Freethinker Sermonettes
revere | August 9, 2009Sadako Sasaki was 2 years old on August 6, 1945 when an atomic bomb destroyed her city, Hiroshima. Three days later, 64 years ago today, a second atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki. The radiation exposure from the Hiroshima bomb initiated a malignant transformation of Sadako's blood cells and ten years later she developed leukemia:
During her long hospital stays, Sadako began to fold paper cranes. According to Japanese legend, if an individual folds 1000 paper cranes, a wish will be granted. With each crane she folded, the wish was the same-to get well. October of 1955, Sasako folded her last…
revere | August 2, 2009I recently had a medical condition that is the only one I know of where the Literal Word of God actually is effective treatment. However, as an atheist I didn't have access to the Literal Word of God (the online version isn't effective) so I asked one of my colleagues, a licensed physician, to treat me, using a modality in which I had faith: heavy science. Unfortunately my faith was misplaced. The treatment failed after three tries (he insisted on using Harrison's Textbook as his treatment source, when I would have used Cecil and Loeb). Desperate, I finally took matters into my own hands in a…
revere | July 26, 2009We rarely put up the same thing twice here. Part of the fun is finding new absurdities. But by accident we again ran across this classic from the Australian Chaser's War on Everything and I laughed all over again. I know we did it before (2007), but the YouTube video was taken down. Luckily we found another one. Anyway, we've had a lot of new people come to the site since the swine flu virus decided we humans would make a suitable place to take up residence, so there's a good chance most readers didn't see it the first time. Even if you did, it's still funny. Or maybe it isn't:
revere | July 19, 2009People here tell me that I give too much time to knocking particular religions. I don't mean to. I mean to knock all of them. I mean, what's the alternative?
revere | July 12, 2009I don't think Noam Chomsky is a genius like Einstein or Newton but he is certainly the smartest person I've ever met. While I know him only casually, it is an acquaintanceship stretching over at least four decades. He once did me the great favor of teaching a class on the British Empiricists at my request. It was an intellectual tour de force. I don't know if my students were as blown away by those two hours as I was but they should have been. He likely doesn't remember it (it was 30 years ago), but it was typical of him. He is extraordinarily generous with his time and has done things like…
revere | July 5, 2009Turkey is supposedly a secular state but has been pitching toward theocracy in recent years. Whatever its military wants, much of its population is still fairly religious, so it's of interest that a bizarre new television game is about to debut there:
It sounds like the beginning of a joke: what do you get when you put a Muslim imam, a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk and 10 atheists in the same room?
[snip]
Contestants will ponder whether to believe or not to believe when they pit their godless convictions against the possibilities of a new relationship with the almighty on…
revere | June 28, 2009There is a misconception that because I am an atheist and poke fun at religion in this space every Sunday that I must have contempt for religion for its own sake. It's true I find many of the pious contemptible, but not because they are pious. You can be stupid in all sorts of ways and that's just one of them. Nor do I go after religion and the religious because they believe in one of the many gods people have made up. There are a lot of ways to be irrational. Look at Wall Street. No, I go after religion because it represents a particularly nasty form of tribalism, a set of beliefs that…
revere | June 21, 2009Blood on the streets in Teheran. Religion is not the only cause of this. But it's one of them Not Islam, particularly. Religion, itself. All religions have done this. Enough is enough.
revere | May 31, 2009In the view of New Scientist journalist Amanda Gefter, The Discovery Institute, high priests of Creationism as an allegedly rational enterprise, aren't really worried about Richard Dawkins. Presumably he's just a great fund raising device for them. The one who really scares the BeJesus out of them is biologist Francis Collins, the evangelical Christian rumored to be Obama's choice as next Director of NIH:
The Discovery Institute - the Seattle-based headquarters of the intelligent design movement - has just launched a new website, Faith and Evolution, which asks, can one be a Christian and…
revere | May 24, 2009I'm not a paleontologist, but my children consider me an authentic fossil. This week PLoS ONE published an important paper featuring a fossil find (lots of good coverage here at Scienceblogs; Brian at Laelaps has a characteristically thorough run down). The discovery of this primate skeleton has implications for the human evolutionary tree, something that hasn't escaped the attention of the inimitable Edward Current:
revere | May 17, 2009Maude was a 1970s TV sitcom (on CBS) featuring a feisty but occasionally overbearing middle aged woman of the liberal persuasion and her fourth husband, Walter Findlay. Walter owned an appliance store in a suburb of New York. The show was a spin-off of All in the Family, another 70s sitcom that was among the first to feature overtly political themes. In Maude's third season (1975) Walter "got religion," although it turns out he had an ulterior motive (to sell appliances to the church's new social center). In pursuit of this unacknowledged objective, he drags Maude (Bea Arthur) to church,…
revere | May 10, 2009[Freethinker Sermonette is a regular Sunday feature here.]
When you don't exist any more as a functioning mechanism, worrying about what happens to your parts is not something to fret much about. And indeed I don't much care.
Well, maybe I care a little bit. Truth be told, there are some things I don't want, something I realized only when I read about a company that will take 1 gram of my ashes (I would like to be burned, by the way) and fly this 1/28-th of an ounce of combustion products of my former self to the moon:
Leaving Earth to touch the cosmos is an experience few have ever known,…
revere | May 3, 2009[New readers: the Freethinker Sermonette is a weekly feature here. If atheism bothers you, you can skip it. But please don't complain it has nothing to do with science. In our view, it has everything to do with science. The rest of you, enjoy.]
PZ over at Pharyngula has the most appropriate post for this week's Freethinker Sermonette (plus it provides a nice link to scibling Nick Anthis's terrific post on the mechanism of a kind of antiviral resistance exhibited by the swine flu virus). I'll just settle for Bill Maher's little diatribe. The swine flu part starts at about 1:45 minutes:
revere | April 26, 2009[For our many new visitors, the Freethinker Sermonette is a regular Sunday feature here.]
With swine flu and everything, some people might think of turning to a Higher Power for protection. Head to the UK. Because The Force is with them. In fact, it's even on the Force. The police force:
Eight police officers serving with Scotland's largest force listed their official religion as Jedi in voluntary diversity forms, it has emerged.
Strathclyde Police said the officers and two of its civilian staff claimed to follow the faith, which features in the Star Wars movies.
The details were obtained in…
revere | April 19, 2009A kind reader (h/t geodef) has passed on to me a really juicy item from the National Catholic Reporter about Reiki. Since I'm not much interested in alternative medicine I don't really know what Reiki is, other than it involves using a Reiki therapist's hands to pass some kind of "life energy" into an ailing part. You can imagine why I wouldn't be interested. But can you imagine why the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine would be? At first glance, the answer is truly hilarious:
A declaration by the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine that Reiki is based on superstition and incompatible with…
revere | April 12, 2009Newsweek's Editor, Jon Meacham, himself a "liberal Episcopalian" and author of a book on the religious views of the Founders (American Gospel), has raised a large cloud of dust with a Newsweek cover story, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." I saw Chritopher Hitchens on TV refer to it as "thoughtful." I read it. It's OK. I guess anything in the mass media that takes a relatively clear-eyed look at the state of religion in the US would have to look relatively thoughtful, but I don't see much depth. My yawn isn't typical, however, as the declining and falling Christian talking heads…
revere | April 5, 2009So what do you do when a big organization insists on maintaining false information about you? You'd demand they remove it, right?
More than 100,000 people have recently downloaded "certificates of de-baptism" from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith.
[snip]
John Hunt, a 58-year-old from London and one of the first to try to be "de-baptised," held that he was too young to make any decision when he was christened at five months old.
The male nurse said he approached the Church of England to ask it to remove his name. "They said they had sought legal advice and that I should place an…
revere | March 29, 2009If it's true that atheism is a "religion" because it has a "non-belief system," there are a helluva lot of atheists out there, since there are a lot of religions and most people believe in at most one of them. Or as one wag put it, "We are all atheists. It's just that I believe in one less god than you." That's a fairly trivial observation and not the main point of this week's Sermonette, which is about Evolution -- in particular, The Origin of Specious. But most people will have no trouble making the inference: