religion
pharyngula | August 3, 2007Maybe it's news, but at this point all I can say is…who the hell cares what you say, Benny.
pharyngula | August 2, 2007A few readers sent me a link to this interview with Alister McGrath; most thought it was worth a laugh, but one actually seemed to think I'd be devastated. I'm afraid the majority were correct: everything I've read by McGrath suggests that here is a man whose thoughts have been arrested by a temporal lobe seizure that he has mistaken for a lightning bolt from god. He'd probably be flattered to be compared to C.S. Lewis, but I see some similarities in the shallowness of their thinking that they believe they've deepened by tapping into theological tradition, but I'm sorry — my bathroom tap…
pharyngula | August 1, 2007The Turkish creationist sunk a whole lot of money sending an elaborate creationist book to thousands of biologists. I'm sure he felt he was doing us a favor in sending us the light, but most of the recipients were feeling something less pleasant — it's like receiving a gilded dead rat in the mail. Now the conservative Christians are going to get in the act, and in a low-rent version of the game are going to send a few hundred thousand cheap bibles to newspaper subscribers.
A Christian ministry wants to deliver custom-designed New Testaments to newspaper subscribers around the country as part…
oracknows | August 1, 2007Mike, Mike, Mike, why did you have to show me this story?
Don't you know that stories like this drive me crazy?
Basically, the story from Boston Now reports on how more and more parents in are claiming religious exemptions to vaccination in Massachusetts:
More Massachusetts parents are sending their children to school without the required vaccines, and some may be lying to get around state law.
Records obtained by Team 5 Investigates show that while the number of medical exemptions has remained flat, the number of parents claiming that vaccines violate their religious beliefs is going up -…
omnibrain | July 30, 2007So freaking cool (and freaky)...Via Neatorama and Curious Expeditions.
It is a remarkable bit of irony, that finger. Venerated, kept in reliquary, subjected to the same treatment as a Saint. But this finger belonged to no Saint. It is the long bony finger of an enemy of the church, a heretic. A man so dangerous to the religious institution he was made a prisoner in his own home. It sits in a small glass egg atop an inscribed marble base in the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, or the History of Science Museum in Florence, Italy. On the shelf next to the middle finger of his right hand…
pharyngula | July 29, 2007
I am appalled. A man in New York was arrested for throwing a copy of the Quran in a public toilet. He deserved arrest—everyone knows it is vandalism and criminal mischief to clog a public toilet with debris.
Oh, hang on — the guy was arrested for a hate crime? Are toilets now on the list of victims targeted by fringe fanatics? What's their slogan: "Bring Back the Open Trench!"? It is a shame to see innocent and useful toilets persecuted in this ghastly way …
Wait, never mind. He was arrested for being mean to Muslims, which also makes no sense. He destroyed a book and clogged a toilet. If…
pharyngula | July 28, 2007Oregon looks to have an interesting senate primary race, with two excellent Democratic candidates, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick, vying for the chance to give the boot to two-faced Republican Bush booster Gordon Smith. I think it's great that more progressive candidates are being drawn into loftier tiers of the political arena, and that good wholesome sparring in the primary is going to help them both out, no matter who wins the nomination. Why, though, should this Minnesotan care? Aside from having lived in Oregon for 9 years (and loving it!), it was brought to my attention that there's a…
neurophilosophy | July 28, 2007
My recent post on prefrontal lobotomy has been the most popular thing on this blog so far, and the comments on it are worth reading.
While searching for more information about lobotomies and the neuroleptic drugs that replaced them, I came across this fantastic webpage at NobelPrize.org, which contains more information about Egas Moniz, the Portugese surgeon who first performed the procedure.
That's where I found this diagram of the instrument designed by Moniz for the prefrontal leucotomies he performed with his colleague. From the diagram, one can see how the instrument (called a…
pharyngula | July 27, 2007Last summer, a lot of people hated this post where I advocated calling the apocalyptic cultists on their evil delusions. Then we had some prominent Christian leaders calling for war with Iran, and John Hagee gave a demented interview with Terry Gross, in which his rapture rubbish was used as an excuse to advocate hate and war and destruction, all because his "prophecies" said that's what we need to do.
Want some more fun?
Watch this video from a Christians United For Israel conference. There's Hagee promising unconditional support for Israel until the Messiah comes, and then standing up in a…
razib | July 25, 2007I was putting off commenting on this, and wondering whether I had any value to add. But a reader pointed me to Noah Feldman's Orthodox paradox, a piece in The New York Times Magazine where the author, a young Harvard law professor, reflects on his journey from the Modern Orthodox subculture into the wider world. The whole piece is worth reading. There is a problem in these sorts of articles insofar as Feldman is such an "insider," while most of the readers are such "outsiders," that one is totally dependent on the author for context and situation. For example, most gentiles have…
razib | July 24, 2007Ali Eteraz points me to the fact that the Grand Mufti of Egypt seems to have offered the opinion that 'Muslims can choose their own religion'. This is important, because as Wikipedia says:
All five major schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that a sane male apostate must be executed. A female apostate may be put to death, according to some schools, or imprisoned, according to others.
Some contemporary Shi'a jurists, scholars, writers and Islamic sects have argued or issued fatwas that either the changing of religion is not punishable or is only punishable under restricted circumstances,…
pharyngula | July 24, 2007Having read Mooney's Storm World last week, I can't be too disturbed by this bit of news: the pizza man who is fanatically devoted to the pope, Tom Monaghan, is opening his new planned town dedicated to Catholic values next Saturday. There will be no porn or contraceptives available in town, but I hear there will be a whole clinic dedicated to pediatric proctology on Main Street.
Anyway, the town is Ave Maria, Florida. Mooney's book points out that one of the looming problems from catastrophic storms and global warming is man-made, the growing investment in valuable infrastructure and…
pharyngula | July 23, 2007We should be quaking in our jackboots: a media counterattack is being launched against us wicked atheists. They have a website!
American Vision is launching a relentless and systematic response to militant atheism. We've produced a brilliant 2-minute commercial that we plan to broadcast globally via the Internet and Television. Atheists present themselves as enlightened and civil. But this new commercial will reveal the shocking truth to viewers. The French Revolution, Communism, Nazism, etc. have taught us that the atheistic worldview will inevitably lead to the persecution of Christians and…
pharyngula | July 23, 2007The first review of my talk yesterday is in! Too bad it is from somebody who wasn't there and who is a world-class fool. Yes, it's Michael Egnor again, and he's got a lengthy post up with the pretext of giving me advice on future talks, but is really an attempt to preempt my arguments and chide me for my crazy materialist position. He doesn't even come close to any of my arguments, and he makes false assumptions all over the place about what I and the audience think. I'm used to straw men from creationists, but this is ridiculous.
Here's what I actually said at the talk.
The first half was…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2007I see that my fellow bloggers have not been idle during my absence. Matt Nisbet has another one of his Dawkins bashing posts up. This time his champion is philosopher Phillip Kitcher.
Nisbet quotes Kitcher as follows, from a recent podcast of Point of Inquiry:
DJ Grothe: Did you write the book to sell secular humanism, or maybe in a more limited way atheism to the public? All these anti-God books are the real rage right now, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens...your book is addressing some of the same topics, are you addressing the same audience...
Kitcher: Well I'm actually not happy with…
scientificactivist | July 19, 2007Yesterday, I mentioned the Atlas of Creation a book by Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya) sent unsolicited to scientists around the world. My boss also received a copy a few months ago, and yesterday he dug up the enormous volume for me. My first impression was that it was even larger and more glorious than I remembered. With hundreds of pages of full-color photos, this book must have been incredibly expensive to produce and distribute.
My second impression, though, was that it was also even crazier than I remembered. In the "to the reader" note at the beginning, Oktar…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007Imagine you found a population in the US where the majority of the people believed that 2+2=5, and that attempts to correct them with the actual, correct result of adding two numbers were regarded as insults to their revered traditions. I think we'd all agree that they a) they were wrong; b) they were misled, misinformed, and miseducated; c) that they were ignorant of arithmetic; or d) might very well have been maliciously deceived by someone in their midst. Somehow, though, if the ridiculous error involves God, some people take a big step backwards and are appalled that anyone might…
kcontreary | July 18, 2007As an American living in Europe, I am at times accutely aware of the differing levels of religiosity between my country of origin and my current residence. But an article from this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal suggests that the disparity may be starting to decrease. Surveys show that, particularly among young people, reported belief in religious concepts (heaven, hell, the soul) is rising, as is church attendance.
All the usual suspects are trotted out as possible explanations for this spiritual upswing: immigration from more devout countries, anxiety over erosion of…
scientificactivist | July 18, 2007A few months ago, my boss (a professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford) received a strange package in the mail, unsolicited. It contained a rather large and colorful book that was quite stunning in appearance. Inside, though, spread across hundreds of color-illustrated pages, was one man's case for creationism: an absurd, unconvincing, misguided, and fundamentally unscientific argument. We passed the book around in the lab, admired its aesthetic values (and the unimaginable expense surely incurred in producing it), and then forgot about it. My boss is out of the lab for…
pharyngula | July 17, 2007The new burned-over district lies in the wreckage of Russia — take a look at the new weird cults flowering in Siberia. Jesus is hanging out on a hilltop there, even.
There's something strange in the human brain that, when people are uncertain and stripped of security and bewildered by too much change, they try to find refuge in any nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it's said confidently and is reinforced by social pressures. This is a real phenomenon that's cropped up again and again in human history, and it's sad to see it rising again.
People have been talking a lot about these…