Freethinker Sermonettes
revere | November 2, 2008The headline over at The Raw Story (a liberal news site) is: "GOP senator lobs false atheism smears in desperate attempt to hold seat." So Liddy Dole, the absentee Senator from North Carolina, thinks that the way to save her seat is to "smear" her opponent as "godless."
Her opponent, Kay Hagan, will have none of it. "I believe in God," says Sunday School Teacher Hagan:
OK. I get it. In North Carolina you better believe in God or you can't be elected. Probably not just North Carolina, either. Almost anywhere in these United States. Those are the Rules. Time for some New Rules:
revere | October 26, 2008The world has had its fill of religion-inspired terrorists. But exactly who is a "terrorist"? In my book, a terrorist is someone who knowingly kills, maims or creates terror in innocent people for a political purpose. The political purpose might be to change a government (from secular to theocratic, from one economic system to another, from colonial rule to nation state, etc.) or change a policy (stop a war, stop abortion) or to take revenge. Most people only want to employ the term to those who kill, maim or create terror for reasons they disapprove of. I'm not in that camp. If you knowingly…
revere | October 19, 2008This hilarious invocation by an evangelical preacher at a McCain rally in Davenport, Iowa, October 11, 2008, has had plenty of exposure but I couldn't resist replaying its Fatuous Goodness one more time. The argument is that God is All Powerful, so He can make McCain win. But if He doesn't make McCain win, then anyone who prayed to Allah, "Hindu", Buddha, etc., for Obama to win will get the idea their God did the trick and the True God's rep will suffer. It doesn't make any logical sense. But would you expect it to? It's religion. It doesn't have to make sense:
revere | October 5, 2008Mrs. R. and I are in the Big Apple this weekend. We got in late so after settling in we sauntered out for a "light" dinner. In my east coast city there are plenty of fancy restaurants, even some celebrity chefs. They're too expensive for us at home (anyway, Mrs. R. is a terrific cook) and in The City crank that price up a notch. But what we can't get in our city of residence is NY Deli. Our city is deli illiterate. I used to live in Manhattan and I know what I'm missing. So we popped into the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue and I ordered my "usual": Corned beef on light rye, side of potato…
revere | September 28, 2008Mirabile dictu. This is not the place you usually read about miracles, but I have to say this one is pretty convincing. To me, anyway. These two guys were working on drywall down in Florida and suddenly this image appeared to them. They've been doing this for 30 years and never seen anything like it, and frankly neither have I (of course I've never worked on drywall). The fact that they misidentified it as Jesus notwithstanding, it is quite obvious it is the face of Charles Darwin:
Here's the clip from the Florida TV station (where else?) so you can see for yourself:
WKRG.com Video
There…
revere | September 21, 2008There are creationists and creationists. One of those creationists (which one?) wants to be just a 72 year old's cardiac arrhythmia away from being President of the United States. It would be historic, although more historic for the rest of us than for the potentially almost President, Governor Sarah Palin, because her notion of the length of historical record is so much shorter. Like many Pentecostals, Governor Palin is said to be a Young Earth Creationist, someone who thinks the earth is only 7 thousand years old and that humans walked alongside dinosaurs. At least that's what one of her…
revere | September 14, 2008I'm getting tired of Governor Palin. Maybe I'll move on to her running mate, what's his name. The serial liar. McCain. But before we leave the Governor, this being Sunday Sermonette and all, here's Bill Maher on the subject:
Bill Maher aside, what do we know about Palin's religious views and how they might affect us in the real possibility she becomes President should the aging McCain die or become incapacitated, say by a fifth return of his cancer:
When asked directly about the "God's plan" comment by Charlie Gibson on the Nightline interview I must say she showed herself as a remarkably…
revere | September 7, 2008Naturally I find Sarah Palin's mixing religion and politics odious. Whether it's believing that the War in Iraq is a task from God or that Alaska's young people should pray that "God's will" be done in constructing her preferred version of a natural gas pipeline or thinking that it's fine to teach Creationism in science class, this is a person who feels untroubled and confident about the rightness of her personal religious views. Moreover she believes in the literal interpretation of the bible. So naturally I find Sarah Palin's religion and politics odious. What's to like?
I don't care about…
revere | August 31, 2008Maybe it says "In God We Trust" on our currency, but it's a financially risky strategy, as the "Christian-centered" Georgia-based Integrity Bank discovered as it came apart at the seams last week:
The Alpharetta-based bank, which opened its doors in 2000 with a Christian-centered philosophy, is the 10th U.S. bank to fail this year and the second Georgia institution to fail in the past 12 months.
As ranked by its total assets of $1.1 billion, Integrity becomes the third-largest bank failure in Georgia history.
[snip]
Integrity is the second financial services firm with a Christian-centered…
revere | August 24, 2008Was John McCain really getting into the religious weeds when he announced "we are all Georgians" and noting that Georgia was "one of the first nations on earth to convert to Christianity...it's been part of the grand sweep that compromises Western civilization"? Or was it just an addled and clueless persona, yearning to breathe free? Here's what Mark Silk had to say about it over at Spiritual Politics, a blog from Trinity College on religion and the 2008 election:
But seriously, as long as we're choosing allies based on their priority in embracing Jesus, can I put in a good word for Armenia,…
revere | August 17, 2008There are some things that cannot be undone. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't flush the Holy Spirit once you have been Baptized. No, wait!
Belief in God symbolically evaporated when more than a hundred atheists were "de-baptized" with a blow dryer yesterday.
Organizers of the event in Westerville, described as a "coming out party" for atheists, agnostics and humanists, served root beer and crackers with peanut butter and honey to top off the late afternoon ceremony.
"Do you agree that the magical potency of today's ceremony…
revere | August 10, 2008It's really hard to know what to say about the following clip. As a doctor I am appalled by it. It is the kind of preaching that leads to tragedy. It might seem like an extreme case, but I don't think it is. It shows a preacher telling his congregation doctors and medicine won't do them any good, only do them harm. He doesn't hold out the promise God will heal them. He instead promotes a passive fatalism implicit in the idea of a God that is all powerful and all wise and everything happens according to his plan. Including your cancer and your death. End of story.
Well, not exactly the end.…
revere | August 3, 2008Birmingham, England is not a little country burg. The Greater Birmingham area has about a million people. It also has a city council to run the place and a computer web access monitoring system to help the people who run the people who run the place "control internet access." Not so unusual. Mrs. R. works in a state health department where they seem obsessed with preventing staff from accessing sites not related to work, although a lot of sites get blocked inappropriately because the filters are "stupid." She has had her access to CDC blocked on occasion because some word triggered a block (e…
revere | July 27, 2008Maybe it's my imagination, but the great desecration in cracker-gate died down more quickly than I would have imagined. That's some kind of internal imagining contradiction, I suppose, quite appropriate for talking about religious questions, which themselves seem to be endless sources of linguistic tangles. When it comes to linguistics, no better place than The Language Log, where I found a tiny disquisition on Good and Evil connected with a new word (for me), "to linquify":
We need a new term for what is going on; although I don't in general think you can only grasp concepts that you have…
revere | July 20, 2008I ran across this on a linguistics blog. Their interest was in the origin of the phrases, "Blackjack. No tagbacks" in the last panel. The consensus was it refers to school yard games where you can't turn around and just tag the tagger in a game of tag. It makes sense in this context. And it's the only thing in the three panels that does make sense. Because if you think through what's being said here, it is the "first mover" argument, so beloved of creationists, flipped on its head and applied to an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic God:
I put it to you: if there were no people, then where…
revere | July 13, 2008There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion. (Pharyngula)
And there are days when it is agony to have to defend a Scibling on the flimsy grounds that, well, he's right, isn't he? PZ Myers at Pharyngula has raised the predictable shit storm by expressing appropriate outrage at the Christian Taliban's (Florida division) attempt to ruin the life (and limb) of a University of Central Florida student who didn't let a communion wafer dissolve in his…
revere | June 29, 2008This week we lost George Carlin. I only saw him once in person, sometime in the early seventies or maybe late sixties. He was already wildly popular and Mrs. R. and I weren't too flush with disposable income so we wound up sitting in the stratosphere of a gigantic theater, stuffed to the gills with Carlin fans. He was a tiny figure on stage from our altitude, but up close and personal with his hilarious routine. While electronic traces of that hilarious presence remain on YouTube and recordings of one kind or another (I still have "Class Clown" on vinyl), George Carlin the person is gone.…
revere | June 22, 2008Since it's a lazy summer weekend (the first of the summer, astronomically speaking -- that is, if you believe the earth goes around the sun), I was lazily contemplating some of the dumbass things said about one of my sciblings, PZ Myers, by another one of my sciblings, Matt Nisbet. The clip Matt embedded is no longer available (taken down at the insistence of the copyright holder; if it's so bad for the pro-science side, why did they take it down?), but it seems to be the infamous "religion is like knitting" clip. Since that clip is still up on YouTube, here it is again, in case you missed it…