religion
jrosenhouse | October 5, 2009Andrew Sullivan has posted several more blog entries on the subject of theodicy. Here's one written from a theistic perspective. It gets off to a bad start:
The emails you have received regarding the theodicy problem are, I think, very telling. Most striking to me is how few of your correspondents -- and none in the set of notes posted just yesterday morning -- seem interested in, or even cite with a measure of familiarity, any of the great Christian theologians on the matter: St. Augustine or St. Thomas, Luther or Calvin, Kierkegaard, or even a near contemporary like Reinhold Niebuhr.…
jrosenhouse | October 5, 2009Via Andrew Sullivan I came across this article, from the Canadian magazine The Walrus, on the subject of science and religion. The article's focus is on Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit astronomer. It was the article's conclusion that really caught my eye:
Consolmagno has little patience for intelligent design. “Science cannot prove God, or disprove Him. He has to be assumed. If people have no other reason to believe in God than that they can't imagine how the human eye could have evolved by itself, then their faith is very weak.” Rather than seeking affirmation of his own faith in the heavens,…
oracknows | October 5, 2009...and, no, I don't mean Orac, his last few posts notwithstanding.
No, don't worry, this post is most definitely not about Bill Maher. Rather, it's how, while doing searches for that craziness, I found even more disturbing craziness. Even though I was disappointed in him on this one issue and even though I often don't agree with him on religion, never let it be said that I don't still have considerable admiration for Richard Dawkins. That's why, when I came across some truly over-the-top attacks on Dawkins, I thought it would be worthwhile to mention them, as a little wafer to cleanse the…
gregladen | October 4, 2009Rep. Michele Bachmann will be headlining a fundraiser in November for controversial ministry You Can Run But You Cannot Hide (YCRBYCH).
Based in Annandale, Minn., the group has made a name for itself as an anti-drug Christian punk rock band that organizes motivational student assemblies to bring Christ to public schools. But over the last several years, parents and school administrators have complained that the ministry misrepresents itself, claiming that the group is not transparent about its Christian mission.
source
This is actually a fairly common problem in public schools. Groups…
emjohnson | October 4, 2009CBS is reporting that ex-Senator Rick Santorum (who lost his Pennsylvania seat in 2006 with 41% of the vote) has entered the running for 2012 along with the likes of Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. All of them are staunch right-wing fundamentalist Christians who have advocated changing the Constitution to reflect Biblical Law.
I have something of a history lesson for Republicans who think that these views have any place in the United States. However, before that, to get a flavor of Santorum's unique lunacy I thought I'd quote his Associated Press interview from 2003 in which he states that…
oracknows | October 4, 2009I hadn't planned on writing much, if anything more, about the whole Bill Maher debacle, but PZ has shown up in my comments and graciously tried to explain what's going on at the AAI convention regarding the truly awful choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award:
Look, I don't know what else I can say. I didn't endorse Maher; if they'd run this decision by me months ago, I would have said, "Are you nuts?". But of course, I have no clout with the AAI. Dawkins consented to the award initially, because he didn't know much about the full views held by the crackpot; he would certainly have…
grrlscientist | October 4, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, amputees, god, atheism, streaming video
Theists who try to respond to the question, Why doesn't God heal amputees? end up avoiding the question altogether and lecturing the questioner about a bunch of unasked questions. Could it be that they have no good answer for why their god refuses to heal amputees every single time, so they try to explain why they're god allows bad things to happen instead and hope we don't notice? This video discusses this observation and the reason why the question itself is important.
grrlscientist | October 3, 2009tags: religion, advertising, satire, humor, atheism, streaming video
Get Religion Today! Funny satirical ad which hits the nail on the head with modern organized religion.
oracknows | October 3, 2009...from PZ Myers at the AAI Convention:
The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy. He did a good job of walking a difficult tightrope; he made it clear that the award was granted for some specific worthy matters, his humorous approach to religion, while carefully dissociating the AAI from any endorsement of crackpot medicine. It won't be enough, I…
oracknows | October 2, 2009...for Bill Maher to receive the Richard Dawkins Award. It was a huge mistake on the part of the Atheist Alliance International to award it, for the reasons I've repeated ad nauseam over the last couple of weeks; so I won't go there again.
What I really want to know is what happened. I can't be in L.A. this weekend. Actually, I'd much rather be in London for TAM London than in L.A. anyway. Unfortunately, I can't be in either place (although I will be going to Chicago next weekend for the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress; keep that in mind if any of you Chicagoans wants to try a…
gregladen | October 2, 2009Though its trailer gives no clue as to its true agenda, this venomous supposed comedy is set in a world where lying is unknown and every word spoken is accepted as truth and where -- not accidentally, the screenplay implies -- God does not exist. Until, that is, failed documentary screenwriter and all-around loser Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) spontaneously discovers the ability to deceive.
That quote is from a movie review in The Catholic Spirit Dot Com.
Have a look:
Has anybody seen it?
(Hat tip: Virgil Samms)
gregladen | October 2, 2009The Medieval Religious State of Saudi Arabia has a school called King Abdullah's University of Science and Technology, which is co-ed (that is an extraordinarily progressive idea for Teh Kingdom) and very science oriented. The idea, obviously, is for Saudi Arabia to maintain it's old patriarchal relgious-oligarchic ways but at the same time not get mushed by the modern world by including some rational thinking and stuff. But a senior Saudi cleric has called for a vetting of the university's curriculum in order to remove "alien ideologies."
Evolution is an alien ideology, apparently.
"…
pharyngula | October 1, 2009The number of godless Americans rises a few percentage points, and O Woe Is Us among the apologists. They are so weak and easily discomfited that it makes me chortle.
This one is pretty funny, too — he urges all the religious people to drop their differences (hah!), "Or risk becoming Europe, where religion is fast becoming an afterthought." What is it with these guys? Europe is a fine, successful place, the thriving heartland of Western thought, and they do very well with a diminished religious influence. I think we'd do well to steal the best parts of European culture, and use them to…
laelaps | October 1, 2009
Not long after I wrote about how creationists got paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine to appear in the anti-evolution film Darwin's Dilemma I received a message from someone at the Faraday Institute. Conway Morris had done an interview with them about science and religion for a miniseries called Test of Faith, they said; would I be interested in receiving a copy of the DVD? I said "Sure" and the film came in the mail last week. I cannot say I was very impressed.
For those who have not heard of it before, the Faraday Institute is a John Templeton Foundation-funded group…
oracknows | October 1, 2009
The endgame is in sight. At the end of this post is a list of questions for Bill Maher tomorrow (if the opportunity presents itself), the vast majority of which you, my readers, thought of.
Let's backtrack a minute.
A couple of months ago, I learned that an award named after Richard Dawkins was being given to someone who was so radically, unbelievably unworthy of such an honor, that I likened giving the Richard Dawkins Award to Bill Maher to giving a public health award to Jenny McCarthy. (In deference to Professor Dawkins, perhaps I'll now liken it to giving such an award to MMR anti-…
oracknows | September 30, 2009I love this guy's explanations of skepticism and critical thinking.
In this installment, it is quite clearly and cleverly why it's impossible to "prove" the existence of God or any god and thus why such gods are always a matter of faith and belief without evidence:
gregladen | September 30, 2009Blasphemy Day is the 30th of September. Don't read this blog post in Ireland because there's a 25 thousand pound fine there for the blasphemer .
International Blasphemy Day is not just a day. It is a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism.BritainDanishEmbassy
The primary focus of the Blasphemy Day movement and indeed this website is not to debate the existence of any gods or deities (there is an abundance of fantastic websites which deal explicitly with that argument all over the internet, check the Web Links section).
The objective of International…
pharyngula | September 30, 2009My appearance at Bates made it to the Lewiston Sun Journal.
They did get a little piece of one point I tried to make. I don't think religion makes people do wicked things, and that's not my gripe with it. What it does is cut an intellectual brake line, making them incapable of dealing with certain situations rationally — they may do what is right, or they may do something that's just nuts, but you just can't rely on them doing what is reasonable.
grrlscientist | September 29, 2009tags: Blasphemy Day International, religion, politics, free speech, human rights, streaming video
Blasphemy Day International is a campaign seeking to establish September 30th as a day to promote free speech and stand up in a show of solidarity for the freedom to challenge, criticize, and satirize religion without fear of violence or reprisal: murder, litigation and other forms of intimidation. It is the obligation of the world's nations to safeguard dissent and the dissenters, not to side with the brutal interests of those who demand "respect" for their beliefs (i.e., immunity to being…