religion
gregladen | June 18, 2008Wooo... whoa... Holy crap. Call 911.
Colleen Leduc already had a lot going against her. The Barrie woman was holding down a job while struggling to raise her autistic 11-year-old daughter. She couldn't afford to give the child the intensive therapy she needed, and was forced to send her to a public school in the area.
So she was completely unprepared for what happened to her and the youngster, an almost unbelievable tale of red tape involving a strange claim from a teaching assistant, a bizarre decision by a school board, a visit from the Children's Aid Society (CAS) and most improbably of…
gregladen | June 18, 2008
Mike Myers has a new film with a new set of zany characters that clearly mimic and probably mock Hinduism. Yet, the producers of the film maintain that the depicted religion is entirely made up. Right.
American based Hindu activists are not buying it...
They say that in the West so little is known about Hinduism that even a parody like Love Guru could be misinterpreted by teenagers and give them a skewed view of the religion.
"They should draw a line when it comes to people's faith," says Bhavna Shinde of the Sanatan Society in the US.
She is upset that the main character wears sacred…
pharyngula | June 18, 2008Remember the case of John Freshwater, the Ohio science teacher who burned a cross into a student's arm and decorates his desk with Christian kitsch? He's a raving mad loon, but he's also fun and popular with the Christian kids at school (who are, naturally, a majority).
Now John Freshwater and the school district are going to court.
Freshwater's action and the administration's inaction, the lawsuit states, "have the purpose and effect of endorsing religion over non-religion and Christianity over other religious beliefs, thus violating the neutrality portion of the Establishment Clause."
In…
pharyngula | June 17, 2008I just got an email listing 50 "proofs" for the existence of a god. It was also sent to a large number of skeptics, and included a plug for the dumb-as-bricks author's book — she's a flea who writes an imaginary scenario in which Richard Dawkins gets psychiatric counseling…from Jesus! If Debra Rufini's imaginary dialog is as bad as this list of "proofs" — more like a collection of cliches, bad quotes, and lies — I can't imagine wanting to slog through it.
Any one of these I'd happily rip to shreds, but 50 at once? The distilled dementia herein is overwhelming, and I'm sure she counts on that…
grrlscientist | June 16, 2008tags: Barack Obama, religion, politics, streaming video
In this video, Barack Obama talks downright lucidly about religion and politics. To all the idiots claiming the US was founded on christianity, he suggests that they read the words of John Adams because "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." He also states that "the United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Muslim nation." Obama suggests that all these so-called christians and other religious wingnuts actually READ THEIR BIBLES -- wow, how radical…
evolvingthoughts | June 16, 2008
From the Enough Rope series by the inestimable Andrew Denton, interviewing Sir David Attenborough, in the course of which, this segment on creationism, below the fold. Humane thoughts of a great humanist.
ANDREW DENTON: Let's talk about the imagination of human beings. You're strongly on the record as being opposed to the concept of creationism. Why do you feel so strongly about it?
I feel so strongly about it because I think that it is in a quite simple historical factual way wrong. Um the arguments I would ah put forward ah now that we are um more knowledgeable about the world as a…
mikethemadbiologist | June 15, 2008I've discussed Republican rising star Bobby Jindal's public support for creationism before. What's galling is that his idiocy can't be laid at cognitive deficiency or ignorance. I was in the same graduating class as Jindal, and I know that every biology major had considerable exposure to evolutionary biology.
Clearly, Jindal is being willfully ignorant to avoid theologically inconvenient reality. Now Jindal is further attempting to lower the value of my degree: he performed an exorcism, and believes that it cured the 'possessed' woman of cancer.
(Don't tell Orac, or his head might explode…
pharyngula | June 12, 2008Many people have been sending me this article about how high IQ turns academics into atheists. I'm afraid I don't trust it at all: the author is the infamous racist, Richard Lynn, and carries all the baggage of his peculiar notions of genetic determinism and narrow views on the significance of IQ.
I don't think the religious are necessarily stupid, and I most definitely do not believe they are born stupid. I do believe they are saddled with a set of foolish misconceptions that can throttle their intellectual development and send them careering off into genuinely weird sets of beliefs, but…
gregladen | June 12, 2008The following image (below the fold) is a little large (that is why it is below the fold). Over one half meg in size.
It is a map of major flooding around the world over the last several years, not counting this year and last. If you add in the present flooding in the Midwest, it is very clear that God is specifically targeting regions where Gay Marriage is illegal or at least frowned upon. The US Midwest, the Boot of New Zealand, the northern tip of Inner Mongolia, and so on. The little red dot you see near Cape Town is not Cape Town, but rather, a military base just north of Cape Town…
razib | June 12, 2008God makes you stupid, researchers claim:
Lynn and his two co-authors argue that average IQ is an excellent predictor of what proportion of the population are true believers, across 137 countries. They also cite surveys of the US Academy of Sciences and UK Royal Academy showing single-digit rates of religious belief among academics.
Well, I actually blogged this relationship years ago (December 2003 actually). It jumps out at you pretty clearly if you know the two traits and their international trends. I think that the causal factors which underly the relationship need to be qualified…
gregladen | June 12, 2008By a vote of 94-3, Louisiana's House of Representatives today passed an academic freedom bill that would protect teachers and school districts who wish to promote critical thinking and objective discussion about evolution and other scientific topics.
There was no vocal opposition, and the floor speech by Rep. Frank Hoffman made clear that the bill was about science, not religion.
"This bill promotes good science education by protecting the academic freedom of science teachers," said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute. "Critics who claim…
pharyngula | June 12, 2008Minnesota pastor Gus Booth is using his pulpit to promote candidates for political office, claiming that "God wants me to address the great moral issues of the day". Which is fine with me, even though I disagree with him on just about everything. He clearly wants to commit himself to crusading for his causes, even though (or because) he is an idiot.
How do I know that? Because he now wants to claim that he's being persecuted by the IRS and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, since they argue that such political activity is a violation of the rules governing his church's tax…
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2008
History is one of those things that the venal mine to serve their special interests, with no concern for truth or accuracy. But it takes real stupid to say this:
Contrary to popular belief, as historian David Barton points out, the theory of evolution was around long before Charles Darwin. As far back as the 6th century B.C., Greek writers Thales and Anaximander had propounded the theory centuries before the birth of Christ. Aristotle, influenced by his intellectual forbears, also advocated a form of evolution.
Other ancient writers like Diogenes, Empedocles, Democritus, and Lucretius, all…
jrosenhouse | June 10, 2008Here's a delightful article from today's New York Times:
The operation in the private clinic off the Champs-Elysees involved one semicircular cut, 10 dissolving stitches and a discounted fee of $2,900.
But for the patient, a 23-year-old French student of Moroccan descent from Montpellier, the 30-minute procedure represented the key to a new life: the illusion of virginity.
Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a hymenoplasty, a restoration of her hymen, the thin vaginal membrane that normally breaks during the first act of intercourse.
“In my culture, not to be a…
jrosenhouse | June 10, 2008It seems giraffes are now considered kosher:
I don't know how this escaped me, but a rabbi named Shlomo Mahfoud (which sounds like a made-up name, in the “Zohan” sense) has declared that giraffe meat is kosher. This must come as a huge relief to the vast Jewish population of the Serengeti.
So what were the issues in reaching this decision?
Heeb reports that the tall, spotted, long-tongued African ungulates have been declared kosher by Israeli Rabbi Shlomo Mahfoud. JTA affirms that since giraffes have cloven hooves and chew their cud, they are totally kosher.
JTA also explains that eating…
jrosenhouse | June 8, 2008Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Wheaton College English Professor Alan Jacobs argues that religion is overrated as a social force. My SciBling Razib has already written a lengthy response.
Jacobs gets down to business in the third paragraph:
Of course, I can't universalize my own experience -- but that experience does give me pause when people talk about the immense power of religion to make people do extraordinary things. When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they're not acting as I usually do, out of…
jrosenhouse | June 5, 2008Here's the Hamas Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment exposing a heretofore unexpected Jewish threat:
“There are also theories that were invented by non-Jews, but they disseminate them, knowing that they are scientifically false, such as the theory of Darwin. Darwin was not Jewish, but they exploited his theory. Even though new Darwinist theories have appeared, they spread the original theory, because the concept of 'survival of the fittest' serves their colonialist needs.”
This will come as news to Rabbi Natan Slifkin, whose endorsement of evolution led certain Orthodox rabbis to declare…
gregladen | June 3, 2008A video image released by the computer game's creator showing an injured man may not appear to be graphic, but you may change your mind once you know who it is. It's the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
The new game, not yet released, is giving a voice to the atheist community, that's according to the game's creator, a University of Virginia graduate student. He wouldn't release his name, for fear of his safety.
"Atheists have never really had anything to speak for them like this. It's the general atheist premise that the world might be a better place without some of those religions," explained…
pharyngula | June 3, 2008I read these lame exercises in making excuses by theologians, and I don't understand how anyone can be foolish enough to fall for them. The latest example is by Edward Tingley, who babbles on painfully about how believers are the true skeptics, the true scientists, while claiming that the believers have a deeper, stronger knowledge than mere atheists. Yet nowhere in his ramble does Tingley ever give any evidence or rational reason to believe in his god or any god — in fact, he triumphantly declares that there is no evidence — god exists, but (I can scarcely believe he makes this argument…