religion
nisbetmc | May 9, 2008
Pew has released an in depth analysis of news coverage of the Pope's U.S. visit. As I have posted previously, some media critics have claimed that the press gave the Pontiff a pass on hard-hitting questions while polls show that the Pope's visit was a major public relations success.
As the Pew news analysis finds, the Pope's visit dominated headlines, accounting for 16% of the total news hole for the week, eclipsing for example the 5% of coverage devoted to the war in Iraq and second in attention only to the 31% of coverage devoted to the election. According to Pew, the saturation coverage…
esiegel | May 7, 2008The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study:
38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms.
65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth.
47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
21% of Americans do not believe that the…
pharyngula | May 7, 2008Sid Schwab considers the meaning of eternal torment. Even a moment's thought should make anyone realize that eternal punishment, besides being literally unimaginable, cannot possibly be just. Yet this principle is dogma in Christianity — Jesus himself said, "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment" — and even worse, those who are good and are admitted into heaven are going to be eternally aware of the torments inflicted on their unsaved fellows, and will be going out to witness the punishment of the wicked (according to St Augustine, anyway…I hear he's a fairly highly regarded…
gregladen | May 6, 2008In a recent poll conducted by the widely respected news outlet The Journal, people were asked:
Should local governmental bodies be allowed to open their meetings with a prayer?
With thousands answering, the results were an astonishing 93 percent opposed! See the results, here.
gregladen | May 6, 2008PZ Myers is asking for another poll crashing. So he'll send his 200,000 readers, and I'll send all four of you ....
Should local governmental bodies be allowed to open their meetings with a prayer?
ANSWER HERE.
nisbetmc | May 6, 2008
Evidence for the influence of an effective media strategy, from a just released Pew survey:
Following his first visit to the United States as spiritual leader of the world's Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI is viewed more favorably than he was a few weeks before his trip. Currently, 61% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of the pope, up from 52% in late March. Views of Pope Benedict's outreach to other faiths have shown substantial improvement. Roughly half (51%) of those who have heard at least a little about the pope say he has done an excellent or good job with respect to his…
evolvingthoughts | May 5, 2008
In a piece reported on in New Scientist, Maurice Bloch has proposed another basis for religion: imagination. Because we can project ourselves and imagine the "transcendental" relation in social and personal relationships, we can imagine that there are agents not visible or present, he claims. The paper is also a good historical review of theories of religion, and makes the point that "religion" is not well defined as a topic of investigation of explanation.
Like many others, Bloch infers that religion is a byproduct of things that were evolutionarily adaptive, such as cognitive skills. His…
gregladen | May 5, 2008I'm talking about the May 4th Podcast of Atheist Talk, from the Minnesota Atheists. The first half was an interview of Lois Schadewald, editor of her brother's posthumous work "Worlds of their Own" ... a book of essays on pseudoscience.
The second half was an interview of Yours Truly by Mike Haubrich on "Academic Freedom" and stuff.
You have to understand that I did this interview against the advice of medical professionals, with a severe case of near-laryngitis. ... so no, that is not actually my voice .... plus I had a fever and was heavily drugged. And not enough coffee. And I was…
gregladen | May 5, 2008I woke up to an icky world this morning. After painfully clearing my lungs and scarfing down some medication, I scanned the TV channels for news. and the blogosphere for inspiration. The TV was giving me mainly god, while the blogosphere was giving me measles, pandemics, murdered sea lions, and this poor eagle with its beak snapped off.
TV land was still in it's pre-day stage (which runs an hour later here in the Midwest). Therefore, fully half or more of the stations were busy peddling Christianity. I learned that it was easier to accept faith and know that God has a plan than to…
oracknows | May 5, 2008That's the message that Ben Stein has been pushing lately, namely not just the hated "Darwinism" but science itself inevitably leads to political philosophies such as Nazi-ism and Stalinism (but especially Nazi-ism, given its emphasis on racial hygiene and eugenics), including the mass murder that resulted from them. As a result, Stein has been correctly and deservedly excoriated not just by science bloggers, but even by fellow conservatives such as Instapundit, who characterized Stein as "totally having lost it," and John Derbyshire, who correctly characterized Stein's lies as a blood libel…
scientificactivist | May 4, 2008As the media circus over Jeremiah Wright continues, it should give us pause that the media hasn't decided to focus on John McCain and his embrace of a wide range of religious bigots. Although McCain once called these men "agents of intolerance" in 2000, he has since done a total flip-flop and openly embraced them in the 2008 campaign. Compare this to Barack Obama, who has now fully renounced his former pastor--as he rightfully should have. Whether this slanted coverage is due to racial bias, or just to the fact that these outrageous conservative white religious figures are so ingrained in…
pharyngula | May 4, 2008
Why do they waste their time with these idiots? Barack Obama has been struggling against the guilt-by-association of having been a regular member of a lunatic's church, this odious little ignorant rat-bag named Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Yet at the same time, McCain joyfully accepts endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley…and if Wright is a rat-bag, those two are festering, reeking mountains of putrefying rat-shit. Does the media give a damn? No. They're also white members of the televangelical racket, and ever since the anti-semitic backwoods babbler Billy Graham was canonized for…
pharyngula | May 3, 2008Sometimes, I am extremely annoyed with the principle of separation of church and state — it leads to absurdities, like this recent court decision that a gay student support group was was using unconstitutional tactics — it was using materials that mentioned that some religions are more tolerant of homosexuality than others. This is, apparently, an endorsement of particular religions and therefore violates church-state separation.
Well, yeah, it is — for specific subjects, like gay rights, science education, and pacifism, some religions clearly are better than others — yet because we have to…
pharyngula | May 2, 2008Oh, no … I mentioned the existence of godtube the other day, and now people are farming it for incredibly stupid videos that they send to me. It's rich soil for stupid over there, and they've got a bumper crop — you would not believe how awful some of their arguments are.
I hesitate to mention this one because I know it's going to trigger yet more bad videos in my in-box, but it is so bad, so crazy, that I have to share it. This one claims that Food Patterns of our Body Proof for Intelligent Design, and, well, you have to see it. It starts with the claim that a sliced carrot looks like a…
jrosenhouse | May 1, 2008I have often commented that it is the arguments of theistic evolutionists, as opposed to those offered by Creationists, that have convinced me that evolution and Christianity can not be reconciled in any reasonable way. A good case in point is Francisco Ayala.
Via Ed Brayton I came across this profile of Ayala from Tuesday's New York Times. In it we find items such as this:
Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said,…
pharyngula | May 1, 2008Today is actually the National Day of Prayer. Really. Let that sink in for a moment.
We have regional coordinating groups — Minnesota is having events at the Capitol today. Did you know that prayer is "America's strength and shield"? I didn't. Our governor has issued a proclamation asking citizens to "open our hearts in thanksgiving". It's a weird document. It announces that we have all these problems like poverty and sickness and crime, and then declares that we've been strengthened by the "conscience-based actions of people of faith" … I guess we people of reason don't have consciences, and…
pharyngula | April 30, 2008Wheaton has a good academic reputation, but man, it's the little things that make it frightening. I would not want to live in the theocratic world it represents. Hank Fox has a couple of stories about Wheaton.
The first is the blog of a recent graduate of Wheaton who determined halfway through his undergraduate education that he was an atheist. It sounds like it was rough. He's ended the blog, though, with a statement that "…now that I'm slightly closer to the real world, I just don't think it's that important whether you're an atheist or a Christian" — which is true. The differences are…
oracknows | April 29, 2008About a month ago, I wrote about an unbelievably sad story of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin who died of untreated diabetic ketoacidosis because she had been unfortunate enough to have been born into a family in which the parents believed in prayer rather than medicine. I say "unbelievably" because I find it truly difficult to believe that anyone in this day and age would willingly eschew effective medicine for their suffering child in favor of wishful thinking. Tragically and not surprisingly, prayer didn't work, and their child died. One of the unresolved issues at the time of the incident…