religion
jrosenhouse | July 11, 2008As I was mulling over what I wanted to say about the PZ Myers / William Donohue kerfuffle, I came across this post (via Bora) by Jeff Fecke, that said perfectly exactly what I was thinking. Go read it.
The basic story line here is that Webster Cook, a student at the University of Central Florida, accepted communion at a Catholic mass. Rather than eat the wafer, he removed it, unconsumed, from the Church. This is a rather serious breach of etiquette, seeing as how the consecrated wafer is said to be a portion of the body of Jesus Christ. Cook's motives for doing this are unclear.
Mentally…
tqa | July 11, 2008
Over the last couple of days, I've considered posting something on the controversy that's been sparked by PZ Myers' comments about the eucharist, and the reaction of Bill Donohue and the Catholic League to those comments. I've been putting it off because it's not an easy post for me to write. The entire incident has suffered from a lack of heroes. Instead, it's been a case where someone has behaved badly, but someone else has behaved worse.
I've interacted with Paul Myers on various internet forums for at least a decade now. In that time, he's done many things that I respect, and a few…
evolvingthoughts | July 11, 2008
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society?
These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing of a communion wafer from a Catholic church. As a result, he got death threats, attempts to have him fired from his university position, and general abuse while the correspondents were simultaneously affirming the niceness of Catholics [see here, here and here for example]. Meanwhile, the Catholic Cardinal of Sydney, George Pell, appears not to have learned…
clock | July 11, 2008I guess it is unlikely you have not already heard about the big brouhaha that erupted when Bill Donohue targeted PZ Myers for showing disrespect towards a belief that made some religious nuts go crazy and violent against a child (yes, Eucharist is just a cracker, sorry, but that is just a factual statement about the world). If not, the entire story, and it is still evolving, can be found on PZ's blog so check out the numerous comments here, here,
here, here, here, here and here.
Also see what Greg Laden and Tristero say. [Update: see also John Wilkins and Mike Dunford for some good clear…
pharyngula | July 11, 2008The Catholic League has issued another press release. In addition to disparaging the theory of evolution as the "King Kong Theory of Creation" (which is a bit peculiar, since Catholicism does not take a stand against evolution), he accuses me and my ilk (that's you, fair readers) of hysteria while making this hysterical declaration:
As a result of the hysteria that Myers' ilk have promoted, at least one public official is taking it seriously. Thomas E. Foley is chairman of Virginia's First Congressional District Republican Committee, a delegate to the Republican National Convention and one of…
gregladen | July 11, 2008
I would like to take a moment to examine Catholic League president Bill Donohue's statement regarding PZ. (Details of the CL's attack on PZ Myers here) Here is the statement:
"The Myers blog can be accessed from the university's website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the 'Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.' One of the school's policies, 'Code of Conduct,' says that 'When dealing with others,' faculty et al. must be 'respectful, fair and civil.' Accordingly, we are…
oracknows | July 10, 2008While I'm taking some time to rag on TV news for its ludicrously credulous reporting of various "alternative" medicine claims, take a gander at this puff piece on a faith healer.
Where's James Randi when you need him? True, the story mentioned that not one of this faith healer's "healings" could be independently verified with objective information and data, but the rest of the tone of the story is quite credulous.
My answer to ABC News (remember: Steve Wilson works for an ABC affiliate) is this video:
The video speaks for itself. Bentley just kicked a guy with stage IV colon cancer in the…
pharyngula | July 10, 2008The Catholic League is preparing a stake for me. They're going to go straight for the jugular and threaten my job — notice how they repeat that you can access my post from my faculty page, nicely avoiding the fact that the post they find so offensive is not hosted on any university server, and that they are urging everyone to harass the president of my university and the regents and the Minnesota legislature. Extortionists and witch hunters, that's all these scumbags are.
Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is…
pharyngula | July 9, 2008Here's a much more serious issue than a goddamned cracker: it's the steady accumulation of military power in religious hands. It's not overt policy, but we should be worried that there is an increasing association between religiosity and military service — an association between credulity and obscene amounts of physical power. Jeremy Hall is discovering this first-hand.
Hall grew up reading the Bible every night and saying grace at dinner. Then, after his first tour of duty, he met some friends who were atheist and decided to read the Bible again. He read the whole Bible, and had so many…
gregladen | July 8, 2008 Do not look at his unless you've been baptized. Oh shit, too late. There are a lot of Christians that I trust, and love. But that is because of who they are. If I just know that someone is a Christian, especially if they are the sort of person to wear their Christianity on their sleeve, uttering "praise god" and telling me "bless you " and "I'm so blessed" and so on, then I tend to not trust them.
Why? Because there is a very good chance that their priorities are such that telling me, or anyone else, the truth on a day to day basis is just not as important as certain other things…
pharyngula | July 8, 2008There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion.
Here's a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.
Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn't eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it.
This isn't the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church…
mikethemadbiologist | July 8, 2008By way of a link from Pam's House Blend to this post, I came across a really good question about funding faith-based initiatives (bold original):
Senator Obama, if a religious institution proselytizes with one hand, and receives federal money with the other hand, how can you seriously posit that institution is not "using taxpayer funds to proselytize" ?
Money is money, and taxpayer funds are funds that religious institutions would not have otherwise. Whether they rob Peter to pay Paul and use funds they would not otherwise have to do proselytizing they would not have had the money to do…
pharyngula | July 7, 2008You knew this was coming, right? How else to honor World Youth than for Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, to cover up an incident of child molestation by a Catholic priest? It's traditional!
jrosenhouse | July 7, 2008Remember a few posts back, when we saw Michael Ruse lecturing Richard Dawkins as follows:
More seriously, Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer-with the possible exception of some English clerics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief. Saint Augustine, one of the greatest thinkers of Western civilization, devoted but one paragraph in the City of God to the proofs. Saint Thomas was categorical that the proofs are second to faith.
In light of that it is with some amusement that I direct you to the current…
razib | July 5, 2008This is a follow up to the post yesterday, Religion is good for your health? Conservative Christianity bad?. I finished reading the paper. It's not a bad one really, but its plausibility will be strongly conditioned by theoretical priors. It is a work in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, and attempts to resurrect a functionalist conception of religious denominations, David Sloan Wilson is smiling somewhere.... The authors posit that the other-worldly orientation of Fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations results in a host of social dynamics which increase mortality rates. In…
razib | July 4, 2008Prevalence Of Religious Congregations Affects Mortality Rates:
....Blanchard found that people live longer in areas with a large number of Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches. He offers two key reasons for these findings.
"First, these types of churches have what's known as a 'worldly perspective.' Instead of solely focusing on the afterlife, they place a significant emphasis on the current needs of their communities," he said. These religions commonly organize outreach efforts for the needy and homeless, invest in the health infrastructures of their town and participate in other forms…
gregladen | July 3, 2008Christina Comer is suing the Texas Education agency. Here is a copy of the law suit. From the Dallas News:
AUSTIN - A former state science curriculum director filed suit against the Texas Education Agency and Education Commissioner Robert Scott on Wednesday, alleging she was illegally fired for forwarding an e-mail about a lecture that was critical of the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.
Also Online
Christina Comer, who lost her job at the TEA last year, said in a suit filed in federal court in Austin that she was terminated for contravening an unconstitutional policy…
evolvingthoughts | July 2, 2008
Hi folks. It's conference time again, and of course we have organised to have the Australasian Association of Philosophy/Australasian Association for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (AAP/AAHPSSS) conferences in the coldest place on the mainland - my home town Melbourne, at the depths of winter. At least it's not Vancouver. So I'm going to be a bit quiet for a while. Play Mornington Crescent amongst yourselves until I get back (not you, Grossman. You're supposed to be fully engaged at the conference. If I see you in the comments after Sunday, I shall refuse to buy you a…
pharyngula | July 1, 2008Karl Giberson is interviewed about the subject of his new book, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It looks interesting, in an aggravating sort of way, and it's on my long list of books to read and use to put dents in my wall. The interview reminds me why I detest the rarefied apologetics of sympathetic theologians as much as I do the bleatings of the purblind literalists — neither one even notices the fundamental flaws in their core of belief.
Let me be nice first. Giberson does say a number of eminently sensible things — he's a physicist by…