religion
oracknows | August 31, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on October 19, 2005. Enjoy!
Somehow I didn't find out about this story about a football coach who resigned because the school district ordered him not to lead his team in prayer at dinners before each game until several days after it had happened. Consequently, I had been debating about whether or not to write about it, its being old news…
jrosenhouse | August 30, 2007Chris Mooney has a link to this analysis of recent polling data. The analysis was written by David Masci. The subject: How Americans feel about science and faith. Mooney thinks the data supports the Matt Nisbet line that people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens hurt the cause. I disagree.
Here's Mooney main comment:
So here's my contribution: I merely wish to point out a good analysis of polling data over at Pew that strongly supports the broad Nisbet perspective. The gist: The American public doesn't generally perceive a necessary conflict between religion and science; but…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2007God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens and Catholic League president Bill Donohue showed up on Hardball yesterday to mull over the issues raised by the Time article. I'd write some commentary, but some things simply defy comment. I have taken the liberty of putting certain choice nuggets in bold:
MATTHEWS: I want to go to Christopher Hitchens. Christopher, you have been tough. You say this is a profound revelation, that this woman did not believe.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR, “GOD IS NOT GREAT”: Yes, and a very moving one, actually, and a very honest one, I have to add. She…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2007Time's cover story this week is about Mother Teresa. Specifically, it's about her newly released personal correspondence in which she repeatedly expresses grave doubts about the truth of Christianity, even to the point of questioning whether God exists.
It's a little hard to nail down from the Time article what Teresa did and did not believe. But some of her letters are heart-wrenching:
Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2007
Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph:
It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory of evolution, which nonetheless has enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in academia and the mainstream media. Perhaps one explanation for the throngs at the Creation Museum is that there are so few politically correct alternatives for people who question the evolutionary…
neurophilosophy | August 28, 2007 In his Channel 4 documentary The Enemies of Reason, Richard Dawkins attacks what he rightly regards as an epidemic of irrational thinking, or, as he puts it, humanity's "retreat into the fog of the superstitious past."
He notes, for example, that 25% of the British population believe in astrology, and that more column inches in British newspapers are devoted horoscopes than to science.
In a manner which I found at times to be highly amusing, Dawkins debunks astrologists, psychics, tarot card readers, and purveyors of alternative therapies.
Watch part 2 of The Enemies of Reason below…
jrosenhouse | August 27, 2007Over at Effect Measure, Revere takes a few shots at Matt Nisbet:
It's not just that the Dawkins/Hitchens “PR campaign provides emotional sustenance and talking points for many atheists,” although it does that too. It's that the various writings of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, PZ and now a number of others has opened up a space -- and a wide space, not a narrow one -- to talk about belief and non-belief in ways not possible before. Even Matt's post is an example. I'm glad we are talking about the best way to talk about harmful delusions -- and make no mistake, that's exactly what we…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007Coral Ridge Ministries is pushing hard to promote their pet causes, and Hank Fox suggests that they give him a few goodies from their list of crazy literature and DVDs. They say they'll send it out in return for a voluntary donation, but so far, it looks like the "donation" is less than voluntary.
I recall taking a stab at this a year or so ago with another Christian organization that was trying to sell creationist books while calling it a giveaway, with a completely independent and entirely optional opportunity to donate a few dollars to a worthy religious cause. I never got my books.
pharyngula | August 26, 2007Goodbye, everyone: I'm about to destroy your brain. After reading the following, you will all convert to christianity and find no further use for my godless ravings. Sorry, people. When someone tells me not to push the big red button, I just can't help myself.
This is the first chapter of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.
THE LAW OF HUMAN NATURE
Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. they say things like this…
pharyngula | August 26, 2007Fanaticism and oppression work! The latest editions of the comic strip Opus are being censored by at least 25 newspapers around the country. I have to concede that Breathed's work doesn't have quite the quality it had during the glory years of Bloom County, but that's not the reason it's being dropped: it's because it mocks Muslim dress, and
newspapers are afraid to make fun of Islam.
Wyson said some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won't publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. "They just don't want to touch that," she said.
It's not really much of a sex…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2007Yes, I've cribbed the title from Chris Hedges' superb, must-read book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. But Josh Marshall stumbles across a great insight about the Iraq War and Occupation, but doesn't quite carry through all the way. So the Mad Biologist will. Marshall writes about President Bush (italics mine):
And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.
By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on.…
evolvingthoughts | August 23, 2007
The "angry atheist" debate has broken out again, like a fire that smolders on until it finds new fuel. I am moved to make a few points, which are worth all you paid for them.
1. There is an assumption that reasonable people can only come to one conclusion. To theists this is theism of some kind. To atheists this is atheism. It presumes that people who are reasonable in one domain (say, science) are reasonable in all. But I know atheists who are libertarians, and a more irrational faith in rights I haven't found, and I know theists who are absolutely in line with all the social, scientific…
jrosenhouse | August 23, 2007Matt Nisbet has been beating his favorite dead horse again. That's the one where he excoriates people like Richard Dawkins for being just so darn mean in his discussions of religion. In this post he praises Carol Tavris for echoing his favorite talking points, and in this one he praises Michael Shermer for doing likewise.
This is a subject that comes up a lot around here. I won't do a point-by-point rebuttal of the arguments in Nisbet's posts. I notice that James Hrynyshyn (here and here) and Larry Moran (here) have already taken care of business
Instead, in the interests of doing…
oracknows | August 23, 2007You know, even though I know he's been a Republican talker for a long time, that he worked for the Nixon administration as a speechwriter and lawyer, I've always kind of liked Ben Stein. My wife and I used to like to watch Win Ben Stein's Money, and he was quite amusing as the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He's always come across as a pleasant doofus, even though I know that image appears to be carefully calculated one.
Now I learn that he's the narrator and a driving force behind a pro-"intelligent design" movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which is due to be released…
grrlscientist | August 23, 2007tags: humor, Dr Seuss Bible, streaming video
Amusing and my my, those green uniforms near the end of the video are really quite revealing, aren't they? [2:29]
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2007
Bob Somerby noticed something during the most recent Democratic presidential debate (and it's so hard to keep track of them all):
But we were especially struck by a decision made during the Democratic debate. Omigod! A real discussion had broken out about the way to exit Iraq! It was by far the most intelligent discussion we've seen in any debate this year; the hopefuls were even beginning to question each other about their respective views. But our press corps flees intelligent discourse as bats avoid exposure to light. Abruptly, George Stephanopoulos brought the discussion to a halt so…
evolvingthoughts | August 18, 2007
I do not care if a politicians visits a strip club. In fact, a politician that did it and owns up without embarassment would be a good choice to pick, because you know he's not going to pull that family values crap in the future. But a politician who visits one, owns up, and then apologises? You know he's going to try to have it both ways.
Too many Australian politicians are playing the religious card lately. Rudd is one of them. C'mon folks, we're Australians, not Americans. We should be like the French or Italians and cheer anyone who shows he's human, male and occasionally stupid. Stop…
oracknows | August 16, 2007It's here, and it's on Google Video. I watched it last night, and it was a blistering attack on the irrationality that is so common in our society:
Part I begins with Richard Dawkins sitting in on some sort of New Age chanting ceremony (the discomfited look on his face is priceless to watch), after which he goes to a New Age fair, and concludes with an attack on the crappy science that lead to the MMR vaccine scare over autism in the U.K. In between, Dawkins takes on astrology, dowsers, spiritualists, and mediums, no holds barred.
Next Monday: Richard Dawkins versus alternative medicine.…
pharyngula | August 15, 2007
If Pastor Drake's curses are fizzling, I know exactly what he needs: a blessed medallion made from an eggplant to potentiate his jebus-power. It's true: this miracle occurred spontaneously, and is exactly the holy artifact any righteous smiter would want on his side.
I will also call your attention to an important and obvious fact: this eggplant did not say "Gott" or "Dieu" or "Dios" or "Ðог" or "Deus" or "Dio" or "ç¥" or "اÙÙÙ" — no, it says "God". Therefore, God chooses to speak in English.
Either that, or it's the natural language of eggplants.