religion
oracknows | January 17, 2009Everyone agrees that it was an amazing demonstration of pilot skill, combined with the rapid response of a large number of people, that allowed all 155 passengers and crew members of a U. S. Airways flight that hit a flock of birds to do a controlled crash into the Hudson River to survive and be rescued from the icy waters. Many are calling it a miracle, even though, more than anything else, it was the skill of a seasoned pilot that salvaged life from death.
So where was God in all this? Why did he allow the flight to hit a bunch of birds, which disabled both of its engines?
Apparently God…
razib | January 16, 2009I have a big round up of various responses to my posts on Judeo-Christianity at Secular Right. Ross Douthat responds:
Indeed, the only real problem with the term for his purposes may be that it isn't intellectually lazy enough - that it doesn't create an umbrella big enough for liberal-Protestantized Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists to huddle under as well. And reading his post again, maybe that's what he's getting at: That we need Christians and Jews to "retain their distinctiveness in at least a notional sense," as he puts it, in order to make other faiths feel comfortable joining the…
pharyngula | January 16, 2009One of the older arguments against god is that there seems to be some limitations on the kinds of miracles he'll do, especially healing miracles. Faith healers can make some little old lady's pain go away, briefly, maybe, but the big one doesn't work: why won't god heal amputees? That would be a vivid miracle!
I would have said that no magical regeneration of human body parts has ever occurred, but someone has pseudonymously claimed otherwise on the Minnesota Atheists forum.
There is MEDICAL PROOF and DOCUMENTATION that proves GOD HEALS AMPUTEES.
If anyone so desires, I WILL FURNISH THIS…
pharyngula | January 16, 2009 Mr Ron Heather, Unprofessional Bus Driver and Pompous Faith-Head, has decided to become briefly famous for his stupidity by refusing to do his job and drive a bus with advertising on it.
Mr Heather told BBC Radio Solent: "I was just about to board and there it was staring me in the face, my first reaction was shock horror.
"I felt that I could not drive that bus, I told my managers and they said they haven't got another one and I thought I better go home, so I did.
"I think it was the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God."
Apparently, passing an intelligence test is not…
sb admin | January 16, 2009
As some sharp-eyed reader may have already spotted, the SciencePunk blog has relocated to the Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs. Let's take a moment to absorb these new surroundings.
OK, done? Those of you who have already run back to check sciencepunk.com will find it too has changed substantially. Drama abounds!
From today, the whole SciencePunk caboodle is getting cranked up a notch. Wave goodbye to the version 5 we all knew and loved, and say hello to version 6. (Ah, you always wondered what that stray /v5 signified, didn't you? Why not check out v4? Web 1.0-tastic!) The site has…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2009Larry Moran points us to the following video on what science is and why pseudoscience is not to be taught or accepted without serious evidence (which makes it science). My only comment to add is that emotional appeals are information and evidence, but they are information and evidence about the speaker, and not about the things that are being spoken of.
There are a number of people trying to give short definitions of science on the blogs right now (see here). I have a one line definition that I think captures everything I want it to, and nothing else:
Science is the process of saying as much…
pharyngula | January 15, 2009Details of some high-level Catholic tribunal and how it handles the most grievous sins have been revealed. In a very strange overview, we learn that murder and genocide, while truly horrible crimes, can be handled by lower members of the hierarchy. There are a few that only this tribunal and the Pope are qualified to cope with. They are briefly listed: trying to assassinate the Pope, a priest spilling the beans about what is said in the confessional, priests having sex, and abortionists becoming priest. But there is one other crime, which the article dwells on:
Defiling the Eucharist, which…
razib | January 14, 2009Ross Douthat (also, James Poulos) makes an intelligent, well-informed defense of the term using the general framework that I began with (as opposed to some people who simply insist on digressing immediately to forward their own position). There are also intelligent comments below. Instead of responding in a point-by-point fashion to Ross's rejoinder in this post, I'll just elaborate in the comments here and below. Rather, I want to tack to a different issue. My main concern as an atheist who lives in a progressively more religiously pluralist society characterized by liberal democratic…
evolvingthoughts | January 14, 2009Chris Nedin at Ediacaran has a nice discussion of the metaphor of the adaptive landscape, "Climbing Pit Improbable". It should be noted that the genetic notion of adaptive peaks is exactly the same thing as the AI notion of gradient descent learning., which inverts the "landscape" the way Chris describes.
The philosopher responsible for initiating the "deep ecology" movement, Arne Naess, has died at the age of 96. Maybe there is something to this exercise thing.
John Whitfield, at Blogging the Origin, is, well, blogging his way through the Origin. Chapter 1 is here. Comments by various folk…
razib | January 13, 2009One of my more quixotic quests has been to dispute the use of the term "Judeo-Christian" in normal conversation. Many people who use the term do so without much forethought, it's just one of the definitions you use to point to the bracketing of the two traditional religions of Western civilization. In our modern context where there are great tensions between the world of Islam and the West it also alludes to a cleavage between the Abrahamic faiths where Islam is painted as the outgroup.
My own contention is that the term misleads, and emerged out of an attempt to acknowledge the rise of…
terrasig | January 13, 2009I just started receiving a bunch of Google referral hits from readers searching for a story about the US Federal Trade Commission apparently taking regulatory action against a church that is selling supplements claimed to exhibit anti-cancer activities.
The article in question, "Tyrannical FTC Threatens Christian Church with Imprisonment for Selling Dietary Supplements," was written by a gentleman named Mike Adams, an editor at NaturalNews.com. I'm not exactly certain at this point what the specific FTC actions are today since the article is rife with rantings and rhetoric:
The FTC has…
jrosenhouse | January 13, 2009We militant atheist types often wonder, with exasperation, how people manage to persuade themselves of God's existence. Former conservative MSNBC pundit Tucker Carlson gives us his answer:
Yet for Carlson, who was baptized as an Episcopalian but didn't attend church growing up, the question of God's existence was settled with two words.
As a high school junior, Carlson was reading, “Wishful Thinking,” a book by author and minister Frederick Buechner, when he said he heard a voice.
“I was reading this book and all of a sudden, God just spoke out loud to me, in my room, totally randomly, out…
gregladen | January 12, 2009Homeschool Showcase (Formerly The Carnival of Cool Homeschoolers) #15 is up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. I've got an item listed in the carnival, which is typical (I often send potentially useful science content material to the homeschooling carnivals.)
While you're studying Earth science, you may want to check out Nature's Evolutionary Gems posted by Greg Laden at Greg Laden's Blog. It's up to you whether you use it to teach evolution as fact or as a teachable moment as you discuss God's creation. I know how we'll be using it. ;-)
Wink wink indeed!
evolvingthoughts | January 12, 2009Truism 4: There is most likely no God - if all gods but one are rejected with good reason, then by induction so should the final god.
Corollary: There are no independent reasons to think there is a god
Corollary: If there is a god, no-one can know that for a fact
Discuss
pharyngula | January 11, 2009I've been hiding from the horrible news in the Middle East, but this story induced me to poke my head out of my tortoise shell…so I can puke. A rabbi consulted his holy books to see what God had to say about the vicious violence going on right now, and you can guess what God's word might be:
Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.
Of course. Did we expect anything else? No moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of…
razib | January 8, 2009One of the more interesting an robust survey datum in the United States is the low opinion of atheists, and, the finding that atheists are less popular than Mormons or Muslims or Homosexuals when it come to a vote for high office. Secular Right points out that the Inductivist has posted data from The World Values Survey on this question in an international context. I doubt people will be too surprised, but, I recommend you check out the Inductivist for the full list. Below the fold I've taken the data on that particular question, and compared it to the % of atheists, agnostics an non-…
pharyngula | January 7, 2009The Indianapolis Star has been running a pointless little prayer on page A2 of the newspaper for years. Not any more; the editor has decided to discontinue it. It isn't because it has suddenly become a mouthpiece for militant atheism, though:
We appreciate that this has been a long tradition in The Star. But we are re-evaluating our mission and all that we do. I believe that prayer is a very personal thing and that offering prayers is something for individuals and their churches. We are a newspaper, not a church.
Also, we do live in a society in which there are many, many different beliefs.…
pharyngula | January 6, 2009The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is angry.
It is time for the Christian bashing to stop and for Christians to no longer be treated like second-class citizens.
Second-class citizens who are virtually the only people who can get elected to political office, who whine piteously if anyone fails to kneel before their sacraments, who also claim that this is a Christian nation, who use their faith to justify war, corruption, oppression, greed, and who use their privileged position to deny non-Christians basic rights. Yeah, right. They're a gang of hypocritical thugs with a persecution…
evolvingthoughts | January 4, 2009Well, he admits that it was a theist diatribe from the beginning, and not the even handed interaction between science and faith doco he told Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers among others. Always nice to find out that those who assert that only with faith in God can we have morals behave as if morals were an optional extra. Not surprising, but there it is. You can lie for your religion, to nonbelievers who do happen to behave morally and ethically.