religion
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2008
In my recent talk on secularism, I declared that there will always be religion, and a secularist ought to get used to that fact. Secularists have assumed that a secular society will cause religion to wither away and die, but this seems to me a foolish thing to believe. Every society known has had a religion or six, and although, as PZ recently noted, some religion is on the decline and more people are declaring themselves to be non-religious (which is not the same has having no religious beliefs, by the way), this doesn't license the easy induction that religion is on the way out. These…
gregladen | October 23, 2008You will remember that Webster Cook is the young man who was involved in the first part of the Crackergate Event, the result of which involved two separate kinds of legalistic charges against him at his school, one by a more general disciplinary board, and the other by the student government (Webster was an elected school officer). The first one was thrown out, but the second was not, and Cook was impeached.
I have just received word that the impeachment was overturned last night. Details forthcoming.
UPDATE: There was a five hour long trial last night in front of the SGA Judiciary. Cook…
oracknows | October 22, 2008After posting about some openly racist McCain supporters from--sadly, as it is a state in which I lived for eight years and happened to like, by and large, particularly since it's the state where my wife hails from--Ohio, I hadn't planned on doing more posts like this. But a theme emerges, and I decided that this would make a good intermittent series: People with views that shouldn't still be prevalent in 2008, but are. For example:
The homosexual agenda wants people to think that homosexual men are safe for women to hang around and even be alone with. Nothing could be further from the truth…
pharyngula | October 22, 2008Great. It just gets more and more insane. It seems that while McCain's side knows how to do 'spiritual warfare', Obama has all the witches on his side.
Minutes ago I spoke with friend Dr. Norman G. Marvin, M.D. and he is so concerned at what he has learned about Barack Obama's family in Kenya that he is calling a special prayer meeting in his home to pray against the witchcraft curses attempted by them against John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Dr. Marvin sent me the below e-mail from Flo Ellers. Flo is credentialed with the International Fellowship of Ministries which is based in Washington…
gregladen | October 21, 2008... wait, wait, does this make any sense at all? Wouldn't the conservative Muslim clerics normally call for the gruesome execution of children who play video games because they involve the creation and manipulation of images of humans and animals? So Koranic lyrics in a background song ... that is just salt on the wounds, right? Here's the story from the BBC:
Copies of LittleBigPlanet are being recalled from shops worldwide after it emerged that a background music track contained two phrases from the Koran.
Sony issued an apology for any offence that its use of the backing track might have…
oracknows | October 21, 2008After having seen the worst, it's encouraging to see that it's not all bad:
Hat tip to Coturnix...
evolvingthoughts | October 20, 2008
So, as many of my readers and all of my friends know, I am a moral vacuum. I routinely brush those earnest young folk aside who seek my signature on their morally worthy petitions with that statement - they usually stand there blinking. I mean, what do you do? Run after the psychopath and try to reason with him? Just try it, young fellow...
Anyway, in a self-conscious attempt to make up for this, see below the fold.
Janet has done all Seed stablemates proud by attempting to get us to donate to DonorsChoose. Since it's an American thing, and I am not American, I have chosen to not get…
oracknows | October 20, 2008I couldn't help but shake my head in disbelief when I saw this:
It boggles the mind that in 2008 such views still exist. I lived in Ohio for eight years, and I had no idea. Of course, I did live in Cleveland...
gregladen | October 19, 2008And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it."
-Isaiah 35:8
So, I'm having dinner over at Lynn Fellman Studios with Lynn, Genie Scott of NCSE who is in town for a conference, and a variety of friends and colleagues including the recently decorated Randy Moore. And I bring up the idea that I 35 ... the main north-south interstate through the Twin Cities, the one with the recent bridge collapse, is seen by some crazy religious people as a special "god's…
evolvingthoughts | October 15, 2008
It occurred to me that some readers may be interested in the grant project, so I put the details beneath the fold. I am funded for an Australian Postdoctoral (APD) research fellowship for three years.
DP0984826 Dr JS Wilkins; Prof PE Griffiths
Approved Project Title: Contemporary scientific explanations of religion: A methodological and philosophical analysis
2009 : $ 87,195
2010 : $ 88,506
2011 : $ 88,446
Primary RFCD 4401 PHILOSOPHY
APD Dr JS Wilkins
Administering Organisation
The University of Sydney
Project Summary
The idea that religion is an evolved feature of…
jrosenhouse | October 15, 2008Damon Linker reviews Religulous for The New Republic.
Let's see, TNR is a left-leaning publication, so they will tend to be sympathetic to Maher's message. But they also fancy themselves very high-brow, which means they have to be turned off by Maher's in-your-face tactics.
The review practically writes itself. Let's start at the end:
Not only is this approach to religion intellectually fraudulent and morally sloppy--equating as it does scientifically literate believers with God-intoxicated scriptural literalists--but it is also asinine as a practical strategy. In the early 18th…
pharyngula | October 14, 2008Ignorance leads to evil: albinos are being butchered for their body parts in Burundi. Witch doctors are spreading the claim that their body parts are valuable in attracting gold, so stupid and greedy people are killing them and selling off bits and pieces.
Officials have gathered all the albinos in the country into a walled safehouse to protect them, which seems like a short term solution. I say since their number came up in the genetic lottery as cursed in Burundi, offer them asylum and bring them to Minnesota, where their paleness won't be at all exceptional.
Say…wasn't an African witch…
gregladen | October 12, 2008Do not delay. Do not equivocate. Do not think twice. Just get to the theater and buy your tickets, find a seat, turn off your cell phone, and sit back and enjoy Bill Maher's Religulous!
In this film, Maher makes a handful of critically important points. Like, if our world is led by people who are expecting, waiting for, even hoping for, The End Times (or some similar event) then ... well... then we are all deeply fucked. This is probably the main point, backed up by lot of other important points about religion.
The other objective of the film is to make fun of religion and religious…
gregladen | October 12, 2008I know a man who is best friends with Huey Newton. I know a woman to who took a class from a professor who is suspected of building a bomb used to blow up (part of) a building in the 1960s. I am closely related to a person who shall remain nameless who was under investigation by the FBI for blowing up (part of) a building during the 1960s. I am part of a group of people who broke some government property at a Viet Nam War protest. Details withheld. When I was a young child I sent a threatenting letter to President Richard Nixon. I was once an active member of what in those days passed…
gregladen | October 11, 2008A woman should not show BOTH of her eyes through her veil. This may encourage her to use eye make up. Two made up eyes peering out of the black veil is just too much to take.
A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye....
Sheikh Habadan, an ultra-conservative cleric who is said to have wide influence among religious Saudis, was answering questions on the Muslim satellite channel al-Majd.
I would like to know, just what was Habadan doing on the Television?!?!? The projection of his image is clearly, unequivocally…
gregladen | October 10, 2008Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.
The other thing that was strange was that the shark closely resembled Marty the Tank Cleaner, who recently left his job at the aquarium and has not been seen in a while.
Details.
pharyngula | October 10, 2008I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can't use them all — so here's a quick dump of a few items from the let's-laugh-at-religion file.
Yom Kippur is supposed to be such a solemn holiday in Israel that no one drives, no one works, no one eats, but apparently, there is no proscription against rioting. A non-Jewish man started his car (blasphemy!), which drove his Jewish neighbors insane with pious rage to the point that they ended up rampaging through the streets, requiring police force to end the violence. (via Obsessed with Reality)
A doll that babbles baby talk has Christians…