religion
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
Razib at Gene Expression has a nuanced and well supported argument about the proportion of religion-supporters versus the proportion of religiosity in various European and Asian cultures. I strongly recommend it.
One of his claims is that the "default" state of humans is a kind of religiosity; I think I agree with him. Humans have all kinds of default "wild type" programs in their psyche and cognition which in a high density population will tend to fall out as religion. Does this mean that atheism is doomed? Or that secularism (which is a different thing) is doomed? I think there will be…
razib | May 25, 2007I've received a few emails from friends about this piece in Edge titled Why the Gods are Not Winning. The reason is that I've made it clear that in many ways I think religiosity as we understand it naturally arises out of the intersection of our societies and our cognition, that atheism is not the ancestral "wild type" for our species. In some ways the piece at Edge is a good corrective and offers up a lot of data that people need to know. Recently an acquaintance of mine mentioned that the United States is undergoing a "religious revival." I responded that over the last 10 years those…
evolvingthoughts | May 23, 2007Talk about skewing the results with a leading question... but anyway:
You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.
Scientific Atheist
92%
Agnostic
83%
Militant Atheist
58%
Spiritual Atheist
58%
Apathetic Atheist
42%
Angry Atheist
17%…
voltagegate | May 23, 2007Linnaeus on systematics:
"I can not understand anything that is not systematically ordered."
-from a letter to a friend
"There are as many varieties as there are plants produced by the seed of the same species."
-quoted by Gunnar Eriksson
Clashing with theology and human origins:
"I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history. I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science…
purepedantry | May 23, 2007The latest issue of Science magazine (May 18) has several reviews devoted to the coming of age of behavioral neuroscience. However, one by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg caught my eye. The review is entitled "Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science," and their core argument is that resistance to science in adulthood is the result of persistence of childhood traits. Ouch. Provocative from the very first.
Let's go into what they actually said before I say what I think about it.
The authors begin by listing the myriad litany of unsupported things that people believe: ESP,…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2007I only have time for quick blogging today, but we ought to tak a quick look this account, from The Washington Post, about Newt Gingrich's speech to the graduates at Liberty University:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich decried a “growing culture of radical secularism” Saturday morning as he hailed the life of Liberty University's late founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, in an address to the school's 2007 graduating class.
In a speech heavy with religious allusions but devoid of hints about his presidential ambitions, Gingrich drew applause from the graduates and their families in the school's…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
A Reformed Dropout, who was in the audience of a talk Paul Griffiths and I gave on Dawkins' The God Delusion at UQ, writes a nice review. It was a fun night. I am glad that some of the attenders thought so too.
jrosenhouse | May 21, 2007Over at BeliefNet, Gregg Easterbrook writes the following:
Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other by the hundreds in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Hindus and Muslims are slaughtering each other in India, herding neighbors into house or trains then setting them afire. Catholics and Protestants continue to kill each other in Northern Ireland. Sunnis and Shias have their arms wrapped around each other's throats throughout the Islamic world. And of course, on Sept. 11, 19 Muslims were so determined to murder helpless Christians and Jews that they were willing to die to shed the…
purepedantry | May 21, 2007Daniel Lazare, writing in the Nation, has an interesting article about differences of opinion even among atheists:
This is the problem, more or less, confronting today's reinvigorated atheist movement. For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian…
pharyngula | May 20, 2007Hey, maybe we're making more progress than we ever imagined, if this poll from Christianity Today is any measure:
As a somewhat cynical realist, though, I'm more inclined to believe in badly designed polls and cunning rascals with a script than I am that subscribers to a Christian magazine suddenly became wise.
(via Sandwalk)
pharyngula | May 20, 2007He wanted to be a preacher. He was a good Christian. His wife was a true believer, too. Their baby, though, was a godless heathen who never read the bible.
So I'm sure it was perfectly reasonable to put the baby in the microwave and cook her.
And their excuse that Satan made him do it? Quite sensible, I'm sure.
Isn't faith a wonderful thing?
pharyngula | May 20, 2007A number of you wrote in to me to let me know that Hong Kong was considering labeling the Christian bible as indecent—it is full of violence and kinky-freaky sexual behavior, after all. It was also amusing how some people rationalized it.
"If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn't mean it encourages those activities," said Reverend Wu Chi-wai. "It's just common sense ... I don't think that criticism will have strong support from the public," he added.
How strange…hasn't the good Reverend read his bible? In Deuteronomy, for instance, some quite explicit instructions are given:
As…
clock | May 19, 2007Amanda Marcotte, that is. And there are two way to look at her from the 'other side' or 'not-as-well-known-side' or 'what-really-happened-side': the first is BlogPac Hero: The Amanda Marcotte Story You Haven't Heard by John Javna and the second is Brimstone and cat spit by Amanda Marcotte.
razib | May 19, 2007I have a long review of God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis over at my other weblog. This is part 1 of 2 for this review, with the second focusing on European Islam. If you are a data junkie I highly recommend God's Continent.
mikethemadbiologist | May 19, 2007In all the recounting of Jerry Falwell's life, almost all of the focus has been on Falwell's 'religiously' motivated positions. But this ignores Falwell's first political activity: to defend the system of American apartheid known as segregation. Racism, not abortion or other 'religious' issues, was what gave rise to the 'religious' right. Max Blumenthal reminds us of this:
Indeed, it was race-not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues-that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism....
Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights…
oracknows | May 18, 2007If you're ever in Iran, you'd better be really, really careful about imbibing a little beer:
Norwegian-Iranian Mamand Mamandy had a brutal meeting with police after drinking two beers while on holiday in Iran.
"It's getting better now, but I am still in great pain," Mamandy, 35, told Aftenposten.no. "My brother is a doctor, and treated me after the whipping. I was in great pain and could not sleep."
Mamandy, a Kurd, explained that he was visiting his mother in Baneh, Iran in April when he was arrested by police.
"We were on an outing with family and friends, six or seven in the evening, and…
pharyngula | May 18, 2007Ralph Reed is a sleazy con artist who hides his predatory nature behind a mask of piety; Hannity is a slow-witted thug with a simple-minded view of the world that he takes straight from the religious. It was therefore rather delightful to see Christopher Hitchens plainly reject their ridiculous demand for a hypocritical expression of sorrow at the death of a rich old shaman.
I was particularly appalled at Hannity's list of Falwell's virtues that included founding Liberty University. If founding a compound where ignorance is encouraged to fester is one of his accomplishments, I will admit…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2007The next time you see someone criticize Richard Dawkins for not giving adequate treatment to the modal logic version of the ontological argument, remind him that this column, from Town Hall columnist Doug Giles, is far more representative of the depth of American religious thought:
Paul (not the lead singer of the Beatles, but the apostle Paul) states that God has made Himself known, via creation, to all men. According to the apostle, God's revealed Himself not just to Christians and to Jews, but to every one everywhere (see Romans 1:18-21).
This means that from Jo-Jo the Brazilian monkey…