religion
pharyngula | August 15, 2007Uh-oh. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is in trouble now: some wrathful priest is cursing them in the name of God and has used the power of imprecatory prayer to ask the Lord to smite them.
Oooooh. There hasn't been any detectable lordly smiting in millennia, or even longer. This could be impressive. You can catch Pastor Wiley Drake on streaming Christian radio tomorrow morning at 9am PST — I'm sure he'll be calling down hellfire in a most entertaining way. I'll be traveling, unfortunately, so someone will have to tune in and report back.
Heh. "Imprecatory prayer." These…
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2007
I normally don't respond the to IDiocy of Uncommon Dissent, but John Lynch, may he rot in purgatory for a thousand years, has made me. As usual, I won't dignify it with links. If you are that interested you can find it.
There are two items: one is by DaveScot, who argues (!) that because Popper's falsification hypothesis means that until we find non-white swans, a hypothesis that swans are white stands, we should somehow assume that Intelligent Design stands as a scientific view. This is silly for a couple of reasons. One is that we have got counterinstances to the need for ID to explain…
pharyngula | August 14, 2007
Some outfit called the Christian Outdoorsman is selling bibles with camouflaged covers, which seems so appropriate — after all, when you're sneaking up on the Christ you wouldn't want to alarm him.
And why, you might ask, should we sneak up on the Messiah? The clue is in the company's logo. You want to line him up in your sights. This is brilliant — we don't do crucifixions anymore, but if we take out Jesus II with a sniper rifle, the Vatican won't have to change the monograms on their towels.
(via SEB)
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2007Salon has posted this interview with physicist Taner Edis. You might recognize Edis as the coeditor (with Matt Young) of the magisterial book Why Intelligent Design Fails.
The subject of the present interview is his new book, An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam. Edis has a lot of insightful things to say about the state of Muslim science, including a few tidbits about creationism, so I recommend reading the whole thing.
Actually, though, it was the beginning of the article that caught my eye:
In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a Russian crew and blast off…
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2007Meanwhile, just in case you were looking for something truly stupid, go gawk in amazement at this column by David Warren of The Ottawa Citizen. Here's the opening:
I get such apoplectic letters, whenever I write about “evolutionism,” that I really can't resist writing about it again. This is not, of course, because I have any desire to tease such correspondents. Perish the thought. Rather, when a writer finds he has hit such a nerve, he can also know that he is approaching a great truth.
Wow! That's total amatuer hour.
Anytime you're reading a columnist who boasts that the negative…
pharyngula | August 13, 2007I am so pleased to learn that Focus on the Family is freaking out a little bit.
The trend is known as the "Great Evacuation," and the statistics are startling to youth ministers.
Studies have shown at least 50 percent — and possibly as much as 85 percent — of kids involved in church groups will abandon their faith during their first year in college.
The best part of this statistic is that college professors and administrators don't even try to divorce students from religion — despite my evil reputation, I don't say a word about religion in any of my classes. All we do is open students' eyes…
pharyngula | August 12, 2007Christian charity and love has clear limits.
A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.
Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.
Yeah, a 5,000 member megachurch spurned a dead man because they didn't care for who he chose to love. The pastor's excuse is terrific:
"We did decline to host the…
razib | August 10, 2007TNR has an interesting piece (here is a cache version of the first page) about Jewish-Christian polemics (in both directions). It is mostly a review of Peter Shaeffer's Jesus in the Talmud; a scholarly work which predictably appeals to anti-Semites. My comment on Noah Feldman and his perceptions of Orthodox Judaism elicited a lot of response. Most of it was interesting, though of course some individuals across the web became convinced that I was an anti-Semite who was a Muslim working against Jews. This missed the whole greater thrust of my point: it isn't always about you, context and…
pharyngula | August 10, 2007The wingnuts are still outraged that there is a Muslim in congress and that a Hindu delivered an opening prayer (which was pretty dang lame, anyway). Now look at this silly little man (R-Idaho) ranting about the death of America:
Last month, the U.S. Senate was opened for the first time ever with a Hindu prayer. Although the event generated little outrage on Capitol Hill, Representative Bill Sali (R-Idaho) is one member of Congress who believes the prayer should have never been allowed.
"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of…
pharyngula | August 9, 2007Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I've heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is apparently the study of the nature of god as revealed by social studies, while Jesus' preferred economic model is capitalism.
It's in Texas, of course.
I wonder if it is the perfect model of what McLeroy wants done with the public school system?
pharyngula | August 9, 2007I mentioned the growing entanglement of fundamentalist religion in the military the other day, and here's another example: proselytization in the military by evangelical freaks like Stephen Baldwin.
Baldwin became a right-wing, born-again Christian after the 9/11 attacks, and now is the star of Operation Straight Up (OSU), an evangelical entertainment troupe that actively proselytizes among
active-duty members of the US military. As an official
arm of the Defense Department's America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind:…
pharyngula | August 8, 2007Here's an odd correlation for you: whenever I take a swipe at the foolishness of Scott Adams, I get a major uptick in the usual trickle of Christian email. I don't quite see Adams as a friend to Christianity, although he does seem to foster the kind of shallow thinking on which religiosity thrives. Anyway, for your delectation, I've put a couple of samples below.
First, here's something we can expect to see lots of in the next year. I'm no fan of Obama myself, but this kind of silly slander is contemptible.
Who is Barack Obama?
Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was…
pharyngula | August 7, 2007Cardinal Pell has issued an edict "demanding that students and their parents be more devout". I'm afraid I'm just picturing a man in a silly hat raising his arms and commanding everyone by the power of Christ to believe! Shall we all just laugh at him?
oracknows | August 7, 2007The third season of Doctor Who is over. There's nothing on the horizon for many months (such as the return of Doctor Who or Torchwood) that's interesting enough to me coming out of the U.K. that I'd go to the trouble of firing up BitTorrent to check it out, rather than wait until it somehow finds its way to these shores.
Until now.
Yes, it's Richard Dawkins' long-promised investigation of alternative medicine and New Age practitioners, entitled The Enemies of Reason:
Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of…
pharyngula | August 7, 2007It's frightening to see religion poisoning our military, but it's happening. A group of generals is facing disciplinary action for promoting an evangelical religious organization, and they admit to being oblivious to the problem of a general declaring that his "first priority is his faith in god", or in supporting a fanatical Christian group that wants to target foreign diplomats, ambassadors, and other representatives for conversion to Christianity. These fellows lent the dignity and responsibility of their positions to a weird cult, and now they defend themselves with this particularly…
oracknows | August 7, 2007After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…
jrosenhouse | August 6, 2007Well, it's time to put my Monty Hall woes to one side for the moment and get back to some regular blogging. A heartfelt thnaks to everyone who left comments. I'm a bit behind in replying, but all have been read and pondered.
So, while I was busy moping last week Slate posted this interesting article about Scientology. The basic point is that while Scientologists claim to believe some odd assertions of dubious validity, the whole thing isn't really any sillier than what more mainstream religions claim to believe:
Some Americans may consider Scientology perhaps a cult, maybe a violent sect…
oracknows | August 6, 2007Seen on the road on my way into work this morning:
I passed a bus going the other way. I noticed that it had a prominent sign over its front window scrolling, "NOT IN SERVICE." We both stopped at the light, the bus on the other side going the other way from me. I then noticed that the sign switched to scrolling "GOD BLESS AMERICA." It kept alternating between those two messages.
Make of this observation what you will. Was it a message? Or was it just strangeness?
omnibrain | August 4, 2007...just kidding! It's nearly every month that a new study comes out showing that abstinence only programs don't do shit. This time a study from Oxford shows, through a meta-analysis of 13 different U.S. trials, that
none of the abstinence-only programmes had an impact on the age at which individuals lost their virginity, whether they had unprotected sex, the number of sexual partners, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases or the number of pregnancies.
One trial did show a short-term benefit with participants reporting that they were less likely to have had sex in the month following…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2007
So I'm home from Ish, and the front part of my brain is giddy and tired while the rest has just shut down. I don't travel well, I'm afraid.
One thing that I came back fired up over are the unfinished projects I have running. So I intend to finish them. They are, in no particular order:
1. Denying that genes have information [heresy #1] Status: Written and needing to be submitted.
2. Denying that functions in biology exist outside models [heresy #2] Status: Written but badly in need of a rewrite.
3. Denying that essentialism ever existed in biology [#3. Four more and I get a free auto…