religion
razib | May 14, 2006Ed Brayton says:
To see an atheist taking a position that is usually held by those who claim to be Christian, typically southern nationalists, is quite disconcerting.
This is interesting. Here is what some might not know about: the racialist far Right tends to be populated by many individuals who have left Christianity. A substantial subset of these are atheists. Here is a quote from American Renaissance, the most highbrow of racialist publications, in regards to their subscriber base:
Two thirds of respondents believe in God, a figure lower than the national average of well over 90…
razib | May 11, 2006OK, some fluff...it seems that the Greek Neo-Pagans have received permission to worship in pagan temples. That might sound obvious, but most pagan temples in Greece are historic treasures, and so the purview of the government. The Greek Orthodox Church is not happy:
But Greece's powerful Orthodox Church takes a less charitable view, accusing the worshippers of idolatry and "poisonous New Age practices".
Father Eustathios Kollas, who presides over the community of Greek priests, said: "They are a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the…
oracknows | May 11, 2006I was just going to leave my plug for the Skeptics' Circle this week stand as my only post today--until I became aware of some serious lunacy:
MUMBAI (AFP) - A Catholic group called on Christians to starve themselves to death in protest at the release of "The Da Vinci Code" at cinemas in India as others burned copies of the novel.
The Catholic Secular Forum said it hoped thousand of people would attend a protest Wednesday in Mumbai to burn effigies of Dan Brown, the author of the best-selling novel.
"It's to show the extent that our feelings have been hurt," said the group's general secretary…
razib | May 5, 2006Recently I stumbled on to this long article, titled Race and the Church, which examines racism and racial theory from a Catholic perspective. I don't have time to comment in detail. Obviously there are many issues I would have with the piece, but, I will offer that I tend to be of the opinion that the ideology of European racial supremacy was something special, and that uniqueness was connected to the rise of modern science. Xenophobia and prejudice are a common theme which unites many cultures, but the coupling of European military-political ascendancy in the 19th century with the prestige…
razib | April 28, 2006There's a hilarious, and often thoughtful, comment thread over at The American Scene. Ross Douthat is a Roman Catholic, and many of his readers are serious intellectual Christians. So, I am always interested when they object to the bizarre and obviously anthropogenic hocus-pocus of Mormonism. Some snips of interest:
dude, mormans are weird. let's just face it. the whole thing makes me giggle when I talk about it. golden tablets . . . the whole thing is goofy-times.
[later]
Because the theology is "weird," and the history is even weirder. Captain Moroni? Golden tablets? Steve Young gets his…
oracknows | April 26, 2006Oh, boy.
Last week, as part of my series Medicine and Evolution, I mentioned the blog of a homeschooled medical student who also happens to be a young earth creationist and used her as an example of why I feared that credulity towards a a pseudoscience that is so obviously wrong based on the empirical evidence, so easily debunked with so little effort is an indicator of credulity when it comes to other forms of pseudoscience, like quackery. I hadn't really planned on mentioning her again any time soon, or even ever, as I thought my point had been made.
Then a reader had to point out to me…
oracknows | April 24, 2006Sometimes people come up with ideas that are just so mind-bogglingly inappropriate that I have a hard time grasping them. Case in point, recently Polish authorities granted permission by a local theater group to perform Jesus Christ Superstar at an old Nazi death camp:
POLISH authorities have withdrawn permission for the musical Jesus Christ Superstar to be performed at Majdanek, the former Nazi concentration camp, after protests by Jewish groups.
The Culture Ministry and the camp's management today said the performance by a local Polish theatre group could not go ahead.
"The play was to…
oracknows | April 22, 2006This Jack Chick parody is a bit incoherent at times, but parts of it are still pretty amusing nonetheless. I'm still not entirely sure what it's about, and maybe someone can help me out there. This particular parody seems to be a parody put together from more than one Chick tract. However, one of them is definitely this one.
(Click on image for the rest.)
razib | April 21, 2006How deep do the seams of tolerance run in this country? Sometimes you wonder...ultimately, I'm pessimistic about the human love of liberty. I tend to agree with Matt McIntosh that to some extent American defense of individual freedoms is based on custom & tradition rather than reasoned acceptance of core principles. In any case I had a book on my shelf which I just had some spare time to open today, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity, and I saw this table:
Spiritual Shoppers (%)
Christian Inclusivists(%)
Christian Exclusivists(%)
All Respondents (%)
Percentage who…
stcynic | April 20, 2006I came across this column on Agape Press called The Serpent of Porn and had to laugh when it began with a Biblical lesson about the importance of avoiding sexual temptations from - of all people - Solomon!
Solomon intimately understood how powerful sexual temptation can be for a young man. It was with him in mind that he wrote the fifth chapter of Proverbs. "My son, give attention to my wisdom, incline your ear to my understanding .... For the lips of an adulteress drip honey and smoother than oil is her speech" (Proverbs 5:1-3).
Yes, folks, he's actually turning to Solomon for advice on…
razib | April 18, 2006PZ's readers are in a tizzy over this somewhat counterintuitive map:
Notice something weird? If the "Bible Belt" is measured by "religious adherents," then it is slapped vertically across the middle of the country, not in the south. Something is wrong here.
Religion means many things to many people. There are people who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and who try to convert people to this state who don't go to a specific church on Sunday but meet with a roving "fellowship," reject "religion" and sometimes even the term "Christian." There are Unitarian Universalists I know who…
oracknows | April 18, 2006Tom Cruise has apparently told GQ magazine that he plans on eating Katie Holmes' placenta after the birth of their child:
Hollywood actor and Scientologist Tom Cruise is planning to eat Katie Holmes' placenta.
It is the latest in a series of strange revelations by the 43-year-old 'Mission: Impossible' star about the child he is expecting with fiancée Katie Holmes.
Cruise told GQ magazine: "I'm gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I'm gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there."
I just hope either (1) that Cruise was indeed just joking; (2) that his…
razib | April 17, 2006Beliefnet has a story about Opus Dei disavowing the publication of a cartoon by a local group which put Muhammad in Hell taking after Dante. The officials make it clear that the decision was in part driven by pragmatic concerns of violence after the Danish cartoon controversy, but I found this conclusion amusing:
"The cartoon's publication is further framed by the current debate in many countries regarding the false and unjust depiction of the Christian faith in The Da Vinci Code," he said. "The issue at stake here is how to make compatible freedom of expression, a free market and respect…
razib | April 16, 2006Rob Knop, physicist and Christian, offers us his ruminations on religion. But Rob is not an "orthodox" Christian from what I can tell, he says in a follow up post:
...do I really believe that Jesus was really bodily resurrected, in contrast to everything we have observed, and everything we know and understand about human physiology and the decay that happens even shortly after death?
Let me give you a wholly unsatisfactory answer: probably not.
There you have it, he believes that the balance of the evidence leans against the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That being said, I'm a big…
oracknows | April 15, 2006The fundamentalist Christian right often laments that there is a "war on Christians" by secular society in the U.S. Indeed, as Easter approaches, such complaints inevitably increase. Consider, however, these clearly un-Constitutional clauses in various state constitutions that make atheists ineligible for public office (or at least not accorded the same rights to run for public office), including Mississippi, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
It's unbelievable today that such blatantly un-Constitutional clauses can remain, even today, in the constitutions of…
oracknows | April 14, 2006Who needs malpractice insurance, when you could have Sharia law? Check out this question to an Imam by a Canadian doctor regarding his culpability if a patient of his dies, and the Imam's answer:
Here's the question (typos not corrected):
Im a doctor and i want to ask about if i make a mistake that leads to the death of a patient .. is it considered as killing by mistake ? ... or just a professional mistake
what i want to ask that if i caused the death of a patient - by mistake - do i need to pay fedia anf fast for tow consequent months ? .. or it is enough to take the punishment stated by…
oracknows | April 14, 2006I'm not Jewish, but nonetheless found this one pretty funny (via one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe):
An elderly man in Miami calls his son in New York and says, "I hate to ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing. Forty-five years of misery is enough."
"Pop, what are you talking about?" the son screams.
"We can't stand the sight of each other any longer," the old man says. "We're sick of each other, and I'm sick of talking about this, so, you call your sister in Chicago and tell her," and he hangs up.
Frantic, the son calls his sister, who…
oracknows | April 13, 2006With all the nuttiness coming out of Tom Cruise in the name of Scientology, it's often forgotten that there are a lot of other Scientologists out there in Hollywood. One of the other most prominent ones is John Travolta. Compared to Tom Cruise, John Travolta seems, superficially at least, the height of reason. Certainly he's a lot less obnoxious about his religion than Cruise is, and he always seems like a likable guy whenever he shows up on the talk show circuit. And, heck, anyone who can earn a commercial pilot's license and fly a 707 around the country has to have something upstairs.…
stcynic | April 11, 2006For a nation just recovering from the mass stupidity of the "War on Christmas", now we've got the War on Easter. Only this time, it's not just an empty catchphrase invented by demagogues to whip up a fake frenzy, it's a catchphrase invented by a mediocre filmmaker to sell his bad documentary. The filmmaker, Brian Flemming, made the documentary The God Who Wasn't There, which was sent to me by the distributors several months ago to review but, frankly, it was so badly made that I only made it about halfway through.
And now Flemming is trying to pump up sales by encouraging people to place 666…
stcynic | April 8, 2006GG of Shiny Ideas has written a reply to my post on atheism and churchgoing. Unfortunately, I think he seriously misunderstands my position and thinks I'm making a much stronger argument than I am. He writes:
This goes back to my previous post about the numinous feelings induced by drug use. If you are, like myself, a materialist, agnostic, (weak) atheist, can you (should you?) in good conscience describe such experiences in spiritual terms? If you are, like Ed Brayton, a deist who denies the existence of revelation, is it proper to be endorsing religious institutions?
But I don't think I've…