religion
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2009Writing at the Huffington Post, Robert Wright has a very bad post up about the New Atheists and foreign policy. Let's have a look"
It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?
No essay that starts like that is likely to have anything interesting or insightful to say. Atheists are overwhelmingly left-wing on…
gregladen | July 12, 2009Physioprof recently posted some comments on science and religion that I basically agree with.1 But I want to add an observation that I've been thinking about since this Pew Research report came out.
The current issue is that the average American thinks that an electron is larger than an atom, and some other stupid stuff. Back in the 1980s, the poster-concept for the stupidity of Americans was an exam given to school children in which the plurality of individuals placed Boston firmly in the middle of Tibet. This exam was given in Massachusetts. In those days, Geography was the bugaboo of…
pharyngula | July 12, 2009I'm feeling a bit uplifted at the word from the other side of the Atlantic: some doom and gloom from the Anglican church.
A long-serving Church of England bishop has predicted that the Church of England will cease to exist within a generation. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the Right Reverend Paul Richardson said declining church attendance and the rise in multiculturalism meant that "Christian Britain is dead".
The Church is rapidly declining, with attendances at its services in freefall, a proposal on the table at the next General Synod meeting to cut the number of bishops, and…
pharyngula | July 12, 2009How often have you seen this? An affectionate couple are walking along holding hands, and one gives the other a kiss on the cheek.
The only way you might have missed seeing that fairly often is if you are legally blind. It's common, it's harmless, and it's rather sweet — and we normally approve of such mild public expressions of affection.
Unless, of course, the couple consists of two young men, and especially if it is in Utah.
A gay couple says they were detained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints security guards after one man kissed another on the cheek Thursday on Main…
grrlscientist | July 12, 2009tags: miracle, christian cat, religion, Christian Cat Plays Amazing Grace, Edward Current, streaming video
In this amazing video, we are given evidence that miracles truly do happen! This video captures the impossible: Edward's christian cat, Miss Delilah, performs a miracle on camera. You just have to believe it in your heart! [1:06]
grrlscientist | July 12, 2009tags: politics, religion, fundamentalism, physical violence, Bill Maher, streaming video
"'This is what I believe.' 'Yeah, you believe it, and I'm going to say why it's dumb.'" ~ Bill Maher [2:17]
emjohnson | July 10, 2009
The "Revelation" as described by St. John, though likely inspired through the
use of hallucinogens (see The Mystery of Manna).
The title for this post comes from a terrific book by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, but I think it's appropriate for a discussion on faith, feeling and reason. Francis Collins' nomination as Director of the National Institutes of Health has effectively gotten people talking about religion, science and what, if anything, each should have to do with the other. I recently brought up Sam Harris' critique of the editor's at Nature for their praise of Collins' book…
emjohnson | July 10, 2009
Science and religion bicker in the backseat. Collin Purrington / Creative Commons
With Francis Collins' nomination as head of the National Institutes of Health I felt it was appropriate to bring up Sam Harris' letter to the journal Nature objecting to what he called "high-minded squeamishness" on the part of the editors for their praise of his book The Language of God. In the book Collins states:
As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no…
nisbetmc | July 10, 2009When I was invited by the Pew team earlier this year to make suggestions about items and questions to measure in their recently released survey on science and the public, I suggested that Pew ask a variation of a question that they have used in the past that queries respondents on the types of messages and information relative to politics they might receive in church. Given their expertise in the area, they were probably already well ahead of me in thinking along similar lines.
I was interested in the potential results based in part on a study I co-authored at the journal Political Behavior…
pharyngula | July 10, 2009William Saletan highlights an interesting study in reproductive biology.
In a paper presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program.
The program was so easy that even the average guy could follow it. According to a summary of the study, "The men were instructed to ejaculate daily."
He presents it as a conflict for religious organizations like the Catholic…
gregladen | July 9, 2009... In which I narrow the gulf between two allied factions enough that with a running start you can jump across ... maybe.
It has been suggested that Accommodationism is "a more moderate atheist perspective on the nature of religion and science."1 In this view, religion and science are not antithetical, and can exist side by side.
I think this is a fair description of accommodationism, and it is what bothers me about accommodationism itself or the description of accommodationism, depending on who's doing the talking, but I also don't think that this is what certain people who have been…
jrosenhouse | July 9, 2009Via Jerry Coyne comes this report, from Daniel Dennett, of a symposium on science and faith held at Cambridge. It sounds like his experience was very similar to mine at the recent NAPC conference. Dennett writes:
I am attending and participating in the big Cambridge University Darwin Week bash, and I noticed that one of the two concurrent sessions the first day was on evolution and theology, and was 'supported by the Templeton Foundation' (though the list of Festival Donors and Sponsors does not include any mention of Templeton). I dragged myself away from a promising session on speciation…
pharyngula | July 9, 2009
Some Irish workmen were cutting down a tree, and lo and behold, the stump supposedly resembles the Virgin Mary, although how they found a hymen in that lump, I don't know. The real source of amusement, though, is the way it has put the local Catholic church representatives in a dither.
Local parish priest Fr Willie Russell said on radio station Limerick Live 95FM yesterday that people should not worship the tree. "There's nothing there . . . it's just a tree . . . you can't worship a tree."
I hope the Irish druids are going to be rightly upset at this horribly offensive slur against their…
razib | July 9, 2009Tom Rees of Epiphenom has a new paper out, Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. The abstract:
Previous research has shown an apparent relationship between "societal health" and religiosity, with nations that exhibit higher mean personal religiosity also tending to provide worse social environments. A possible cause is that exposure to stressful situations (i.e. personal insecurity) increases personal religiosity. To test this hypothesis, income inequality, a widely available proxy for personal insecurity, was compared with other…
pharyngula | July 8, 2009Oh, great. He's been appointed by Obama.
He'll do a fine job…he's a competent administrator. I think we can trust him to manage the institution smoothly.
We can also trust him to drape Jesus over every major announcement, use the office as a platform for promoting religiosity, and otherwise taint the whole business with embarrassingly inane nonsense…just as he did with the human genome press conference. Isn't it about time our government promoted secular values that work over these antique and ineffective superstitions that just make their proponents look goofy?
pharyngula | July 8, 2009Forgive me, readers, but Madeline Bunting has raised up her tiny, fragile pin-head again, and I must address her non-arguments once more. Well, not her non-arguments, actually, but the same tedious non-arguments the fans of superstition constantly trundle out. She was at some strange conference where only people who love religion spoke and came away with affirmations of the usual tripe. It's as if the "New Atheists" have provoked a counter-attack by critics armored in pudding and armed with damp sponges.
…the Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, "beware of the power of nonsense…
pharyngula | July 7, 2009I just got this note from Richard Dawkins, who is attending the Cambridge Darwin Festival.
Robert Hinde is the elder statesman of the science of Ethology and one one of the most respected figures in British biology. I just met him at the big Cambridge Darwin Festival. Robert had agreed to speak in one of the sessions on 'Religion and Science' but withdrew on learning that it was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. He is now even more respected among British biologists.
We need more of this kind of action, and we need to publicize it more.
One other curious phenomenon: I searched the…
pharyngula | July 7, 2009Orthodox Jews are rioting in Jerusalem. The reason: because the city allows a parking lot to remain open on Saturday, which means people are able to drive on their holy day, which they consider sacred. Anne Barker was there to record the event as a journalist, and she switched on her recorder to document it all — when the protesters turned on her.
I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting - on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms.
It was like rain, coming at me from all directions - hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses.
Big gobs of spit landed…
grrlscientist | July 5, 2009tags: science, god, religion, creationism, humor, funny, satire, Edward Current, streaming video
This video provides an unbiased look at whether Earth's favorable conditions for life prove that a loving God planned it that way all along. (Hint: There's no other explanation.) [3:45]
emjohnson | July 4, 2009Inspired by the nation's birthday, Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism has a few thoughts about the term "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as it appears in the Declaration of Independence:
That phrase provokes questions. Do the "Laws of Nature" depend on some religious belief in "Nature's God"? Does "Nature's God" suggest some kind of natural theology--some conception of the divine that is manifest in nature without need for revelation? Could "Nature's God" suggest a deistic notion of God as the uncaused cause of Nature? Or do we need a more biblical conception of God as a divine…