to turn you into an…
oracknows | September 9, 2007The Secular Outpost informs me of the existence of a brand new Jack Chick tract. I don't know if it truly is new or not, but it does have its copyright listed as 2007. This time around, Jack is explaining why the dinosaurs really died out. (Hint: It wasn't some big nasty meteor millions of years ago.) It starts out with humans hunting a dinosaur and degenerates from there.
(Click on the picture for the full tract.)
This was so silly that at first I thought it must be a parody. But then I remembered: This is Jack Chick we're talking about here. I will say one thing, though. The picture of…
pharyngula | September 9, 2007Back when I had an ungodly commute to work and had to get up at 5am to knock back a quart of coffee before staggering out to the bus and train, I'd sometimes flip through the channels on the TV to see what was happening. And at that hour of the morning, what you'd find is quack ads, infomercials, and the televangelists. I confess, some of my favorites were Ken Copeland (an awe-shucks country boy who looked like a few generations of inbreeding and moonshine abuse had shriveled his brain) and Benny Hinn (head-thwacking con man in a shiny white suit) — I'd watch them, awed that anyone was…
oracknows | September 8, 2007Friday afternoon, 2 PM.
In my current frame of mind, some things strike me as perhaps more bizarre than they would have normally. This is one such incident.
After vacation, arriving back from vacation only to turn around to have to head to Ohio for a funeral, and having to be in the operating room on Thursday, Friday was the first day since mid-August when I had very little scheduled. Consequently, it allowed me the first opportunity to sit down and figure out exactly what the heck I needed to do to get back to work and to get my research rolling. I met with my postdoc and had him show me all…
pharyngula | September 7, 2007Daniel Cooper knows how to properly evaluate what's important. He's George W. Bush's undersecretary for benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs. We're in the middle of a bloody, wasteful war, and we've got lots of veterans who deserve support and, you know, benefits, so I think Mr Cooper's job is fairly important.
What does Mr Cooper think is important? He's made a video for Campus Crusade for Christ in which he plainly spells out where his priorities lie.
In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, "it's not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is…
tqa | September 5, 2007
From an article in the Baptist Press, linked from the Uncommon Descent homepage:
"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," [Dembski] said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."
Good job, Bill.
tqa | September 5, 2007
Last week, I reposted four old articles that I wrote back in 2005, when a group representing a number of Christian schools in California filed a lawsuit against the University of California claiming that UC's rejection of several of their courses was illegal "viewpoint discrimination." In a more recent post, I mentioned that there's a hearing on motions for summary judgement scheduled for later this month. I also mentioned that the Christian schools claim that all they are doing is "adding a religious viewpoint" to "standard course material." It doesn't take a genius to see that the "…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007Reality is highly offensive to the godly. Bill Nye has alienated Texas by pointing out a simple fact:
Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College's Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.
But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars."
The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a…
neurotopia | September 5, 2007Ha ha, fooled you!
The Discovery Institute has just issued this on their blog, the inaccurately named Evolution News and Views:
According to CSC senior fellow and leading ID theorist William Dembski, what follows is:
"[A] big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID. Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks's work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007If I were a passenger, I don't think I would find Nepal Airlines' maintenance procedures at all reassuring.
Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
At least the in-flight meals must be fresh and tasty.
pharyngula | September 4, 2007The Rational Response Squad has a "competitor": a group calling itself the Righteous Response Squad. I think we can already see a problem—we can expect a dearth of originality and imagination from this new gang. And to fulfill that prediction, this collection of fundies decided to declare the Bible literally true and internally consistent, and issued a challenge: "Do you have bible contradictions? Do you think you can prove the bible false?"
This is easy. The only difficulty is that there are so many contradictions — biblical literalism is a fool's game, which is why there are so many fools…
jrosenhouse | September 3, 2007I had not intended to do another post on this subject. But in response to P.Z.'s post , my fellow Panda's Thumber Burt Humburg left a lengthy comment that I feel requires a response. So I'll ask your patience as we go one more round...
Burt wrote:
You know what audiences really love PZ? The ones who are steeped in religion and have steeped their children in it to the point that they think that all of morality and goodness and apple pie proceeds fundamentally from a love of God? Those guys?
Turns out, they absolutely love it when “2 + 2 = 4” comes coupled with “Therefore, there is no god.”…
mikethemadbiologist | September 3, 2007...or too much of anyway. One of the most eloquent speeches that I have ever heard was by Martin Luther King to striking sanitation workers. What's sad is that, while the particulars have changed somewhat, the overall picture remains the same. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine):
My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their families, and to all of my brothers and sisters, I need not pause to say…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is, and what it means for modern thinking, people would move away from attacking evolution in order to bolster their religious agendas.
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of…
pharyngula | September 1, 2007So Jesus and Jeffrey Rowland are having a conversation in a bar…
Now, see, that's the root of the problem: religion is crazy when you think about it, and when people do start considering its inconsistencies and ridiculous claims, its proponents either try to spin you around with increasingly nutty rationalizations, or they outright tell you to stop thinking. If science has any heresy at all, that's it: to stop thinking is the one thing we must not do.
This is why religion is a science stopper. It makes absurd claims about the history and origin and nature of the world, and then tells you…
pharyngula | September 1, 2007Mooney says that because polls show that Americans are so blinded by religion that they would choose the words of a bloody-handed Middle Eastern sky god over the evidence of science, Dawkins and all us uncompromising atheists are wrong in our tactics. We are henceforth to heed the words of Nisbet and stop confronting people on their religious biases.
Huh?
But that's exactly the problem that we're addressing — that people will foolishly prefer "white-beard-in-the-sky-guy" over reality. And the message he takes home from this is that we're wrong? This is nuts. I read that poll and it says we…
pharyngula | August 31, 2007Texans should be concerned about Texas H.B. No. 3678, an act "relating to voluntary student expression of religious viewpoints in public schools." It's authored by Charlie Howard, an overly cheerful and zealous member of the far religious right, and Warren Chisum, who will be known forever as the bible-thumping dwarf from Pampa, and it plays the pious fairmindedness card perfectly, while hiding the fact that it emerged from the sleeve of a pair of notorious liars for Christ. It is an underhanded and sneaky bill that, under the guise of promoting religious tolerance, actually has the purpose…