religion
pharyngula | December 2, 2008Sometimes the Christian death cult really creeps me out. There is a museum exhibit called Celebrating the Lives and Deaths of the Popes that seems to be particularly heavy on the "death" part. It's got exhibits to give you the "true sense of attending a Pope's funeral", replicas of the geegaws dead popes are dressed up in, and crypt and coffin reproductions. All very morbid and intensely repulsive — do good Catholics actually savor the rituals wrapped around the corpses of their popes?
gregladen | December 2, 2008A new paper by Kevin Padian of UC Berkeley is just out in Comptes Rendus Biologies, a French peer reviewed journal, on American creationism.
Padian summarizes the history of creationism in the US. From the abstract:
The history of anti-evolutionism in the United States begins only in the early decades of the 20th century but has evolved considerably since then. Various versions of the movement ("equal time" for creationism, "creation science", "intelligent design") have developed over time, but they have made few positive contributions to serious discourse about science and religion. Their…
evolvingthoughts | December 2, 2008
The only problem with Queensland, apart from the occasional severe storm, is that they filled it with Queenslanders. Here's a bunch of northern bigots protesting a Muslim school being built on the Gold Coast "because they won't integrate" with Australian society by being, I don't know, Christian or something.
Resident's spokesman Tony Doherty said Muslim schools did not encourage multiculturalism.
"It's segregation, not integration," he said.
"They're not trying to integrate into the rest of society.
"Since we have started protesting against this our churches have been covered in hate-…
gregladen | December 1, 2008Do you remember the Moral Master 2.0? Well, you may have noticed that the training video gave you the first and last of the Fundemental List of Moral Question, but not the ones in the middle.
This is because it was assumed, correctly I'm sure, that we are a culture of immediate gratification and rapid MTV style entertainment and would not sit through the whole thing.
But, there were complaints. So the middle ... the additioanl questions ... are now available as part of the Moral Master 2.0 Add-On Pack. Here:
Hat Tip Javier
pharyngula | November 30, 2008The conventional wisdom is that it was Vladimir Lenin, but officers in our military have access to secret knowledge, thanks to Rick Warren: it was actually Charles Darwin. We learn this from one of those ghastly power point presentations the military churns up, this one from Air Force Chaplain Christian Biscotti, who argues that the way to prevent suicide is to throw away the facts. At least, that's the impression I get from the twisted history he serves up to justify his thesis, that Warren's vacuous little book provides the way to make troops combat ready. It might even be true, if turning…
mikethemadbiologist | November 30, 2008While this letter I found at AmericaBlog.com deals with religiously-motivated intolerance towards gays and lesbians, I think it's going to be germane (at least tangentially so) to the current stem cell discussion over at What's New in Life Science:
We as a group have become tolerant of intolerance.
Whenever anyone justifies their bigotry with what I call DHRB (deeply held religious beliefs) we roll over as if that were the end of the discussion.
We have confused respecting a persons right to hold whatever religious beliefs they chose with respecting those beliefs. The truth is there are…
pharyngula | November 29, 2008A Catholic abbot is accusing Disney of corrupting children. It's not because they are transmitting bad ideas, but that they are all tied to Disney's corporate motives.
While he acknowledges that Disney stories carry messages showing good triumphing over evil, he argues this is part of a ploy to persuade people that they should buy Disney products in order to be "a good and happy family".
He cites films such as Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians that feature moral battles, but get into children's imaginations and make them greedy for the merchandise that goes with them.
Now I can sympathize…
tqa | November 29, 2008
(another own goal, of course.)
There he goes again. Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's latest post over at the Discovery Institute's Why's Everybody Always Picking On Me blog may have actually reached a new standard for missing the point. And, as both my loyal regular readers know, that's not an easy mark for Egnor to hit.
The current contender is his latest post in a back-and-forth that he's been having with PZ and Orac. Once again, Egnor is attempting to argue that evolutionary biology has not provided any useful insights to the field of medicine. That much is familiar ground.…
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
... to his doctors. Here.
Late Note: Ronan in the comments points out this was in 2006. I think I was sleeping that year...
pharyngula | November 26, 2008Americans United has put up a story of religious discrimination from its files. Two women had a little problem with institutionalized religiosity in an Oklahoma public school district.
In 1981, Bell had just moved to Little Axe and enrolled her children in the local public school system. At that time, school officials were allowing a teacher-sponsored student group called the Son Shine Club to gather before school to pray.
Though the fundamentalist Baptist meetings were supposedly voluntary, the school buses dropped students off 30 minutes before classes started. Those who were not…
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
pharyngula | November 25, 2008The US 6th Circut Court has just handed down a big decision: victims of abuse can sue the Vatican, and the Catholic church can be held liable for other claims against them as well. Ouch. Bleed 'em dry, I say.
gregladen | November 24, 2008Season's greetings from the secular side
by
August Berkshire
Minnesota Atheists
'Tis the season. With winter coming, some members of the religious right have begun bracing themselves for the so-called annual atheists' "war on Christmas." While we think that the government and public schools should remain neutral when it comes to religious celebrations, we have no interest in depriving anyone of whatever private celebrations they wish to conduct.
Nevertheless, in case you were wondering, here are the plans some of us have for December....
Read the rest here.
gregladen | November 24, 2008And on behalf of John Lennon, I say: "Kiss my ass, Vatican..."
(Though I'm sure John would not have said exactly that.)
A Vatican newspaper has forgiven the late English singer John Lennon for saying four decades ago that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
In an article praising The Beatles, L'Osservatore Romano said Lennon had just been showing off.
Lennon told a British newspaper in 1966 - at the height of Beatlemania - that he did not know which would die out first, Christianity or rock and roll.
At the time, the comparison sparked controversy in the US.
... which then led to the…
gregladen | November 23, 2008PZ Thinks this is for real:
I'm not so sure. What do you think? (Click on Fidel to visit the site. If you dare.)
pharyngula | November 22, 2008Since a Wall Street Journal editorialist has denounced secularism as the source of all of society's ills, it's only fair to get another opinion. Like, say, of a social scientist who has actually done a comparative study of different nations, looking for correlations between religiosity and superior moral values or stability or whatever. Surely, faith-based societies will have some virtues, won't they?
Uh-oh. The results don't look good for believers.
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD…
gregladen | November 19, 2008One of the most amazing scenes in Bill Maher's Religulous is the scene from The Holy Land Experience, which is like Disney Land, but instead of fictional characters that are sometimes charming sometimes scary and that everybody goes nuts over, it's got ... well, fictional characters that are sometimes charming sometimes scary and that everybody goes nuts over. Maher interviews Jesus Christ, Son of God. Then, they show some film of Jesus being crucified and shit. Fine. But the strangest thing is the audience. They are in a theme park, there is an actor playing Jesus, and a bunch of actors…
gregladen | November 18, 2008It started out as a church. Then the children were taken away because, according to authorities, they were being held in some sort of hareem of young girls for the church leader's pleasure. Now, they will probably start calling it a 'cult.' But it isn't. It's just a church.
State officials on Tuesday took into protective custody 21 children associated with an evangelical group whose founder faces federal child sex charges.
The children, all younger than 18 and part of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries, were taken while custody hearings were being held for six girls seized during a…
pharyngula | November 18, 2008Getting in on the collectable card game fad, the New Humanist has published a set of religion cards. Here's a familiar one:
Here we are:
Unfortunately, while they have all those stats on the cards, they haven't given us any rules! I don't know how to play the game, other than to mix all the cards together in a bag, and set fire to them. At least that has some real-world verisimilitude to it.