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Tripoli Six campaign's new and perilous phase (with Addendum)

The Campaign to free the Tripoli Six is entering a new and dangerous phase. On October 31 their trial resumes, with a death sentence again looming. For those not familiar with the case, The New York Times today summarized the situation in a strongly worded editorial: Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are facing the death penalty in Libya based on preposterous charges that they deliberately infected hundreds of children with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. This looming miscarriage of justice demands a strong warning to the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, that his efforts…

Preserving species diversity - long-term thinking

The latest question in the Ask A ScienceBlogger series is actually not that easy to answer, though some have, so far, valiantly tried: Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?... My attempt at the answer is under the fold.... My first knee-jerk answer is "Yes, of course!" Then comes a qualification: "As much as we can". I guess I could just leave it at that. But why do I think that? Why people who answer with a more-or-less guarded 'Yes' think that way? Apparently, and I cannot now think of the source where I read this taxonomy (Google found this),…

Garden Contingency Planning.

I probably won't get to look at them until after Isaiah's birthday and our Chanukah party next weekend, but the seed catalogs are piling up, and I'm starting to think about gardens again.  I can't wait to sink down into the couch with a stack of catalogs and dream. This was a tough year for gardening - I was already behind in early spring because of the final push to get _Making Home_ out.  On May 1, K. and C. arrived, and it took the better part of a month before things normalized.  That was ok, I thought, the fall garden will be SPECTACULAR, I'll just put my energies there, and get serious…

Poor Mitt

Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news. GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very…

Season of Leaves: Greens and the Education of a Farmer

Starting our CSA (aka "Community Supported Agriculture") was a risk. I knew that I could grow vegetables, and more than we could eat - I'd proved that the previous year. I knew also that I could find some people who would believe me when I said I was competent to run a CSA. Beyond that, I was clueless. I'd never organized a garden to produce food for other people. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd scheduled twenty weeks worth of deliveries, starting in early June. I just didn't know what was going in the recycled laundry baskets I was using for my deliveries. And in retrospect, early…

Diseases Cross Borders? Administration Official Doesnât Want to Hear It

By Liz Borkowski After former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified that White House officials tried to weaken or suppress important health reports for political purposes, Washington Post reporters Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman followed up on the case of a 2006 surgeon generalâs report on global health (draft here) whose publication was blocked. Carmonaâs report described the global nature of diseases and the many factors involved (including food and nutrition, water and air, and violence), and concluded with a call for international collaboration to improve overall global health…

Anti-science ain't just on the Right

Here's a controversial topic to discuss, especially for a science blogger. Science is overrated. This is my contention. Last night in chat I evidently hit a nerve by (perhaps not so) casually suggesting that maybe it's not the end of the world that fewer and fewer American students are going into the sciences. I read that first bit, and you may be shocked to learn that I'm willing to agree. There are some really good arguments to support the position. Science is hard, and it's true that the majority of people aren't going to be able to grasp it. We're oversubscribed and overextended right…

Eating weasels is wrong

I'm ploughing my way through the Mad Bish's Speech. As Paul notes, its turgid stuff. At least you have to give him credit for getting religion back in the headlines. Round about the end of page 2 I read this implies in turn that the Muslim, even in a predominantly Muslim state, has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful and I find it odd, because you can say exactly the same about a Christian (or Jew or Hindu or...). There is always a conflict between religious and secular law. As far as I know the clearest artciulation of the idea that…

Clowns to the left of me...

Jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can now read the full lyrics and realise I haven't got a clue what they are on about. Wiki doesn't know either, but does include the curious line "The song is often mistakenly attributed to Bob Dylan, likely because Rafferty's distinctive voice is similar to Dylan's"... errrm, then how can it be "distinctive"? Anyway, this long rambling introduction has no great purpose, other than to lead into the next level of rambling: As I was rowing along the Cam this morning, trying to avoid feeling or…

Atheism and Church Attendance, Take 2

GG of Shiny Ideas has written a reply to my post on atheism and churchgoing. Unfortunately, I think he seriously misunderstands my position and thinks I'm making a much stronger argument than I am. He writes: This goes back to my previous post about the numinous feelings induced by drug use. If you are, like myself, a materialist, agnostic, (weak) atheist, can you (should you?) in good conscience describe such experiences in spiritual terms? If you are, like Ed Brayton, a deist who denies the existence of revelation, is it proper to be endorsing religious institutions? But I don't think I've…

John West at the McLaurin Institute

Yesterday, I hopped into the black evo-mobile and made the long trek to Minneapolis to witness another creationist make a fool of himself. As is my custom when traveling alone, I like to crank up the car stereo until the road noise is beaten back, and the soundtrack for my trip was first, NPR's Science Friday, and then Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, which I'd received in the mail earlier this week (thanks, Richard!). This was a mistake. This would have prepared me for science, complexity, and beauty, but all I was going to get at the end was ideological stupidity, simple-mindedness, and a…

Ask Ethan #5: The Weak Force

"Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away." -Marcus Aurelius Every one of us does our best to come up with an accurate picture of reality, and that includes the Universe, from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest scales fathomable. But given how bizarre and counterintuitive some of our physical laws are -- even at a fundamental level -- this can be a daunting task for even those of us who are professional theoretical physicists. Image…

I have no doubt AP got this wrong: climate science contrarians are deniers.

The Associated Press has changed the AP Stylebook, tossing out a commonly used set of terms in favor of an entirely inappropriate word, for describing those who incorrectly and without foundation claim that climate change science is a hoax, or wrong, or misguided, or otherwise bogus. The term "skeptic" has a long history, but has come to refer to those who regard claims, usually about nature, health, or anything where science may inform, with studied incredulity. The skeptic wants evidence, and they are organized. The Skeptics Society has a magazine, and the magazine has a podcast. The…

Once Again, The #FauxPause Is Killed By Actual Research

We drove north for two days, to arrive at a place that existed almost entirely for one reason: To facilitate the capture and, often, consumption of wild fish. The folks who run the facility make a living providing shelter, food, boats, fishing tackle, easy access to a fishing license, and they can be hired as guides. The whole point is to locate, capture, butcher, cook, and eat the fish. The fish themselves have little say in the matter. And while talking to the people there we got a lot of advice as to how to find and capture the fish, and offers were made to assist with the butchering and…

The Energy Transition and the Question of Perfection

I just read an interesting piece on the widely influential VOX, by David Roberts, called “A beginner’s guide to the debate over 100% renewable energy.” It is worth a read, but I have some problems with it, and felt compelled to rant. No offense intended to David Roberts, but I run into certain malconstructed arguments so often that I feel compelled to promote a more careful thinking out of them, or at least, how they are presented. Roberts' argument is not malconstructed, but the assumptions leading up to his key points include falsehoods. I’m not going to explicitly disagree with the…

Continued Responses to Rusty

Rusty has again left comments on a post below. Unfortunately, the comments only allow a short message and the issues he raises may require more than 300 words, so I'll copy them here and respond in more detail. Rusty's words are in italics, my responses are in plain type. I will take a different tact here and state that I disagree that the order of appearance MUST be as the record shows for evolution to be true. Gould himself stated that if the evolutionary tape were rewound and then run again the results would be entirely different. For all the data we have on the Cambrian Explosion there is…

Lifecode

I've been reading a strange book by Stuart Pivar, LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which purports to advance a new idea in structuralism and self-organization, in competition with Darwinian principles. I am thoroughly unconvinced, and am unimpressed with the unscientific and fabulously concocted imagery of the book. There exists a real difference of opinion between two approaches to biology, the functionalist and structuralist views, and it influences how we look at evolution. The functionalist position is the one most people are familiar with:…

Top 100 Movies

Timothy Sandefur says this is the hot thing to do on blogs, and being the fashionable guy I am, I'll play along. It's a list of the top 100 grossing films of all time, with bold for the ones you saw in the theater and italics for the ones you saw on video, along with a few comments: 1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824 - I have only seen a few minutes of it here and there on TV, and that's all I will ever see of it. The theme song alone is enough to bring terrorism charges against the makers of this film. 2. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665 - I think I saw it 11 or 12 times in the theater, and I was…

An Atom in the Universe

"The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out - there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman Here you are, a human being, a grand Universe of atoms that have organized themselves into simple monomers, assembled together into giant macromolecules, which in turn comprise the organelles that make up your cells. And here you are, a collection of around 75 trillion specialized cells, organized in such a way as to make up you. Image credit: J. Roche at Ohio University. But at your core, you are still just…

My Last Post on this Topic. Promise!

My first published piece of writing on evolution and creationism was a review of Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God for Skeptic magazine, published in 2000. In light of my recent posts at this blog, you might find it hard to believe that I actually wrote the following: Like Miller, I deplore the rhetorical excesses of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett who would blur the line between methodological and philosophical naturalism. Though I would quibble with a few of his specific examples, the chapter Miller devotes to these excesses is one of the best in the book. Needless to say…

Deficiencies in modern evolutionary theory

This is a post originally made on the old Pharyngula website; I'll be reposting some of these now and then to bring them aboard the new site. There are a number of reasons why the current theory of evolution should be regarded as incomplete. The central one is that while "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", some important disciplines within biology, development and physiology, have only been weakly integrated into the theory. Raff (1996) in his book The Shape of Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) gives some of the historical reasons for the divorce of evolution and…

Why the Science Funding in the Stimulus Bill Might Be a Problem

So I have been reading over the details of the stimulus bill that is working its way through Congress. Now I grant that this is a rough draft and may be substantially modified in the process of passage, but one particular sentence got me thinking: Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: We need to put scientists to work looking for the next great discovery, creating jobs in cutting-edge-technologies, and making smart investments that will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy. For every dollar invested in broadband the economy sees a ten-fold return on…

Correcting an Error about Dopamine Signaling

I caught this article in O magazine by fellow ScienceBlogger, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish. The article isn't bad. It is about why people have trouble overcoming unproductive habits like trouble exercising.  But I want to correct something she says that is inaccurate. Dopamine has a primary role in the signaling reward, and this is a point made in her article. But she also says: Dopamine teaches your brain what you want, then drives you to get it, regardless of what's good for you. It does this in two steps. First you experience something that gives you pleasure (say, McDonald's french…

Why the New Atheist Noise Machine Fails

In provoking the emotions of fear and anger among non-believers, the Dawkins-Hitchens PR campaign motivates many atheists to be ever more vocal in attacking and complaining about religion. Yet does this PR campaign reach beyond the base, convincing Americans to give up their collective "delusions"? Or does it simply create further polarization in an already deeply divided America? As the social psychologist Carol Tavris notes in a recent Point of Inquiry interview, if anything, social science research suggests that the Dawkins-Hitchens PR campaign only serves to further balkanize America.…

Cheating on the Brain

Evolutionary psychologists argue that we can understand the workings of the human mind by investigating how it evolved. Much of their research focuses on the past two million years of hominid evolution, during which our ancestors lived in small bands, eating meat they either scavenged or hunted as well as tubers and other plants they gathered. Living for so long in this arrangement, certain ways of thinking may have been favored by natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists believe that a lot of puzzling features of the human mind make sense if we keep our heritage in mind. The classic…

You don't get to revise evolutionary theory, until you understand evolutionary theory

There was a conference sponsored by the Royal Society last month, titled New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives. There have been a number of news stories about this event, some good, some bad. Here's one: can you tell what's wrong with it? For example, speaking at the Royal Society was Melinda Zeder, who talked about the way in which modern synthesis fails to provide a reason for mankind’s turning to agriculture 10,00 years ago and its ensuing evolutionary impact. Growing crops may have taken years, so there could not have been a short-…

Some days, it's very hard to defend Neil deGrasse Tyson

Robin Loznak This morning, I read a pile of bullshit about Tyson written by an anti-intellectual reverse-snob -- he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science. Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it. What he actually does is make the universe boring, tell people things that they already know, and dispel…

Darwin's Degenerates - Evolution's Finest

If I ask you what group of organisms is an exhibition of evolution at its finest, what would you say? Most people, I think, would say human beings, or at least apex predators. After all, we have staggering intellect compared to our prey items and clearly dominate the planet, eat what we will, etc. Not only that, we're insanely complex. Ask some scientists, and they might give you any number of answers. Cockroaches are likely to exist long after we do, as are rodents, so maybe they get the title. Or, being scientists, they might be biased to whatever organism they study. Maybe algae and plants…

Life as a Leak, Part 3

Well, just when I think I might be getting the migraines under control, I go and lose a whole week due to some mystery illness. It wasn't a cold and it wasn't the flu, but it sure did nail me to the floor for a week. I'm just getting back on schedule in my life. I'll try to get the Joy of Science summaries posted tomorrow but discussion posts may not be till Thursday. Anyway....I wanted to call your attention to a nifty post on the "life as a leak" subject over at Fairer Science. And back on March 20, Science Woman wrote a post on Why We Leave that is very good. The discussion in the…

Partial Spinal Regeneration in Rats Using a Two Part Process

This is rather clever. Houle et al at Case Western show in the Journal of Neuroscience that you can use a bacterial enzyme called chondroitinase to degrade scars in spinal cord lesions and enable regeneration of axons. Just for background, there is some interesting neurobiology when it comes to spinal cord regeneration. If you sever peripheral nerve axons and then reconnect it, the axons will regrow to find their old targets leading to a functional restoration. However, something different happens in the central nervous system (CNS). Instead of regrowing, the axons just stop. For many…

Bush Directive on Regulatory Authority in a Broader Context

I was reading the article that is currently was on the Buzz in Scienceblogs. It is about President Bush issuing an executive order to the bureaucracy curtailing the use of guidance statements and insisting that political appointees evaluate the costs and benefits of these statements. The story was in New York Times: In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House…

Jackson Pollock Is Scary! Why People Hate Modern Art

I've never really hung out in a social psychology laboratory, but here is how I picture a typical day in one. There are some social psychologists sitting around, drinking some sort of exotic tea, and free associating. One psychologist will say the name of a random social psychological theory, and another will then throw out the first thing that comes into his or her head. They'll write each of these down, and the associations will then become the basis for their next several research projects. OK, so that's probably not really what's going on, and I suppose there's a more scientific method to…

Talkin' Science

As you all know, fellow ScienceBloggers Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney published an article in the April 6 issue of Science on the topic of "framing science." The article has sparked a great deal of (sometimes heated) debate on ScienceBlogs and off (Bora has a list of links, to which I'd add John Hawks, Greg Laden, and Sean Carroll; especially the Laden post, because it points out how wrong Nisbet and Mooney get the idea of "framing" in many places). The impression I've gotten from reading this discussion is that most scientists (or at least most science bloggers) agree that we need to do a…

Money Is Umm... Food?

A while back, I linked to a paper analogically comparing money to drugs. Judging by the comments, those of you who read the paper weren't particularly impressed by it. But if you thought the money-drug analogy was odd, I've got a better one for you. If you recall, the money as a drug paper by Stephen E. G. Lea argues against a purely instrumental, "tool" theory of the subjective value of money. From the money as a drug perspective, money doesn't serve purely practical purposes. Instead, people actually seek out money because it gives them some pleasure, like a drug. Apparently, a similar…

Comfortably Numb-er

I noticed while writing this, that the word style="font-style: italic;">numb, if modified by adding the suffix -er, becomes an entirely different word.   style="font-style: italic;">Number does not convey the meaning of more numb. According to Answers.com, number is a adjective, with the root numb.  The thing is, it only works if spoken; if written, it is ambiguous.  Ambiguity can be useful, but usually it is just a nuisance.   Anyway.   href="http://www.charlesbarberwriting.com/pages/author.html" rel="tag">Charles Barber wrote a book, href="http://www.charlesbarberwriting.…

The work-life balance minefield.

That all said, as a woman in science, it is sometimes disheartening to almost never hear an article suggest that a woman in science discuss household duties with her partner and split them evenly. The author of your article makes the statement that women bear the burden of household labor, but until scientists begin to tell other scientists that this isn't right, women are going to continue to leave academic science for fear of not being able to "balance" work and family. You can be right and be practical at the same time. These need not be mutually exclusive. I also think that you need not…

How not to predict the outcome of clinical trials

Yesterday, I came across a concept that I had never considered before (or even heard of before). In fact, it's a concept that took me by surprise. Basically, it's an application of a concept to a problem that I never considered applying the concept to before--probably with very good reason. Basically, it's a guy named Michael Slattery writing about The Wisdom Of The Crowds And Sangamo's Phase II B Clinical Trial Results. I've never been convinced that there is a such thing as the "wisdom of crowds." Certainly, the numerous examples throughout history of mob behavior and downright idiotic…

Choprawoo metastasizes into video games

Now this is some seriously funny stuff. Anyone who's been reading this blog a while knows my opinion of Deepak Chopra. Basically, he's the quackiest of the quantum quacks, the godfather of quantum woo, the one woo-meister to rule them all. He did it first and did it "best" (if you can call it that), in the process garnering a devoted following of people with far more "spirituality" than understanding of science. All it took was a unrelenting abuse of quantum physics, a Lamarckian misunderstanding of evolution, combined with a bit of old-fashioned Cartesian mind-body dualism, all thrown into…

Sullivan outs himself, or: Time for J.B. Handley to put up and shut up about Paul Offit

Longtime readers of this blog might be familiar with a certain regular commenter here who goes by the 'nym Sullivan and also blogs over at Left Brain Right Brain. Back in November, our old friend at the anti-vaccine propaganda crank blog, J.B. Handley himself, founder of the anti-vaccine crank activist group now fronted by Jenny McCarthy herself, Generation Rescue, posted a hilariously off base "outing" of Sullivan entitled Is Paul Offit's Wife Internet Troll/Autism Father "Sullivan"? Yes, that's right. Apparently J.B., with the investigative skills of Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau and…

In support of a diligent, relentless critique of creationism

Have a look at this video, done by Brian Rooney of ABC News Nightline, in which he follows around Billy Jack and Rusty Carter, two young earth creationists who are leading a school group through the Denver Museum of Nature and Science: A revise repost. Young earth creationists, or 'YEC's' believe the earth and all forms of life that exist today were created over a six day period 4004 B.C. In this piece, the YEC's are showing exhibits to the young students, asking them questions, teaching them, and so on. Rooney also interviews the two YEC's in the absence of the children, as well as Kirk…

More thoughts on pseudonymous writing

This is probably the last thing I'm going to say about pseudonymous blogging. I plan to leave the issue behind forever. Or at least for a few days. The "argument" between DrugMonkey - PhsyioProf - BlaBlaBlaBlog ("the clique") and me has become sterile and senseless, primarily because the clique has ruined it. PalMD over at Denialism Blog has noted that this is a terribly pedantic debate, and I would argue that it is only terribly pedantic on a good day. The other day's it is just terrible. By the way, PalMD's post is excellent, I highly recommend it. (But Pal, please see below, because…

Darwin and the Voyage: 04 ~ Darwin Gets his Wellies Wet

I became acquainted with an Englishman who was going to visit his estate ... more than a hundred miles [north] of Cape Frio. As I was quite unused to travelling, I gladly accepted his kind offer of allowing me to accompany him. And so was the case with a number of Darwin's excursions into the bush. Although he organized expeditions to the interior, he also took advantage of individuals or groups traveling one place or another, such as this Englishman, in order to carry out random acts of geologizing and opportunistic biologizing. And thus seven men, including Darwin and his Englishman,…

Taking a vaccine injury case to the Supreme Court

I haven't written much about this before, at least not in this context, but vaccine scares are nothing new, nor is execrably fear mongering journalism about vaccines. Those of you who read Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets or Arthur Allen's Vaccine probably know about a particularly egregious example of both that occurred in the early 1980s and concerned the DTP (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine. In 1982, the local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a special report entitled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. Indeed, Vaccine Roulette was the prototype of the muck-raking, sensationalistic sort…

Animal "rights" terrorism, revisited

I've written before about how animal rights cranks have started resorting to terroristic tactics in order to intimidate or frighten researchers into ceasing to do animal research. As you may guess, I have little but contempt for the Animal Liberation Front (is that anything like the People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front?) and their ilk, who routinely use lies such as the claim that no good has ever come of animal research or the utterly risible claim that we can now somehow replace the use of animals with computer or cell culture models, coupled with vandalism and intimidation…

Why are all the birds dying?

Over the last few days, there have been several reports of mass die-offs of birds, and one report of a fish die-off. These events have been linked, via suggestion but not evidence, to hail, lightning, fireworks, aircraft, aliens, each other, poison gases, and even pockets of oxygen free air. Many have suggested that there may be a cover up. What is the explanation for so many highly unlikely events happening in such a short time period? The answer may astound you: Nothing. According to available records, close to a hundred mass die-offs of birds occur each year in the US. The recent…

Nova: Becoming Human Hour Three: I'm speechless.

The first part of this documentary, including the preface and the first several minutes of the main body of the work, should be deleted. The writers and producers who put that part together should be captured, gutted, eviscerated, and their dried and salted remains staked to the front entrance of the Public Broadcasting System as a reminder for other writers and producers. Why? Here's why: What was said was pure teleology. At some point, sixty million years ago, the path that human evolution would follow was set. Some of the ancestral forms stayed on the path to us, others did not and…

Penfield's Homunculus and the mystery of phantom limbs

Phantom limbs are not a modern phenomenon. There are records of people "haunted" by amputated appendages dating all the way back to the sixteenth century. Consequently, we have more than 500 years worth of theories about what causes phantom limbs--some quite ingenious. After losing his right arm in the Napoleonic Wars, British naval hero Lord Nelson believed that his phantom arm was proof positive of the existence of a soul. After all, if his arm could outlive its corporeal existence, why not the rest of him? This was a soothing hypothesis. Most were not. For the uninitiated, phantom limbs…

"Vaccine Awareness Week": Barbara Loe Fisher dupes Delta Airlines into running an anti-vaccine PSA

The nearest major airport to me happens to be a Delta Airlines hub. Consequently, nine times out of ten, whenever I have to fly anywhere I'm usually stuck using Delta Airlines. It's actually not too bad, as major airlines go, better than some but about the same as most. Unfortunately, during the month of November, Delta's in-flight entertainment will leave much to be desired. The reason? Apparently, not satisfied with renting the CBS JumboTron in Times Square last year, this year the highly Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) somehow slithered their way into the in…

Can We Talk About Science? I Mean, Really?

You should never, ever criticize something a New Atheist says about science and religion. Never tell them maybe it's not the best idea in the world to just go on about science/evolution + religion in whatever way, at whatever time, in whatever manner, for whatever reasons. In fact, you cannot criticize the speech of New Atheists even if your goal is not to tell them to shut up, but to suggest that they might get their message across better and more effectively if they tried delivering it in a different manner than the one they've been using, because suggestions like that are CENSORSHIP and…

Religion, atheism, and fundamentalism

Thanks to Framing Science for pointing me to a debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan about religion and religious moderation. Shorter Sam Harris: If only religious people understood religion as well as atheists do, they'd be atheists like I am. Honestly, Harris writes "Moderate doubt—which I agree is an improvement over fundamentalist certitude in most respects—often blinds its host to the reality and consequences of full-tilt religious lunacy." While his own absolute rejection of faith gives him what insight into "full-tilt religious" … what, exactly? When Andrew Sullivan, of all…