religion
evolvingthoughts | April 29, 2008
The Australian government, still in the period of meeting its election promises, has legitimised the relations between homosexual couples so that they now have the same rights as defacto couples, which is long overdue. But they didn't quite get it right. Why not?
They didn't allow gays to get married. The reason is that, as the attorney general, Robert McLelland, said, "the government regards marriage as being between a man and a woman and we don't support any measures that seek to mimic that process."
Why not? Where is it said that marriage must be heterosexual? Answer: only in a…
pharyngula | April 29, 2008Prayer doesn't work. Enshrine it in the law — prayer is not a helpful action, but rather a neglectful one. Teach it in the schools — when the health class instructs students in how to make a tourniquet or do CPR, also explain that prayer is not an option. Faith in prayer kills people.
The Wisconsin parents who allowed their daughter to die in a diabetic coma because they believed prayer was sufficient aid have been charged with second degree reckless manslaughter. That seems about right to me.
Read this account of the progression of their daughter's disease, and ask yourself at what point you…
pharyngula | April 28, 2008Matt Taibbi went off on a three day Christian retreat, and discovered how ridiculous they are…but he also discover the deep emotional, anti-intellectual pull of these kinds of events.
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this -- once you've gone this far -- you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and…
laelaps | April 28, 2008As I've said elsewhere, I think that the idea that creationists are master communicators is a myth; they are successful because they are tapping into a religious majority that is feeling antagonized and marginalized by secular culture. Even though most of the population of this country would identify themselves as Christians, some members of the faithful feel like they are continuously under attack by scientists, liberals, homosexuals, etc., their desire to "reclaim the country for Christ" being hindered by a minority of secular elitists.
Indeed, the film Expelled is little more than an…
grrlscientist | April 28, 2008tags: Richard Dawkins, Beware the Believers, religious fundamentalism, evolution, streaming video
This amusing streaming video is a rockin' version of Richard Dawkins' expertise [3:57].
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2008
The Nays won, narrowly, and the debate, between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston, will be available as a podcast here. A summary is here.
One thing that I find interesting in these debates, which let's face it are more important for allowing people to vent than actually proving anything, is that those opposed to religion tend to think, as the Guardian commentator does, that anyone who has what I would think is a rational approach to belief, is a kind of "God-Lite", "an unthreatening and more-or-less rational - and private - approach. It's hard to object to that: practised in this way…
jrosenhouse | April 26, 2008A common response to the books by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris involved castigating them for the shallowness of their understanding of religion. In their incessant focus on fundamentalism and more extreme forms of religious belief, they proved themselves unwilling to consider seriously the nuance and subtlety of mainstream religious thought, it was argued.
P.Z. Myers brilliantly satirized this argument, referring to it as The Courtier's Reply. I was moved to think about it once more in light of this exchange of editorials in the British newspaper The Guardian. Representing sunshine and…
clock | April 26, 2008It took a century to build the St.Sava Cathedral. I remember playing on its foundations as a kid - a great fortress to play in. But the enterior has just begun to be worked on - I am not sure if the pictures can show the immensity of the space in there:
nisbetmc | April 26, 2008
The Pope is technically a head of state, so when he visits the US, why doesn't the news media spend more time asking him hard hitting questions about church policy and practice?
NPR's On the Media spotlighted that question last week (audio above) interviewing Tom Roberts, news director of The National Catholic Reporter. Here's the crux of the problem as Roberts sees it.
TOM ROBERTS: They're dealing with a basically secret organization. It makes its decisions in secret, its appointments in secret. There's no precedent for a real robust exchange. You don't even have that with bishops in the…
pharyngula | April 26, 2008I think he's due, but he's not the only one. It's like our entire army is being turned into a pocket theocracy.
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. "People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!" Major…
pharyngula | April 26, 2008Birmingham, Alabama apparently has a serious crime problem. That's bad news, but to compound it all, they've got a mayor who is a fecking idjit. Mayor Larry Langford has a plan to deal with crime.
At Tuesday’s Birmingham City Council meeting, Mayor Larry Langford proclaimed Friday, April 25, a “day of prayer in sackcloth and ashes” in Birmingham.
Birmingham Weekly reported two weeks ago that the mayor purchased 2,000 burlap sacks for ministers and other community leaders to wear at a Plan 10/30 summit.
To many Christians, sackcloth and ashes symbolize humility and repentance, but the mayor’s…
razib | April 25, 2008Just a heads up, I've been posting now and then to the quasi-Twitteresque site Talk Islam run by my friend Aziz Poonawalla. I also have a sub-weblog where I'll be posting some of my longer form ruminations...but it might be best to just sign up for the RSS so you're notified when I start posting there regularly. I've been reading God's Rule - Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought on & off for weeks now, and I think I'll put up a review over there after I'm done....
grrlscientist | April 25, 2008tags: Creationism-vs-evolution, fundamentalism, religion, culture wars
A friend, Dave, sent me an interesting article that was published several months ago in Science. This insightful and well-written article by Jennifer Couzin is important because it focuses on one scientist's trauma and ensuing lifelong journey with rejecting his evangelical creationist upbringing to accept evolution as scientific fact. Below the fold is a summary of this article for you to read.
Paleontologist Stephen Godfrey, curator of the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, started out his life incongruously as…
pharyngula | April 25, 2008KBSU is the campus television station for Bemidji State University, and apparently they've been broadcasting crap lately — several hours a day have been dedicated to episodes of this feeble series of videos called "Does God Exist?". It's awful. It's basically some self-proclaimed Christian standing in front of a camera and preaching.
For an example of the quality of the thinking going into this video series, take a look at his proof for the existence of god. He literally says that there are only two possibilities: 1) the universe is eternal and uncreated, the atheist position (which is…
pharyngula | April 24, 2008Christianity is a creepy death cult. Worshipping a rotting corpse is revolting.
The exhumed body of Padre Pio, a saint considered a miracle worker by his devotees, attracted thousands of pilgrims on Thursday when it went on display 40 years after his death.
…
His face was reconstructed with a lifelike silicone mask of the type used in wax museums because it was apparently too decomposed to show when the body was exhumed.
…
The body of the bearded Capuchin monk was exhumed from a crypt on March 3 and found to be in "fair condition" after 40 years. Since then a team of medical examiners and…
pharyngula | April 23, 2008I don't say the pledge of allegiance; I actually find it rather offensive that I'm expected to give a loyalty oath to a political entity if I attend a school board meeting. So I was a little sympathetic to this story of a student was kicked out of school for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But then…the school administrators made a fast about face and decided to let her return to school. Why, you might wonder…but I think you can guess.
She simply said she was a devout Christian and could not make oaths to anyone but her god.
Zooom! Excused!
So this means an atheist student wouldn'…
gregladen | April 23, 2008Despite the fact that the producers of Expelled! have the most nefarious of motives in mind, and that we can expect more from them (we are waiting for the other shoe to drop), it is interesting to note how many conversations this documentary about Intelligent Design Creationism has sparked. Ultimately, the intended purpose of Expelled! is to silence real scientists and set back scientific research that is on the verge of filling one of the most important "gaps" in which the Christian God of the theistic evolutionist currently lives. In the long run, conversations that arise from movies like…
evolvingthoughts | April 22, 2008
Or, "Ive been a baaaddd boy, Abbott"
The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
Level
Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)
Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)
Moderate
Level 2 (Lustful)
Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)
Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)
Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)
Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)
Very High
Level 7 (Violent)
High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)
Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)
Low…
pharyngula | April 18, 2008Hey, I remember when this piece from Rush came out, and I remember the snake-like tree in the video, but I don't remember the ending … and it's the ending that makes me laugh now.