Religion
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Religion
The real explanation for transitional fossils, radiometric dating, and genetic similarity
Posted by Orac on October 17, 2009 I knew it! I knew there had to be an explanation that young earth creationists could come up with for all that evidence in support of evolution: (WARNING: Borderline NSFW, depending on your job. Definitely offensive to fundamentalists.) It’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of it before?
From one skeptic to the 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award: Stop being an anti-vaccine loon
Posted by Orac on October 16, 2009 Well, here’s something refreshing. In fact, it’s so refreshing that I just had to link to it. Michael Shermer, renowned skeptic and the publisher of Skeptic, has decided to school the Atheist Alliance International 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine kook Bill Maher, over the nonsense about alternative medicine, vaccines, and conspiracy theories…
The trouble with Deepak Chopra, part II
Posted by Orac on October 14, 2009 As I mentioned on Friday, I’m in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I’ll be until Wednesday afternoon. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here’s a blast…
More burning stupid from Bill O’Reilly on evolution and the “God of the Gaps”
Posted by Orac on October 11, 2009 I may have been a bit hard on Richard Dawkins lately, but, if he believed in saints, Dawkins would deserve sainthood for keeping his cool in the face of so much concentrated idiocy coming from Bill O’Reilly: A couple of lovely O’Reilly quotes: “I’m throwing in with Jesus because you guys can’t tell us how…
The crazies are out in force after Richard Dawkins…
Posted by Orac on October 5, 2009 …and, no, I don’t mean Orac, his last few posts notwithstanding. No, don’t worry, this post is most definitely not about Bill Maher. Rather, it’s how, while doing searches for that craziness, I found even more disturbing craziness. Even though I was disappointed in him on this one issue and even though I often don’t…
My last entry for a long time on the Maher issue (I hope), plus a little history
Posted by Orac on October 4, 2009 I hadn’t planned on writing much, if anything more, about the whole Bill Maher debacle, but PZ has shown up in my comments and graciously tried to explain what’s going on at the AAI convention regarding the truly awful choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award: Look, I don’t know what else I…
A report from the field…
Posted by Orac on October 3, 2009 …from PZ Myers at the AAI Convention: The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy.…
The time has come…
Posted by Orac on October 2, 2009 …for Bill Maher to receive the Richard Dawkins Award. It was a huge mistake on the part of the Atheist Alliance International to award it, for the reasons I’ve repeated ad nauseam over the last couple of weeks; so I won’t go there again. What I really want to know is what happened. I can’t…
Some “inconvenient questions” for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins tomorrow
Posted by Orac on October 1, 2009 The endgame is in sight. At the end of this post is a list of questions for Bill Maher tomorrow (if the opportunity presents itself), the vast majority of which you, my readers, thought of. Let’s backtrack a minute. A couple of months ago, I learned that an award named after Richard Dawkins was being…
The role of faith summarized
Posted by Orac on October 1, 2009 I love this guy’s explanations of skepticism and critical thinking. In this installment, it is quite clearly and cleverly why it’s impossible to “prove” the existence of God or any god and thus why such gods are always a matter of faith and belief without evidence:
Ask Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins some questions at the AAI Conference this weekend!
Posted by Orac on September 28, 2009 I promised last week in a post in which I described Bill Maher’s latest pro-quackery remarks (this time, supporting cancer quackery), today is the day that I’m going to ask you, my readers, for some help. As I complained a while back, Bill Maher, who is anything but a rationalist or a booster of science…
Are you ready for the…ultimate praying championship?
Posted by Orac on September 26, 2009 Sadly, this is not too far from how religious disputes seem to be settled. The only difference is that there’s less violence here than there is in real life: Hmmm. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if religious conflicts could be resolved by an Ultimate Praying Challenger, rather than the usual way. As…
September 11, 2001: What we saw and as it happened
Posted by Orac on September 11, 2009 Once again we come to another September 11. It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since that horrible day. On this day, traditionally, I do two things. First, I post the following video. This video was shot by Bob and Bri, who in 2001 lived in a high rise a mere 500 yards…
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, especially when it’s Jesus on a toilet
Posted by Orac on September 5, 2009 Praying to the porcelain god was never a more appropriate term: Cue toilet and bathroom jokes…with Jesus!
Sedalia, Missouri, you should be ashamed of your schools, or: The dumbest anti-evolution victory I’ve ever seen…
Posted by Orac on August 30, 2009 It was just a high school marching band, like so many other high school bands in this country, a band that no one outside of the area of Sedalia, Missouri would be likely to have heard of, were it not for a breathtakingly stupid action by its school superintendent. You see, the band had an…
How did my town get so lucky to have such a…religious person running for office?
Posted by Orac on August 23, 2009 Although I was born in Detroit itself, like so many Detroiters in the 1970s my family moved to a suburb of Detroit called Livonia when I was 10. I haven’t lived in Livonia in nearly 25 years, but my parents still live there in the same house where I spent my teen years. So the…
Francis Collins’ “Five Themes” for the NIH
Posted by Orac on August 20, 2009 One of the advantages of hanging out around home on the proverbial staycation is that, instead of actually paying more attention to the news, I’ve paid less attention to the news. That’s why I didn’t notice some stories from earlier this week about what the new director of the NIH, Francis Collins, plans to do.…
Everything you ever needed to know about conspiracy theories
Posted by Orac on August 9, 2009 Too bad it’s missing one big one. There’s nothing about the birther movement there: See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. I think that about sums it all up: moon hoax, 9/11, the Illuminati, the Masons. What more could there be?
Harness the power of religion
Posted by Orac on August 8, 2009 This may be a few months old, but I only just saw it the other night. Seems like it would work: CreedocideUploaded by greenfaace. – See more comedy videos. My only question is: Where is the other major monotheistic religion?
Senator Tom Harkin’s and Representative Darrell Issa’s war on medical science
Posted by Orac on July 28, 2009 In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call “tooth fairy science,” where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine…
Bill Maher gets the Richard Dawkins Award? That’s like Jenny McCarthy getting an award for public health
Posted by Orac on July 23, 2009 Although I often don’t agree with him and have cooled on him lately, I still rather like–even admire–Richard Dawkins. While it’s true I’ve taken him to task for having a tin ear for bioethics, lamented his walking blindly right into charges of anti-Semitism (no, I don’t think he’s an anti-Semite), and half-defended/half-criticized him for seeming…
Thermonuclear stupid about vaccines from someone other than Jenny McCarthy
Posted by Orac on July 22, 2009 This may be the burningest stupid I’ve ever seen about vaccines. Maybe. It’s so hard to tell given how much idiocy I’ve seen about vaccines. I know, it’s really, really hard to believe me when I say that what follows deserves to leap right up to the top ranks of brain-melting moronicity. After all, over…
More pareidolia: At least this Virgin Mary sighting isn’t as bad…
Posted by Orac on July 20, 2009 …as the last Virgin Mary sighting in a bird turd smear on a pickup truck. At least this time around, we’re back to more conventional “Virgin Mary in a tree”-type sightings: (Click on image for video.) Of course, this time around, I have to wonder if the guy who cut the tree down is having…
Looking for the Virgin Mary in all the wrong places
Posted by Orac on July 18, 2009 Everyone knows that I’m a bit of a connoisseur of pareidolia. Pareidolia, for those not familiar with the term, is a phenomenon where humans see patterns in various things, you know, like seeing Elvis in a flame or the Virgin Mary on a stain under a freeway overpass in Chicago or in a window blotch…
I wish I’d had this T shirt at TAM7
Posted by Orac on July 14, 2009 Well, I’m back. After my trip to TAM7, I’m back in the real world, jet-lagged and tired. So it may take me a while–hopefully only a little while–to get back to my usual prolific output, and there will be something later today. In the meantime, just let me say I really, really wish I had…