August 31, 2009
If you're in the mood for some Darwin-related reading, have a look at these four offerings from the website of the NCSE. They are reviews of four recent books about Charles Darwin. I recommend especially the eloquent smackdown of The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin by Discovery…
August 30, 2009
My friends, there are certian times in your life when you are simply forced by events to reevaluate everything you believe and hold dear. For me, now is such a time. I have argued at length that the aggressive tone of the anti-religion books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens…
August 27, 2009
The success of the New Atheist books has spawned an industry of book-length, pro-religion replies. I have read quite a few of them at this point, and have emerged far more confident in my atheism as a result. Some of the books, like David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion, were obviously the work…
August 25, 2009
Over at Jeffrey Goldberg's blog we find a brief interview with Congressman Henry Waxman about how his Jewish faith informs his political views:
Tali Yahalom: You are quoted as saying that many of your American values are "synonymous" with your Jewish values. Can you talk about that?
Henry Waxman:…
August 24, 2009
People often tell me that I have a skewed view of religion because of my frequent participation in creationist gatherings. Yes, obviously, the fundamentalists are out of their minds, and it is discouraging that they give religion a bad name generally. But there is also a rich body of serious,…
August 24, 2009
Here's The Times of London planting a big wet kiss on Richard Dawkins in one of their lead editorials:
Thomas Henry Huxley, the great contemporary populariser of Charles Darwin's ideas, declared it his aim to "smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of…
August 22, 2009
I have been a huge Quentin Tarantino fan ever since seeing Reservoir Dogs in college. I have loved all of his movies, with Jackie Brown being the only item in the corpus that gets a rating below brilliant. So you can imagine my excitement over the premiere of Inglourious Basterds. I almost never…
August 20, 2009
I am currently working my way through the book The Evolution Controversy in America, written by historian George Webb and published in 1994. I got a kick out of the following quote. It will help to know that the Reverend Ben M. Bogard was the pastor of a church in Little Rock, Arkansas in the…
August 19, 2009
Speaking of crazy right-wingers, the Supreme Court's resident lunatic has been up to his old trick again. Alan Dershowitz administers the proper spanking:
I never thought I would live to see the day when a justice of the Supreme Court would publish the following words:
This court has never held…
August 19, 2009
Barney Frank confronted one of those “Obama is a Nazi!” types at a town hall meeting the other day. Video here.
QUESTIONER (holding a picture of Obama with a Hitler moustache): Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama expressly has supported this policy? Why are you supporting it…
August 17, 2009
The fall semester begins one week from today. Much work, both physical and psychological, must be done to prepare. Cuts into the blogging time. Sorry about that.
But since it hardly seems fair that my problems should cut into your bloggy pleasures, have a look at the latest column from the…
August 11, 2009
Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have another of their New Atheist bashing essays up, this time in The Los Angeles Times. It is, alas, a dreadful piece of work. P. Z. Myers has already wieghed in here, as has Jerry Coyne here.
The actual arguments in the op-ed are standard fare: The New…
August 10, 2009
You can imagine my dismay upon discovering that I had forgotten to deposit my latest Netflix offerings in the mail. Bereft of quality home entertainment to take my mind off the looming return of the students, I hopped into the Jasonmobile and sallied forth to the local Blockbuster Video.
Typically…
August 7, 2009
Time to wrap up my discussion of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book Unscientific America. In Part One I focused on the main themes of the book, arguing that it was superficial in its analysis of the issues and that its proposed solutions are impractical and unlikely to be effective. In…
August 3, 2009
Sometimes, when you're reading, you come across a paragraph so well-crafted and eloquent that you just have to pause in admiration. Here's an example, taken from the book Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. Published in 1994, it deals with some of the astonishingly foolish…
August 2, 2009
Probably not, but it's going to get one. I have just signed a contract with Oxford University Press for a book based on my experiences at creationist conferences. It's not going to be an easy book to write, but it should be a fun project.
The basic outline looks like this:
Section one will be…
August 1, 2009
Meanwhile, the debate over health care reform is playing out according to a familiar script. Armies of conscienceless right-wing attack dogs make stuff up in their attempt to prevent some sensible piece of social reform. Democrats are slow to respond, figuring that no one could possibly be…
August 1, 2009
In Part One of this review I focused on the broad themes of Mooney and Kirshenbaum's book. My general feeling is that their presentation of the state of play is simplistic in crucial ways and that their proposed solutions are impractical at best. Now I would like to zoom in specifically on the…
July 29, 2009
The remainder of my review of Mooney and Kirshenbaum on paper will have to wait a bit longer. You see, I now have Mooney and Kirshenbaum in real life to discuss.
Always happy to have an excuse to visit the big city, I stopped by the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC to see Chris Mooney…
July 26, 2009
The science blogosphere has been buzzing about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, the new book by former SciBlings Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. For whatever reason everyone else seems to have received their review copies before I did, and I did not want…
July 24, 2009
On the subject of science and religion, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins are not among my favorite commentators. That notwithstanding, this interview actually manages to be pretty interesting. Giberson's questions are in bold face, Collins' answers are in regular type.
You seem like a mirror…
July 23, 2009
Th Richard Dawkins award is given by the Atheist Alliance International based on the following criteria:
The Richard Dawkins Award will be given every year to honor an outstanding atheist whose contributions raise public awareness of the nontheist life stance; who through writings, media, the arts…
July 23, 2009
In the course of expressing his dismay with the Episcopalian Church (for ordinating gay bishops) and with Jimmy Carter (for holding liberal political views), conservative pundit Cal Thomas provides an apt summary of the Bible:
Inclusivity has nothing to do with the foundational truths set forth in…
July 23, 2009
From an interview with Brad Pitt posted at a German website:
BILD: Do you believe in God?
Brad Pitt (smiling): "No, no, no!"
BILD: Is your soul spiritual?
Brad Pitt: "No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out…
July 22, 2009
An amusing comment from last night's Countdown. Guest host David Shuster was siting in for Keith Olbermann:
On this day in 1925, an anniversary of note if your name is Sam Brownback. High school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of breaking a Tennessee state law, teaching evolution…
July 21, 2009
The overlords at Seed have informed us that there will be some server maintenence starting at 7:00 tonight. Alas, it will be impossible to comment during that time. Take that Turkish spammers!
July 21, 2009
From Yahoo News:
Fish have lost half their average body mass and smaller species are making up a larger proportion of European fish stocks as a result of global warming, a study published Monday has found.
“It's huge,” said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and…
July 20, 2009
Blogging will continue to be sporadic around here for a while longer while I struggle to finish up a few projects that for some reason aren't getting finished on their own. In the meantime you can have a look at two letters to the editor in response to the Meyer editorial on which I reported last…
July 16, 2009
Moving back across the pond, we find another wise op-ed, this time by Daniel Dennett writing in The Guardian. He writes:
I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to…
July 16, 2009
Alas, op-ed's as measured and intelligent as the one from Reiss and White are a comparative rarity in American newspapers. More often we get tripe like this, from ID supporter Stephen Meyer. He writes:
IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson's demand for a “…
