religion
gregladen | November 18, 2008... and verily, got their asses totally smitten.
But they will never lean, will they! Nice pictures of the Flalse Idol of Wall Street at Holocene Hominid
gregladen | November 17, 2008...over 900 people died in one event. One religious event. Happy Anniversary Jonestown Massacre.
That event was when the word "cult" became absolutely, concretely reified to distinguish between 'mainstream' religion and non-socially accepted religion (though that distinction is often made post hoc) in newsrooms, and the association of death ... usually suicide ... with religious 'cults' was underscored in spades. (The term 'cult' has been used in a similar way, is of course, for over a century.)
In my view, it is not entirely clear what the difference is between something like Jone's cult…
gregladen | November 17, 2008Or, so says Drew Sandlin, in a letter to Oklahoma Christian University's student newspaper, ironically named Talon.
When I was a kid, I had an uncle who was a Franciscan Priest. I come from a long line of priests and nuns, mostly Franciscan. That's why I'm good with animals. Anyway, I liked this Uncle because he lived in foreign lands, fished, was a ham (I was a budding ham myself) and he was kind of exotic, being a priest and all.
Someday, I thought, I'd be a priest too. But I also had other interests, and some times there was a conflict....
One day I made mention of the fact that we…
grrlscientist | November 16, 2008tags: gawd is hate, grrlscientist with beaker of evil, humor, reader response
Secret Underground Laboratory, New York, NY 10024.
Image: Homeland Security Photo of GrrlScientist with Beaker of Evil.
God inspired a reader of mine to write a message to me in response to my godless spoutings. My reader, being a blog writer, posted it to his blog (much like the disciples did when gawd inspired them to write stuff -- no doubt only after they'd all sparked up a doobie and sat back on the couch with a bag of Doritos and quill-and-ink and a piece of parchment). This piece is one letter that will…
evolvingthoughts | November 16, 2008
We had a little storm here yesterday. It left my brother's flat wet inside and out, destroying their mattresses, and giving my motorcycle a jet blast clean. It's clean for the first time since I bought it four years ago. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, very scared. Two minutes before I arrived at my brother's place, I was on the road on my bike. Then this happened. Hailstones the size of a small orange, winds up to 130km/h (and I am sure that was what I saw when I took this pic), tree branches down and water just pouring into the flat.
Anyway, that to one side, here are some…
pharyngula | November 16, 2008It isn't so good for a fellow's sanity to get the full dose of my inbox all at once, rather than spread out over four days. I got my mail working again a little while ago, and just browsed through some of the crazy stuff you people send me. Be amused.
A priest dared to ordain women. He's getting a reward, though: he's being excommunicated.
A priest denies communion to Obama supporters. He's intrinsically evil.
I have to give the Pastor Ray Mummert award to the Bishop of Lancaster, who has declared that the problem with the church is all those darned educated people who aren't attending…
gregladen | November 15, 2008 The priest at St. Mary's Catholic Church in downtown Greenville has told parishioners that those who voted for Barack Obama placed themselves under divine judgment because of his stance on abortion and shouldn't receive Holy Communion until they've done penance.
The Rev. Jay Scott Newman told The Greenville News on Wednesday that church teaching doesn't allow him to refuse Holy Communion to anyone based on political choices, but that he'll continue to deliver the church's strong teaching on the "intrinsic and grave evil of abortion" as a hidden form of murder.
source
So, anyone from the IRS…
gregladen | November 15, 2008Atheists are smarter than Calvinists in Dutch Study. But, the Calvinists are quicker at identifying small shapes than the Atheists.
Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of religious background on attention. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and controlled for race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual…
gregladen | November 14, 2008... which should not be a huge surprise. Here are a few quotes from the recently published ... then hastily removed ... column of Cynthia Dunbar, who is a member of the Texas State Board of Education. Yes, she's one of the creationists:
Can we truly even imagine an America under an Obama Administration? I sincerely believe that an Obama Administration would ultimately mean one thing...the end of America as we know her.... [some babbling about Obama not really being a citizen] ...
I perceive it [terrorist attack on U.S. soil in first six months of Obama Presidency] will be a planned effort…
jrosenhouse | November 14, 2008Remember that big apologetics conference in North Carolina to which I made jeering reference a while back? Well, I didn't go.
Happily, Timothy Yedder did, and to judge from his account it doesn't sound like I missed anything:
We arrived to a scene of total chaos, scores of people trying to park and find their way into the monstrosity that is the church. We waited in a 'line' which was actually just a room full of people facing all directions, and we registered. We were given a wristband (the thought of anyone trying to sneak into this thing made me laugh openly), a bag full of glossy…
gregladen | November 14, 2008"I may not have won your vote," Obama said, "but I hear your voices, need your help, and I will be your president, too."
But the promise meant little to leaders of the religious right, who are undaunted by the Democrats' gains in the White House and in Congress.
"I knew, moments after the election results came in, that I was now part of the resistance movement," says Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.
npr
Sore losers.
oracknows | November 13, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about the sad case of Motl Brody, a 12-year-old Orthodox Jew whose brain tumor had rendered him brain dead and whose parents are fighting the efforts of the hospital to disconnect him from the ventilator and to stop all the powerful cardiac drugs that are keeping his heart beating and his blood pressure high enough because their religion tells them that death is defined by cessation of heartbeat and breathing. They do not accept the concept of brain death, even though they do accept that their child will never recover.
Yale neurologist and all-around skeptical guru Steve…
pharyngula | November 13, 2008The TED folks are sponsoring a disturbingly vacuous call for a Charter for Compassion, which they claim is an attempt to rescue religion from an aberrant fundamentalism by emphasizing the goodness of faith. I don't see it. What I see is a foolish whitewashing of religious history to claim that it is all about tolerance, when it's the opposite: it's all about tribalism. Instead of opening minds to the wonders of the world, it's all about clamping down on the human mind and imposing the strictures of dogma. It's all very nice to sit around and dream up a religion that's all beauty and sweetness…
oracknows | November 12, 2008I realize that the title of this post might sound as though I'm equating brain death and fundamentalist religion. As tempting as it is sometimes to do so, I'm not. What I'm more interested in is a story I came across by way of ScienceBlogs Big Kahuna blogger P.Z. Myers last night, mainly because it brings up some serious ethical issues, aside from any religious issues. P.Z. tackled the story as he usually does tackle stories involving religion, with all the subtlety of a jack hammer in a glass factory.
I'm not saying that I'll necessarily be subtle, but I do have some actual, hands-on…
gregladen | November 12, 2008 The name of Allah is written in this eggplant. (source) ... in Western Europe.
Currently, strange shaped veggies ... carrots that look like human sex organs, potatoes that look like Mr. Potato head wearing glasses, and of course, rutabagas in the shape of the Virgin Mother Mary cannot be legally sold in Western Europe. That regulation is about to be lifted.
Currently, for instance,
Class I cucumbers must "be reasonably well shaped and practically straight (maximum height of the arc: 10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber)". Class II "slightly crooked cucumbers may have a maximum…
pharyngula | November 11, 2008Twelve year old Motl Brody has died. A tumor destroyed his brain, and the consequences are unambiguous.
Unlike Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan, who became the subjects of right-to-die battles when they suffered brain damage and became unconscious, Motl's condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.
His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to…
oracknows | November 11, 2008Since I've been on the topic of the Holocaust again today in giving a victim of the Hitler Zombie a well and truly deserved taste of not-so-Respectful Insolence, before I get back to medicine and science tomorrow I can't help but note that it's been brought to my attention that a brand, spankin' new Jack Chick tract has made an appearance to darken the Internet for critical thinkers and skeptics everywhere. Heck, Chick's fundamentalist religious craziness is so toxic that rational believers (and even many not-so-rational believers) undergo a wave of neuronal apoptosis any time he appears.…
gregladen | November 10, 2008God Poll: This looks like a nice AJAX application that happens to ask some interesting questions. I'm showing it to you because of the technology, not because of the content. Not to encourage you to crash a poll or anything. Just because PZ does that.
gregladen | November 10, 2008
Ricci's mug shot " Jonathan Ricci [of] Florida ... was arrested Saturday morning after he allegedly tried to steal "a handful of communion wafers" from a priest at a Catholic church in Jensen Beach. Ricci, 33, sought to swipe 15 wafers valued at $1 .. 9 AM, Ricci accepted a wafer on the Communion line, but "walked away without taking the communion into his mouth." After refusing a priest's requests to "accept" the wafer, Ricci "turned to the priest and grabbed a handful of the wafers from the plate and attempted to leave" ... "Due to the religious significance of the holy…
pharyngula | November 9, 2008The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they insist on being called, has earned another reason to be regarded with a sneer of contempt: they sent a letter to all of their churches in California urging their adherents to vote for Proposition 8. It's bizarre that a religion known for being out of step with the rest of the country on the issue of marriage, a place populated with polygamists and young girls treated as chattel and coaxed into child marriages, now wants to "preserve the sacred institution of marriage". They sunk tens of millions of dollars into the campaign.…