religion
oracknows | April 6, 2007In perusing my Folder of Woo, which is becoming every more crammed with potential targets begging for the tender mercies of Orac in their very own Your Friday Dose of Woo installments, I was wondering which one to pick. After all, it's an embarrassment of riches (if you can call it "riches") in there, with so much woo and so little time. I needed something different after last week's installment, which, sadly, appeared to have grossed some people out. I don't know why it might have grossed more people out than previous posts on colon cleanses and liver flushes, but for some reason it did. But…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007
Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that "many scientists don't really know what they're up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians" — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We're also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It's more than a cosmetological failure, though;…
clock | April 5, 2007Neural Gourmet and Blue Gal are organizing a massive blogospheric Blog Against Theocracy weekend:
I'd like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody's favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism,…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007If I see Francis Collins' pious, simpering facade one more time, I'm going to get really pissed off. Can someone please give that man a Templeton Prize and let him retire to the Cascades, where he can stare at waterfalls to his heart's content? CNN has an article on "Why this scientist believes in God", and it's just more vapid crap distilled from his vapid book.
But OK, let's take him at his word. He claims to be presenting reasons to believe … what are they? Do they meet any kind of scientific standard?
I've thrown out most of his essay, and pulled out just those parts that actually address…
clock | April 4, 2007...someone (guess who?) will feel persecuted:
.... One student objected that I was singling out Christianity. Another objected to what I was implying about the religion. I'm not sure I even used the word "Christian" in my description of the above examples, but I certainly wouldn't argue it. But I found it fascinating that connecting Islam with 9/11 was acceptable, but for certain students (both born-agains), the idea of connecting Christianity with bad behavior was unacceptable. I also found it interesting that despite accusations of insulting Christianity, I never made a value judgment.…
retrospectacle | April 4, 2007Courtesy of CNN, an empty-headed opinion piece that adds no real dimension to the topic.
As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God's language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God's plan.
I did not always embrace these perspectives. As a graduate student in physical chemistry in the 1970s, I was an atheist, finding no reason to…
clock | April 3, 2007Or, to tell the traditional Passover joke:
A Jewish physicist in the UK was about to get knighted by the Queen. There was a long line of recepients waiting for the ceremony and they were all instructed what to say/chant once they come to face the Queen. The physicist kept silently practicing the obligatory words, but when his time finally arrived he got so nervous he forgot what he was supposed to say. So he started singing the only song he could remember "Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot..."
The Queen looked at him, then looked at her advisor and asked:
"Why is this knight…
pharyngula | April 3, 2007Steve Stanton, the city manager of Largo, Florida, is getting a sex change operation. That news is grounds for firing him. Injust as that is (but so damned typical), I was amused by this remark:
"If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated," said Pastor Ron Saunders of Largo's Lighthouse Baptist Church. "Make no mistake about it."
It's a fascinating comment. We have an idealistic image of Jesus representing the weak and downtrodden, the oppressed minorities, of preaching tolerance and inclusion, and Pastor Ron Saunders is exactly the opposite … and at the same…
oracknows | April 3, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…
pharyngula | April 2, 2007Salon has an interview with Elaine Pagels on the Gospel of Judas. I'm really not much interested in yet another quaint twist on Christian dogma — I can understand how historians may differ, of course — but in the course of the interview she pulls this stunt … this ridiculous, absurd, cowardly claim that is pretty much routine from theologians.
What do you make of the recent claim by the atheist Richard Dawkins that the existence of God is itself a scientific question? If you accept the idea that God intervenes in the physical world, don't there have to be physical mechanisms for that to…
oracknows | April 1, 2007Palm Sunday seems an opportune time to mention how religious sensitivity all too often seeks to muzzle artistic expression and freedom of speech in the U.S. You may have heard of Cosimo Cavallaro's 200 lb. milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus on the cross called My Sweet Lord that was getting religious nutcase Bill Donohue so up in arms last week, leading to some threatening-sounding language while calling for a boycott of the hotel that houses the gallery where the sculpture was to be displayed during Holy Week:
As I've said many times before, Lent is the season for non-believers to sow seeds…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2007According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 3% of Americans claim to be atheists. I know a lot of atheists, so I am wondering if I know all of the atheists in America? Do they all know each other?
Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll's respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam. Nearly half (48 percent) of the…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2007According to this creationist video, peanut butter, which has been subjected to high temperatures to render it sterile, disproves that life can come from non-life. The silliness of this argument reminds me of Kirk Cameron's 'banana proof' of creationism.
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tags: peanut butter, evolution, streaming video
oracknows | March 31, 2007Why is it that the concepts of freedom of religion and freedom of speech seem so hard for some people to understand? Witness a truly idiotic attempt to prevent someone from appearing on TV simply because he is a Scientologist:
March 31, 2007 -- - A German official is demanding that John Travolta be uninvited from a guest appearance on a popular German television show tonight because he's a Scientologist, but show officials insist he will appear as scheduled.
Guenther Oettinger, the state governor of Baden-Wuerttemberg, wants Travolta off "Wanna Bet?" a popular show in Germany seen by an…
pharyngula | March 31, 2007A gay rights group called Soulforce had a sit-in (it warms my heart to hear the traditions of the 1960s have not completely died) in the offices of Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and typical homophobe. One of our local bible scholars, Reuben David, an assistant professor of Communication Arts at North Central University, took it upon himself to criticize these militant gay rights activists; I'm really impressed with his perspective:
Osama Bin Laden's threat against the West is milder compared to the movements of [Soulforce founder] Mel White and others who…
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2007...or something like that. By way of skippy, comes this, erm, fascinating creationist exposition on the inertness of peanut butter:
People can't really be this stupid, can they?
pharyngula | March 30, 2007"There's something enchanting under his sari!"
What is this, silly religion day? I just got sent a link to this marvelous story of a young unemployed British fellow who became a goddess in India — he is now the incarnation of Bahucharaji, the patron of Indian eunuchs, and he goes around blessing people and curing their infertility. Apparently, Bahucharaji was an Indian princess who castrated her husband because he wasn't interested in sex, and for that she was deified. Thank Lakshmi and Urvasi my wife is an unbeliever!
They call him Prema, for short. It means "Divine Love." Hey, what a…
pharyngula | March 30, 2007Bill Donohue is hopping mad again — he's got another wild hare up his butt and is fuming over another insult to his very Catholic sensibilities:
Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever".
The latest affront is a life-size sculpture of a naked man on a cross, made out of 200 pounds of chocolate, on display in New York just in time for Easter.
Come on, Bill, get over it. Shouldn't Abu Ghraib have been "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever"? How about the injustice of our war in the Iraq? What about the ongoing…
pharyngula | March 30, 2007OK, simple story: kid goes to school dressed as a pirate, eyepatch, inflatable sword, and talking about the flying spaghetti monster; kid is asked to remove the eyepatch several times; kid refuses; kid gets kicked out of school for a day. You may be disappointed to learn that I don't see a problem. I think it's fair for schools to enforce some minimal level of decorum, by all accounts he was asked politely to remove the eyepatch, and even the kids' mother thinks he got a little carried away. A mild punishment like suspension to enforce the reasonable authority of the school administration is…