religion
pharyngula | July 17, 2007A religious group in England is terribly upset at the lack of respect their beliefs have received lately. In particular, they are indignant at the mockery made of one of their holy sites.
(Careful on clicking through—fortunately, I saw this at a late hour of the night, or my howls of laughter might have disturbed my colleagues.)
You see, someone painted another figure next to the Cerne Abbas giant.
Anyone for a game of ring toss?
And just to compound the humor, The Pagan Federation has vowed to turn their rain magic against Homer and wash him away. Comedy piled on top of farce stacked with…
pharyngula | July 16, 2007Sheril seems like a well-intentioned person, but when she decides to step into the science/religion wars, it's a horrendous mistake to label atheists as "fundamentalists" (a term I despise) and compare me to Rush Limbaugh. Without even saying a word about her position on the issue, it's quite clear where she stands.
While giving us that great big clue, though, she also fails to explain anything about how religion and science are supposed to interact — she just calls for a "discussion". You cannot get a productive discussion if one side hides their point of view.
Shorter me: Sheril violated…
pharyngula | July 16, 2007Religion can be used to justify anything. Even the virtues of killing the innocent. It's amazing how the combination of needing to control sexual behavior and the presence of an accommodating religious impulse can lead to deeply deranged behavior.
A Cypress man charged in the death of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant said Saturday that he was doing God's work when he went to a Montrose-area bar last month, hunting for a gay man to kill.
"I believe I'm Elijah, called by God to be a prophet," said 26-year-old Terry Mark Mangum, charged with murder June 11. " ... I believe with all my heart…
pharyngula | July 15, 2007There is a little girl dying of cancer in Seattle (there are, of course, little girls dying of cancer everywhere). There's a positive aspect to the story, of a community pulling together and providing support for her family, but there is also a poisonous taint to it all—most of the support isn't actually for a suffering young girl, but for a communal fantasy.
For four years, the 11-year-old has been a patient and a symbol, suffering with grace and galvanizing a community into action. The support is immense and mesmerizing, hundreds unifying to help this family with seven children. Hundreds…
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of my sermons.
There are basically two popular views of the relation between science and religion. One is the All-Or-Nothing view: science is either entirely subsumed under religion, or totally excluded from it. The other is the view that each has their own special role - Stephen Gould called it the Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authority (NOMA) view. Both are, in my opinion, quite wrong, both…
oracknows | July 14, 2007While perusing my comments yesterday, I became aware of what looks like a promising new blog, Occam's Trowel by Scott Prinster. Check out his self-description:
Scott Prinster is continuing his graduate studies in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin. His current interest is in the interaction of religion and science in the pre- and early Reformation period in Eastern Europe, especially as part of the movements known as the Radical Reformation. Scott has also been a Unitarian Universalist minister for 12 years, and has served congregations in Michigan and here in…
mikethemadbiologist | July 14, 2007digby writes what I've often claimed around here--'people of faith' who criticize Democrats for not embracing 'faith' really want Democrats to embrace theopolitical conservatism:
The religious folk who vote GOP on the basis of religion are never going to vote for Democrats unless they become social conservatives. That's the formula and that's what the liberal religious lobby is really pushing. I just wish they'd be honest about it.
Amen, sister digby.
(now go read the whole thing).
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
A religious body or faith community that speaks only with only exclamation points but no question marks misses the complexity of creation and the beauty of evolution.
Rabbi Kendall in Stuart, Florida
pharyngula | July 12, 2007This is amusing in so many ways to an atheist. Christian activists tried to disrupt a Hindu prayer in the Senate.
It's absurd but so typical of Christian extremists that they would freak out at the imposition of a prayer that does not reflect their beliefs — welcome to my world, guys. We learn from an early age that the appropriate response is just to wait it out and not participate … and that any protests have to be made at an appropriate opportunity.
I'll also point out that while everyone is pissed at the crazy Christians, the Hindu prayer is a rather vapid bit of meaningless nonsense,…
neurophilosophy | July 12, 2007
Most people recognize Tutankhamun as the boy-king of ancient Egypt. He is the most well-known pharaoh because his tomb was discovered apparently intact* and, more importantly, because it contained the magnificent gold mask that has become an icon of Egypt.
Tutankhamun was otherwise unremarkable, as was his mother Nefertiti, who is renowned only for her beauty. Of far greater interest, and importance, than both Tutankhamun and Nefertiti was the pharaoh who some believe was Tutankhamun's father: Akhenaten, the so-called "heretical" pharaoh.
Akhenaten was an eighteenth dynasty pharaoh…
nisbetmc | July 12, 2007
Pew has released a survey analysis comparing American Muslims to other American religious groups, comparing levels of religious intensity, political identification, and policy preferences. I summarize and quote from some of the key findings below.
Muslims account for less than one percent of the country's population, whereas eight-in-10 Americans are Christian. Recent public opinion surveys by the Pew Research Center find that, with respect to the intensity of their religious beliefs, Muslim Americans most closely resemble white evangelicals and black Protestants.
Among the findings, as…
grrlscientist | July 12, 2007tags: creationism, creation story, humor, satire, streaming video
Richard Dawkins spent so much time crafting his arguments, but comedian Ricky Gervais did an even better job refuting the creation story simply by reading the Bible aloud. [9:57]
pharyngula | July 11, 2007Isn't this a lovely map? It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed. Oh, it's labeled as the frequency of religious adherents, but it's the same thing.
Religious adherents as a percentage of residents
You can see where I live — it's in the dark splotch marring the western and southern corner of the state of Minnesota. It says that more than 75% of the people who live here are bible-wallopers — I…
neurotopia | July 11, 2007It looks like somebody either never heard of Dover, or refused to learn from their lesson. It seems the local ID supporters of Chesterfield County aren't happy:
So far, the official actions of the CCSB have been limited to issuing a rather vague and confusing statement. ID proponents had hoped to influence the selection of science textbooks, but they started their campaign too late, and the CCSB approved the selection of standard biology texts. But there is still much concern about the situation in Chesterfield. ID supporters, backed by a local conservative group called the Family…
pharyngula | July 11, 2007All the Baptists and Methodists and Mormons and Lutherans and so forth have been unchurched by fiat — the pope has declared their buildings non-churches and that they aren't true followers of Jesus. This is good news! Now we can tell all the protestants, "Nyaa, nyaa, you're going to Hell with us atheists!" I'm also going to relish telling the Jehovah's Witnesses that knock on my door and invite me to church that the only church in town is a couple of blocks down 3rd Avenue, and Father Caskey runs the show.
The bad news, though, is that we're going to have to resume the Thirty Years' War.…
oracknows | July 11, 2007About a month and a half ago, I posted an update to the story of the plight of a group of medical professionals who have come to be known as the "Tripoli 6" or the "Benghazi 6." These are six foreign medical workers who were falsely accused by Libyan authorities intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and then unjustly imprisoned under horrific conditions, where they have remained for nearly eight years. Thanks to the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for unhygienic conditions in the hospital, leading to an ignorant bloodlust whipped up against…
pharyngula | July 10, 2007Honestly, it's unusual for biologists to be the target of hate — except when they work on cute furry animals — so the news that religious kooks are slipping threatening notes into evolutionary biology labs isn't too specifically worrying.
University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.
The messages included the name of a religious-themed group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not…
neurotopia | July 10, 2007The Alliance for Science, a wonderful group of which I am a member, has a link about a survey that examines public perception of the new Creation Museum. Having recently visited the Propoganda Ministry Museum myself, I was very underwhelmed. I will report my experiences there in a future post replete with pictures. I feel bad because I haven't been keeping up on the evolution/science activism side of my life for a very long time now, aside from this post and pushing the Alliance for Science's Evolution Essay Contest, I have done very little this year to even address the issue. Might have…
evolvingthoughts | July 9, 2007
I probably agree with Christopher Hitchens on many substantive points. But I won't be reading his book. Instead, we can thank this reviewer for their critical, ascerbic, and I suspect in the end accurate review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
evolvingthoughts | July 9, 2007
Proving, contrary to the father's comments in the story, that it really is the dark ages, an Australian Catholic Church school has banned (and since rescinded) a child whose surname is "Hell". In German, "hell" means "light" or "bright".
Mr Hell, of Austrian heritage, says the name means light or bright in German.
"It's 2007, not 1407, it's not the Dark Ages," he said.
The dark ages is much earlier than that, usually running from around 500CE to 1000CE. The 15th century was the time of the rebirth of classical learning with the translation of Aristotle's works and many Arabic works of…