religion
grrlscientist | December 4, 2006Do you remember Ken Starr? Well, having failed to convict Bill Clinton of a blow job, Kenny Starr is now helping an Alaska school board attack the 1st Amendment against high-school senior, Joseph Frederick, in the "kids will be kids" escapade, the infamous "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner case -- and Starr is doing it free of charge.
Click here to see this evil, evil banner in its own window.
Frederick was suspended in 2002 after he unfurled the 14-foot-long banner -- a reference to marijuana use -- just outside school grounds as the Olympic torch relay moved through the Alaskan capital headed…
mikethemadbiologist | December 4, 2006The story about Kenyan religious leaders who are attempting to stifle evolutionary biology at the Kenyan National Museum is making the rounds of the progressive political blogs (interesting, how the right-wing blogs aren't covering this...). Within this story, there is a real tragedy: Kenya has a serious problem in treating certain types of bacterial dysentery due to the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
grrlscientist | December 3, 2006
Darwin's Evolution of Man.
.
Richard Leakey, the famous paleoanthropologist, is battling with powerful evangelical church leaders in Kenya. These fundamentalist wingnuts are pressuring Kenya's national museum to hide its world-famous collection of hominid fossils that detail the evolution of humans' early ancestors.
Leakey stated that the wingnuts' statements are "the most outrageous comments I have ever heard."
"The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind,"continued Leakey. "The…
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2006While my theological beliefs (which have very little to do with my religious observance) tend towards that 'ol time agnostic monism, Nicholas Kristof, in one of the daffiest columns he's ever written, has decided that the Christopath Right "has largely retreated from the culture wars." Therefore, any resumption of said wars must be squarely laid at the feet of "the Atheist Left."
No, Special K, the Right didn't "retreat", they were driven off the battlefield. There is a huge difference.
Kristof's column is nothing more than Compulsive Centrist Disorder rearing its head in the culture wars…
pharyngula | December 3, 2006Jebus, but I am in the wrong business. Benny Hinn is getting his flock to buy him an airplane.
As a result, we have recently taken delivery on our Gulfstream G4SP plane, which we call Dove One. I have enclosed a beautiful photo-filled brochure to explain more about this incredible ministry tool that will increase the scope of our abilities to preach the Gospel around the globe. Now we must pay the remainder of the down payment, and I am asking the Lord Jesus to speak to 6,000 of my precious partners to sow a seed of $1,000 in the next ninety days. And I am praying, even as I write this letter…
oracknows | December 3, 2006I'm getting really tired of "ChopraFan" spamming the comments of unrelated posts with his serious kissing of Chopra's posterior over Chopra's risibly idiotic multipart response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. In fact, given the number of times that I've fisked Chopra's profound ignorance of and obtuseness over science and what the theory of evolution actually says, I feel like I'm playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with him, with no end in sight.
Consequently, as promised over at PZ's demolition of this woo, my response will be brief. In fact, I daresay it may be the only response ever…
pharyngula | December 1, 2006Something is odd about this comment:
…to help make his point that the bible was the word of god, he introduced the Dead Sea scrolls. He said that they were 3,000 years old and that scholars had found that they were identical to the modern day bible. In fact, he said, "Every dot over every 'i', every cross of the 't', every comma, and every period is in the exact same place as in the bible in your hand" (quote paraphrased).
And to this day in Hebrew school, the children receive careful instruction in dotting i's and crossing t's.
pharyngula | December 1, 2006This is just not right. Orac finds some wacky spiritualist 'healer' who claims to have the cause for diabetes: a demon, the great spirit squid of doom. What? A squid demon? How kooky. Everyone knows no self-respecting squid demon would confined itself to screwing up one subset of cells in your pancreas.
You'll have to read the original page to find a list of other demons. There is, apparently, also a Demon of Excessive Foot Odor which you can cast out, and you can also have Demons in your Blood Sugar.
oracknows | December 1, 2006It's been five months since I first started Your Friday Dose of Woo. I started it on a whim, after wondering if I should have a Friday feature, as so many other ScienceBloggers do (Friday Cephalopod, Friday Sprog Blogging, The Friday Fermentable, among others). In those five months, this thing has taken on a life of its own, producing woo more woo-ey than any that I had ever encountered before, woo like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, Dr. Emoto's water woo, spiritually guided surgery, detoxifying boots, and the global orgasm. Sometimes the woo had religious overtones; sometimes it abused…
pharyngula | November 30, 2006Daniel Morgan, of Get Busy Livin' or Get Busy Bloggin' was interviewed on the Florida 10 commandments monument. It would be a moment of glory if Sean Hannity hadn't been involved.
You can catch it all on YouTube.
mikethemadbiologist | November 30, 2006A while ago, I posted about the Missouri legislative committee that claimed that abortion had led to a shortage of workers which then resulted in illegal immigration. Really. I can't make this garbage up. Now, Nehomee over at Shakespeare's Sister has observed the same thing in Georgia:
Rep. Franklin manages to muddy the fundamentalist waters even further by revealing his true intentions in Section 1, a(15): "The practice of abortion has caused the citizens of this state an inestimable amount economically, including, but not limited to, the costs and tax burden of having to care for…
oracknows | November 30, 2006When I wrote a post about how Richard Dawkins was being unjustly smeared as supporting Hitler-style eugenics by the religious blogosphere, I figured I might provoke some criticism, particularly since I didn't just stop there. No, in a bit of what some may consider blogging hubris, I couldn't resist trying to discuss under what circumstances eugenics might be morally justifiable and under what form. (Of course hubris is almost a job requirement to be a blogger; so none of this should be surprising.) In any case, not surprisingly Vox Day wasn't all that happy about what I wrote. (If you're…
clock | November 29, 2006While all this was going on I was wondering where Jason Rosenhouse would stand on all of this. He is back from a break and has two posts on the issue here and here.
Update: Chris Rowan wrote an intriguing analysis and a huge thread on the topic is still ongoing on Panda's Thumb
pharyngula | November 29, 2006Now Phil is trying to kill me—he sent me this link with a knowing smirk, plainly telling me that he knew it would raise my blood pressure. People, think this stuff through: if I were found dead in my chair, one clawlike hand clutching my chest, my face in a rictus of agony, and there on the computer screen in front of me was an email chortling over giving me apoplexy, the police would come calling, and they wouldn't be cheerful. My family, amoral godless atheists all, would probably put out a hit on you via the Infidel Mafia. Be more careful!
As you can tell, though, I survived this episode.…
jrosenhouse | November 29, 2006Okay, I'm back. Did I miss anything?
Other than the giant kerfuffle between Larry Moran and P.Z. Myers on the one hand and Ed Brayton and Pat Hayes et al, on the other, that is.
Things started with this post, from Moran, on the subject of a recent lecture by philosopher Robert Pennock at UCSD. Some pro-ID sites were claiming that all students were required to attend. Moran sarcastically suggested that rather than require students to attend an anti-
ID lecture by Robert Pennock, the better approach would have been not to admit pro-ID students in the first place.
Ed Brayton was not amused…
mikethemadbiologist | November 29, 2006The other title of this post could have been "The War on Christmas and the Politics of Failed Withdrawl." Regardless, Tuesday, the Catholic League launched the first salvo in its ongoing War Against the Jews On Christmas with a large ad on the op-ed page of the NY Times. Here's what the Catholic League had to say:
(larger version here)
I think the charge of "cultural facists" is more than a little overblown. I live in Boston, a bastion of liberalism, not to mention the dreaded 'Homofascist Hordes', and nobody is ripping down the Christmas lights on Newbury Street or Comm Ave. The Boston…
pharyngula | November 29, 2006Sean notes without comment a piece on how Muslims should find Mecca when traveling in space. I am in awe of the mind that could write this.
A user-friendly, portable Muslims in Space calculator , could determine the direction of the Qiblah and prayer times on the ISS. Its essential feature would be the use of the Projected Earth and Qiblah Pole concepts. These are based on the interpretation of the holy house of angels in the sky above Mecca. The place is always rich with angels worshipping. As many as 70,000 angels circumambulate it every day. Thus, one virtual Qiblah pole can be taken as a…
oracknows | November 29, 2006I don't know about you, but I'm starting to get a bit bored with Deepak Chopra. He's like the Energizer Bunny of woo; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Unfortunately, one of his sycophants going under the 'nym "ChopraFan" appears to have infested my blog, posting plugs for Chopra's latest idiocy in the comments of unrelated blog posts. it's almost as though he wants me to trash Chopra's latest incursion into woo, a breathtakingly inane piece called The God Delusion? Part 5 (or here on The Huffington Post).
PZ's already chewed over the woo, but I can't resist getting a couple…
mikethemadbiologist | November 28, 2006Thank you, Dennis Prager for your anti-Muslim bigotry: at least we know where the modern conservatives really stand. Despite Article IV of the U.S. Constitution which states that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States", Prager has his knickers in a twist over Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison's intention to use a copy of the Koran instead of a Christian Bible while being sworn into office. Prager spews:
Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not…
pharyngula | November 28, 2006I'm not a big fan of Steven Pinker's work, but I have to agree with just about everything he says in this letter arguing against the planned "Reason and Faith" requirement at Harvard.
First, the word "faith" in this and many other contexts, is a euphemism for "religion." An egregious example is the current administration's "faith-based initiatives," so-named because it is more palatable than "religion-based initiatives." A university should not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.
Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like "faith" and "reason" are…