religion
nisbetmc | May 13, 2009Yesterday I focused on the need for "cross-talk" on matters of science policy, highlighting for example the importance of a middle ground perspective on science and religion. It had escaped my eye, but at the Washington Post on Sunday, columnist Kathleen Parker apparently is thinking along similar lines, spotlighting a recent "Candle in the Dark" initiative from Francis Collins.
I don't normally agree with Parker, yet I continue to read her and respectively assess her ideas. For example, I think in the past she hasn't given the Obama administration enough credit for incorporating a range of…
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2009In keeping with the last post on humanities, I thought I'd ruminate with no effort or knowledge to back it up on what the term "secular" means.
If the fundamentalists are to be believed, it is a synonym of "humanist" and also "Satanist", "infidel" and "homosexual". But somewhat more seriously, I have seen it used in journals to mean those who are not religious, those who aim to the elimination of religion, and those who seek to exclude religion from the affairs of the political institutions. None of these are exactly right, as far as I can tell.
In Australia it seems to be a term used largely…
pharyngula | May 13, 2009Look, this page on prayer has numbers on it! You can't argue with that.
I wonder if you can pick up a "Divine Consciousness meter" at Radio Shack, and what the units it is measured in are.
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009Matt Taibbi opens a can of whoop-ass on the hapless tag team of Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton. I discussed the same essay in this post. Taibbi writes:
The whole premise recalls Woody Allen's famous syllogism: "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates." And...well, I'm not going to get into this too much, because taking an axe to some soggy old Catholic academic is beginning to feel wrong somehow. But something tells me we're going to be hearing more of this rhetoric, if for no other reason that whenever money gets tight and the times get nervous even…
jrosenhouse | May 12, 2009The evolution blogosphere has lately been abuzz over the question of compatibility between science and religion. Jerry Coyne got the ball rolling with this post, criticizing the accommodationist views of the National Center for Science Education. He writes:
Here I argue that the accommodationist position of the National Academy of Sciences, and especially that of the National Center for Science Education, is a self-defeating tactic, compromising the very science they aspire to defend. By seeking union with religious people, and emphasizing that there is no genuine conflict between faith…
pharyngula | May 12, 2009I have a…errm…reputation for offending Catholics. It's undeserved, since I try so hard to offend everyone, but also because some Catholics are too easily offended. Can you spot the unforgivable offense the writer is complaining about in this story?
Your April 27 front page had an article, "World government race to contain swine flu outbreak." The article was from the Associated Press.
A picture of a priest distributing the Eucharist had a caption, "Catholics who entered a closed door Mass line up for a communion wafer Sunday at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City."
That one line drove…
oracknows | May 12, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who, with the support of his parents, has refused conventional therapy for his cancer, which would normally consist of chemotherapy and radiation. Given his stage and type of tumor, he could normally expect at least an 85% chance of surviving and perhaps even greater than 90%, wherea without therapy he is certain to die of his disease, barring a rare spontaneous remission. The reason given by his Daniel and his mother Colleen is that they belong to a highly dubious-sounding American Indian religion called…
pharyngula | May 11, 2009Baseball. Baseball and god. What could be more important? An now a couple of baseball players are in a snit.
The Cliff Notes version: After hitting a homer off Wilson in the 12th inning of the Giants' 7-5 13-inning victory, Blake was seen on television making the same well known gesture that Wilson makes after every save in tribute to both his Christian faith and his late father.Â
By the time Wilson returned to the clubhouse after securing the win in the 13th, some friends had sent images of Blake to his cell phone, sending him into an agitated state that his teammates instantly had to calm…
jrosenhouse | May 11, 2009They make creationists sad:
Driving home from church recently, I spotted one of two new billboards sponsored by a local coalition of atheists. “Don't believe in God? You are not alone” was their message, an attempt, the group declares, to let the city know that good people in Dallas, like atheists, don't need God. I'm sad to see the ads go up in my city, but not really surprised. The drift away from conservatism in religion, and in politics, is much more obvious in our nation today.
pharyngula | May 11, 2009Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well.
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit…
oracknows | May 10, 2009Regular readers here know that I really hate to see stories like the one I'm about to discuss, specifically that of 13-year-old Daniel Hauser, a boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who is refusing chemotherapy based on religion and his preference for "alternative" therapy, whose parents are also supporting his decision.
Since I'm a bit behind on this story, its having percolated through the blogosphere for the last three or four days, let me start with a bit of context. If there is one theme that I've emphasized time and time again here, it's science- and evidence-based medicine. That means…
grrlscientist | May 10, 2009tags: religion, humor, edward current, streaming video
Do you really believe that precious life comes from disgusting body fluids? The Truth is, babies are brought into the world by a pure white angel, the Stork. [3:06]
pharyngula | May 9, 2009Hodgkin lymphoma is one of the more curable forms of cancer — the 5 year survival rates for patients who are middle-aged or younger is over 90%, and for kids, it is over 95%. These results assume, of course, that the cancer patient is actually treated with modern medicine — neglect that, and all bets are off. You're almost certainly going to die of it.
Daniel Hauser is a 13 year old victim of Hodgkin lymphoma here in Minnesota. Doctors give him a 5% chance of surviving the disease, not because he has some particularly lethal form of the cancer, but because his mother is a religious fruitcake…
pharyngula | May 9, 2009Some of these cults are stocked with puritan prudes. Baptists, in particular, are a bit nuts.
A student at a fundamentalist Baptist school that forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing will be suspended if he takes his girlfriend to her public high school prom, his principal said.
The student is named Tyler Frost, not Kevin Bacon, by the way.
You want to dance, dance. You want to sing, sing. The two of you want to kiss, kiss. I think those are all beautiful acts, and as long as no one is harmed, it is ridiculous to forbid them.
I also think the school has stepped way out of…
evolvingthoughts | May 8, 2009There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD says that is exactly what it shows.
The paper purports to show that when thinking about God or beliefs about God, the very same areas of the brain are used that are used in ordinary social interactions and so on:
The MDS results confirmed the validity of the proposed psychological structure of…
jrosenhouse | May 6, 2009That's Michael Coulter, production editor for The Sunday Age. Commenter mrcreosote left a link to a magnificent essay by Coulter in in my post of two days ago. It's so good I felt it deserved a post of its own. Let's have a look.
MOST weeks I read The Sunday Age's Faith column, out of professional duty. Most weeks I am left perplexed, unable to reconcile what I am reading with anything I see around me.
What I see is a world slowly tearing itself apart for the sake of one faith or another. A world where an extreme faction of Islam wishes to put me and mine to the sword for my unbelief, and…
gregladen | May 6, 2009It's just too much of a leap! But don't worry, Texas Educators have it under control.
I love the way she says Jump, like with two syllables. Good thing the slack jawed yokels are in charge down in Texas. We would not really want Texans to stop being as stoopid as they'all are, they would not be as cute!!!!
evolvingthoughts | May 6, 2009My union is calling a strike next Tuesday. I'm not sure what to do. I don't teach, and have no administrative duties, so should I stop thinking from for 8 hours? I'm not sure the administration would notice...
Rob Skipper at hpb etc. has a series of podcasts from the series of lectures on Darwiniana that were held there recently. They include John Beatty, Roberta Millstein and Ken Waters, all serious folk in philosophy of biology (although Roberta, at least, is not serious all the time). From the sublime to the faintly absurd, you can also see my talk in Lisbon, one of them, anyway, at…
gregladen | May 6, 2009According to Texas Education Expert!
She knows because she looked at some web sites!!!!!!!!! Holy Crap!!!!
pharyngula | May 6, 2009Look at what's happening to the opinion on religion in our country:
Historically, the percentage of Americans who said they had no religious affiliation (pollsters refer to this group as the "nones") has been very small -- hovering between 5 percent and 10 percent.
However, Putnam says the percentage of "nones" has now skyrocketed to between 30 percent and 40 percent among younger Americans.
Putnam calls this a "stunning development." He gave reporters a first glimpse of his data Tuesday at a conference on religion organized by the Pew Forum on Faith in Public Life.
It's a poll, so it…