religion
tqa | August 11, 2008
The initial phase of the California Creationist Lawsuit is over, and quality education is the decisive winner. Kevin Vicklund has Judge Otero's decision, as well as a very nice analysis of the ruling up over at his blog. If you've been following the case closely, you can probably jump right over there for the details. If you haven't been tracking the events closely, or want a quick review of the case, keep reading. I'm going to go over the history first, then I'll talk a bit about what Friday's decision means, and what is likely to happen with the case in the future.
The lawsuit (ACSI v.…
pzminion | August 10, 2008Sastra here.
I'm about halfway through, and really enjoying, Robert Price's new book, Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today's Pop Mysticisms.
Bob Price has an interesting background: he started out as a roaring Pentacostal Minister, gradually grew into a high-end Christian theologian, and eventually evolved to his present form as secular humanist. He's currently teaching classes in comparative religion -- and also happens to be an expert on HP Lovecraft and science fiction. I think this wide-ranging perspective gives him a particular advantage when dealing with religious topics. He's been into…
gregladen | August 9, 2008Technically, Nisbet did not say that. He simply showed a picture of PZ Myers ... a rather funny picture of PZ that is not what I would call a glamor shot ... and made the statement paraphrased as the title of this post in reference to all atheists who have strong views and who are, well, not appeasers of religion.
I've been getting private emails from friends and colleagues asking me if I can talk to Nisbet .. and convey a message to him (I won't repeat the messages here). What I want you to understand is that just because I am a Sbling, etc., does not mean that I'm in touch with the guy.…
pzminion | August 8, 2008OK guys, LisaJ here again. This is going to be a quick one from me because I'm in the middle of hosting a BBQ, and I'm leaving all of the other helpers alone and feeling bad about it! From reading some of the replies to my earlier post I thought I should put up a quick post about the craziest and most horrific news story to hit Canada in quite some time.
I'm sure you've all heard of what happened to 22 year old Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus last week in Manitoba. If not, here's a quick overview. Tim was stabbed repeatedly in the neck and chest and then beheaded by a crazy fellow passenger…
pontiff | August 7, 2008Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer.
An email about a summer school in Australia:
Dear Colleagues
Please forgive us if you receive this multiple times...
We would like to circulate notice of the inaugural 2008 Asher Peres International Summer School in Physics
which will take place in Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbor, from 17-22 November 2008 in memory of Professor Asher Peres
The 2008 school is entitled: From Qubits to Black Holes
and is organised jointly between Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), and the Technion…
gregladen | August 6, 2008An employee of the Grant Memorial Church, of Winnipeg Canada, identified by the church's pastor as a quiet person who seemed perfectly normal, stabbed a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus fifty or sixty times, beheaded the passenger, and ate parts of his body, last Wednesday, as other passengers apparently sat helpless. The church custodian carried the head of the victim, whom he did not know, up and down the aisle of the bus, taunting police and passengers. He also saved some of the body parts in a plastic bag, presumably to eat later.
He is being evaluated for psychiatric abnormality…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
I get a lot of Google alerts about various things, including species concepts, obviously. I have noticed a pattern: media from the so-called "developed" or "first world" almost never put much in the way of actual facts or knowledge in their reports, concerned, I guess, that it will scare the consumers away. But the developing nations, in this case Bangladesh, will do so. They seem to value knowledge and science. Wonder why?
Here's a piece "The Importance of biodiversity", from The New Nation, a Bangladeshi independent newspaper:
Wetland ecosystems (swamps, marshes, etc.) absorb and…
terrasig | August 4, 2008It's a lovely crescent moon this evening up here in the Northern Hemisphere so I can't blame the latest unbelievable and irrational happenings on a full moon (which would be unscientific, of course). Okay, maybe sunspots?
First, the Bush administration was proposing draft legislation to grant medical professionals the right to withhold care, prescriptions, etc., based upon religious beliefs or other objections by reclassifying birth control pills and IUDs as "abortion." PalMD covered this among others, but reminded me of several of my old posts on my objections to pharmacists refusing to…
gregladen | August 1, 2008 Photograph of anthrax
Do you remember the Anthrax Scare? Envelopes with strange notes and mysterious white powder were showing up in various mailboxes. In many cases the white powder was "weaponized anthrax" ... anthrax (bacterial) spores processed in such a way to enhance the spread of the spores by air and infection via lung tissues.
A total of five people died in that incident, which occurred shortly after the September 11th attacks.
US Government Scientist Bruce Ivins had been under suspicion for a number of reasons, and on learning that prosecutes were about to charge him with…
evolvingthoughts | August 1, 2008
Every so often we start a discussion somewhere about who is and who isn't an atheist. PZ Mackers has the poster shown below up on his blog:
I want to look at the term and associated meanings of "atheist" and cognate terms, because the way I taxonomise the world, only two of those guys are possibly atheists. Sagan and Hemingway, maybe. I don't know much about them; but Jefferson, Franklin, Darwin were all deists; Lincoln a theist (though not an orthodox Christian), and also Clemens (unless that's Tom Selleck), and Einstein a "Spinozan theist".
Atheism has a number of conflicting…
jrosenhouse | July 31, 2008Karl Giberson offers up the usual cliches of the genre in in this essay for Salon. Those mean ol' atheists are trying to make a religion out of science, but savvy clear thinkers like him see the problems with that little project. Blah blah blah.
P.Z. has already spanked Giberson in this post. Nonetheless, there was one paragraph that really caught my eye:
In order for many of us to truly feel at home in the universe so grandly described by science, that science needs to coexist as peacefully as possible with the creation stories of our religious traditions. I share with Myers, Dawkins and…
gregladen | July 31, 2008A Goshen Family has identified an apparition of Banana Jeezus on their kitten. Here is a closeup:
Go HERE for a film of Banana Jeezus.
All Hail Banana Jeezus! All Hail Orac for Brinin' Us Dis Newz!
All Hail Ceelin' Kat!
We ask Ceelin' Kat, "Ceelin' Kat, whut 2-do about teh unbeleevers????"
Laik dis, ceelin' kat???
Whoa.....
oracknows | July 30, 2008
Sadly, I haven't seen any good pareidolia stories lately, you know, stories in which someone, usually Jesus, Mary, or the Pope (or sometimes Elvis, who, let's face it, is basically the same thing as Jesus, Mary, or the Pope), shows up as a seeming image on some sort of object or other. It can be a piece of sheet metal, a tree, under an expressway underpass, and even on a dog on his--well, best not to say.
Cats, of course, felt left out in this pareidolia arms race. Consequently, one cat decided it was time to take action, as CNN reports. That's right! It's the Jesus Cat (not to be confused…
terrasig | July 30, 2008Unlike the blogosphere and some unhinged stakeholders, I've been quietly watching the PZ Myers crackergate episode unfold. My concerns have been less theological than educational, primarily because I am the beneficiary of an arm of the University of Florida public higher education system.
I've been beating my head against the wall as to why the leadership and student government of the University of Central Florida in Orlando would be taking such drastic action against Webster Cook. Cook is the student who took a consecrated communion wafer uneaten from a Sunday 29 June Catholic service at…
evolvingthoughts | July 28, 2008
Those who are getting very agitated, missing out on their Usenet fix of the group talk.origins, which has been dormant for the past few days, should know that Steps Are Being Taken. Stop emailing me. I don't know any more than this... go take some other stimulant. Alcohol, chocolate, anything!
Oh, and on another subject, PZ is reported in the Inside Higher Ed website. Nothing new - that same old positions, ranging from crucifixion to "meh".
razib | July 28, 2008One of the problems with intellectual conversations is that they are generally restricted to intellectuals. By their nature intellectuals tend to value reflection and some semblance of comprehension and consistency. This is a "curved" scale; I'm not contending here that intellectuals really attain a very high absolute level of analytic clarity or coherency, but, the process itself tends result in a minimal baseline of plausibility to a propositional sequence.
I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the problem with attempting to understand human cognition as a sequence of inferences…
mikethemadbiologist | July 27, 2008I recommend Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. In it, she describes one of the most devastating forces to hit modern fundamentalism (yes, that's oxymoronic)...
Alcoholics Anonymous. Consider:
The single best time to convert an adult has always been when he's down and out. He hits bottom; God steps in. Any of "the big D's" will do it. It might be drink, it might be drugs, it might be divorce, it might be death, it might be disaster. A sinner riding high is not looking for Jesus. He's got to be knocked down so hard that he knows he can't get up on his own.
For about…
pharyngula | July 26, 2008I guess that since the Catholic League was unable to fire up a stake in Minnesota, they're going to push for some success in Florida. Webster Cook has been impeached, and now look at this: his friend Benjamin Collard who was there but not involved in the heinous crime of not eating a cracker is being harassed by UCF.
"I tried to look at my class schedule," Collard said. "There was a hold placed on my account that I couldn't sign up for classes. I went to the office of Student conduct to see what was going on and they told me Catholic Campus Ministries filed charges against me."
Collard…
gregladen | July 25, 2008It appears that the Chancellor of the University of Minnesota, Morris put out a statement today regarding PZ Myers' recent activity in relation to the cracker/eucharist. This led to coverage in the Star Tribune where you can, if you like, leave a comment. The story:
Morris chancellor defends instructor who defiled Eucharist, tore Qur'an
The chancellor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, is standing up for a faculty member's freedom of expression after the instructor posted on the Internet a photo of a defiled communion wafer with pages ripped from the Qur'an.
Paul Z. Myers, who teaches…