religion
pharyngula | December 30, 2010It makes me want to give her a big smile and a hug and whisk her off to get psychological counseling.
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2010Update: I have revised the original post to reflect the observation made by ProgJohn in comment five, and Raka in comment eleven.
Over at HuffPo, Rabbi Adam Jacobs presumes to explain “The Jewish View of Creationism.” The title alone is a bad sign. The standard line is that if you put ten Jews in a room you get eleven opinions. The idea that there is a Jewish view of anything is pretty unlikely.
Jacobs focuses entirely on the question of the age of the Earth, and not of biological evolution. He writes:
To the secularist, the notion that we should flippantly toss aside hundreds of…
pharyngula | December 28, 2010Lawrence Murphy was an evil man. He was a Wisconsin priest who molested over 200 boys, and just to make the story particularly deplorable, they were deaf children. Preying on the weakest and most vulnerable was apparently his life's mission. Furthermore, this was the scandalous case that was reported directly to then Cardinal Ratzinger in his role as the Vatican enforcer; his enforcement involved shuffling the guilty around to hide their crimes and give them fresh opportunities in new hunting grounds.
Well, the Vatican has finally found it in its black (but gold-plated!) and shriveled husk of…
pharyngula | December 28, 2010The Pope had a Christmas message for the world this year: we should forgive Catholic priests for raping children because everyone else was doing it. He invented a peculiar history that bears no resemblance to the late 20th century I lived in.
"In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children," the Pope said.
"It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a 'better than' and a 'worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself."
The Pope said…
oracknows | December 27, 2010Christmas is over. Heck even Boxing Day is over. Still, Orac is doing something very unusual for him in that he's taking a bit of a staycation at home. Consider it a sanity break. Even though I'll be working on grants and a variety of other projects at home and even though I haven't signed out my pager to one of my partners, it is still a very good thing indeed not to see the inside of my office for ten days. As for blogging, understandably, given that readership has fallen off markedly the week between Christmas and New Years each and every year since I started blogging way back in 2004, I…
gregladen | December 26, 2010... will focus on Christmas.
Actually, he's wrong in comparing his ability, or yours or mine, to trace back a genealogy with Luke and his buddies. Back in those days, and in that culture, people did indeed walk around with pretty deep genealogies attached to them (though the extensive and intensive study of genealogies in anthropology tells us that those genealogies are not expected to be accurate).
(Sorry, I meant for this to come out yesterday but forget to hit the "publish" button)
pharyngula | December 22, 2010Tim Moyle (I will not call him "Father"; I have a lot of respect for my father, none of it transfers to the clergy) wonders why atheists are so grumpy, and offers some explanations. He apparently does not know any atheists and is completely lacking in self-awareness, so his arguments don't hold up very well.
Why is it that so many in the atheist community cannot bring themselves to get past their anger whenever they engage in discussion about religion? The language of many of atheist contributions in public debate is laced with venom and dripping with sarcasm.
Well, actually, when I consider…
pharyngula | December 21, 2010St Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Arizona was a Catholic-affiliated institution, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix has just made a major strategic error: they have stripped the hospital of its affiliation.
There are two reasons this was a bad idea for the church. One is that it exposes them as callous, evil bastards who don't care for their patients as much as they do their invisible, nonexistent souls. The reason the church took this action is that doctors there performed an emergency abortion on a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant and dying. The choice was to stand by and do…
pharyngula | December 21, 2010Soon, it will be the end of the year. Soon, all those various forms will come trickling into your mailbox, telling you how much money you earned. Soon, you will have to fill out a whole bunch of other forms and pay out your share to the state and federal government. For most of us, it's a big bite, but if only we were ministers of the lord, it wouldn't hurt so much.
Read this summary from a tax preparer who did a local priests taxes, and feel your wallet cringe.
The minister gets paid from his church, from which he received cash of $105,000 in 2009. He received a W-2 with wages of $40,000…
pharyngula | December 21, 2010The pope has the answer, and it's not the priests. Can you guess whose fault it all is?
If you guessed godless secular society, you'd be right. It doesn't count for much, though, because you know it was an easy question.
I'm not sure how it works, though. He claims that secular society was making excuses for pedophiles, promoting moral relativism, which I don't think was at all true…but let's pretend it was, just to give him the full benefit of the doubt. Then what? A priest sees George Carlin, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace all busily promoting a lifestyle of hedonism and disregard for…
gregladen | December 20, 2010But the method must be adjusted if you happen to be an atheist.
OMG. As it were.
WARNING: your irony meter may break just after 2 minutes 10 seconds. Adjust your irony meters now. Do not drink coffee while watching this video.
pharyngula | December 20, 2010This is getting ridiculous. Now people are getting irate at the use of a common word.
The teacher…was explaining to the class how the cold climate in Trevélez, Granada province, aided in the curing of the village's most famous local product, jamón serrano. The boy told his teacher that hearing the word 'ham' in class was offensive to him because of his religion and asked his geography teacher to stop referring to the product which caused him offence.
El Mundo newspaper reports that the boy's parents then reported the teacher to both the National Police and to the courts. It's understood…
pharyngula | December 20, 2010So instead, he's written a Christmas essay about why he's an atheist. It's not bad. He pegs why people get so sniffy at innocuous words from an atheist, and what we all have to live for, so there's that.
So what does the question "Why don't you believe in God?" really mean. I think when someone asks that they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking "what makes you so special? "How come you weren't brainwashed with the rest of us?" "How dare you say I'm a fool and I'm not going to heaven, f-- you!" Let's be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered…
oracknows | December 19, 2010Everyone knows how much I live pareidolia. It never ceases to amaze me how the human mind can impose imagery on everyday things. We've seen Jesus on toast, on sheet metal, in rocks, on trees, and in windows. We've seen the Virgin Mary on a similar bunch of things--even a Lava lamp or a freeway underpass.
However, this is the first time I've seen both Mary and the baby Jesus in hard candy.
Hmmm. Personally I don't see it, even with the picture of Mary and baby Jesus put right next to the candy. It looks more like a map to me. Perhaps my faith isn't strong enough.
pharyngula | December 15, 2010Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn't put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.
And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.
So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?…
pharyngula | December 14, 2010I was sent this link to an apologist defending Christianity against rationalist requests for evidence, and I was unimpressed — all he's got is repeated claims that the Bible says Jesus was lord of the universe, which is not a good argument. I can also point to the Lord of the Rings, which says Gandalf was a powerful wizard, but that doesn't even begin to support any claim that he actually existed.
But I read on, and it got weird. Read this, and somebody explain to me…is he arguing for or against Christianity?
As for the empirical and falsifiable evidence scientists and atheists demand, let's…
pharyngula | December 14, 2010Last week, the CNN Belief blog published some transparently inane pseudoscience from Oprah.com; this week, it's publishing some awesomely trivial tripe about where your dog goes after death (how does the author know they go to heaven? He dug up some Bible verses, of course.)
This is amazingly bad stuff. It's as if there is some sneering, mocking atheist who has been put in charge of CNN's religion section, and she gets up every morning on a quest to find whatever will make religion look profoundly stupid…and she succeeds three minutes after going to work, and spends the rest of the day…
jrosenhouse | December 13, 2010The BECB (that's the big evolution/creation book) is slowly winding its way towards a complete first draft. I just finished writing a chapter about religious experiences. Creationists routinely tell me they have had them, you see.
So over the last few months I have read my share of the literature on the subject. I started with classics like William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, which actually made for more interesting reading than you might expect. James' approach to the subject is pretty measured and reasonable, especially given the state of science at the time (his…
pharyngula | December 13, 2010At least the Mafia doesn't tolerate baby-rapers in its ranks.
Otherwise, though, they're both shady organizations with very tightly closed ranks and a sense of privilege. It seems the Vatican is also suspected of criminal enterprises — it has its very own private, secretive bank that is accused of money laundering, and recently had about $30 million in assets seized.
I don't think the Vatican has any ties to grisly gangland murders, though…oh, wait.
Calvi headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans made to dummy companies in Latin…
pharyngula | December 12, 2010Blasphemy laws have some novel consequences. Take the case of this devout fellow who uses his name as a legal weapon.
Pakistani authorities have arrested a doctor on suspicion of violating the country's contentious blasphemy law by throwing away a business card of a man who shared the name of Islam's prophet, Muhammad, police said Sunday.
…
The case began Friday when Muhammad Faizan, a pharmaceutical company representative, visited Valiyani's clinic and handed out his business card. He said when the doctor threw the card away, Faizan went to police and filed a complaint that noted his name…