godlessness
pharyngula | October 7, 2009It's not that funny. Anyway, here is this utterly hideous 'infographic' ('infographic' is the term they use when they torture information with a useless pile of graphic clutter) which tries to illustrate the changes in the numbers and percentages of various religious beliefs with a photo of a group of representatives of each faith in a bar, with a graph superimposed on each. The bar photo is busy, distracting, and adds nothing but visual noise to the data. However, one thing stands out.
The members of the different faiths are sitting around on bar stools. Guess who represents the godless? A…
pharyngula | October 5, 2009I'm supposed to remind you down-under people that the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, The Rise of Atheism, is taking place on 12-14 March in Melbourne. You have to sign up soon or you won't be in the uprising, and you'll find yourself trampled beneath the iron treads of our all-conquering robot army. Register now! The High Priest commands it!
You will also notice that, in the list of presenters — Richard Dawkins, Catherine Deveny, Phillip Adams, Taslima Nasrin, Peter Singer, PZ Myers, Dan Barker, Stuart Bechman, Sue-Ann Post, Kylie Sturgess, John Perkins, Tamas Pataki, Max Wallace, Russell…
grrlscientist | October 4, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, amputees, god, atheism, streaming video
Theists who try to respond to the question, Why doesn't God heal amputees? end up avoiding the question altogether and lecturing the questioner about a bunch of unasked questions. Could it be that they have no good answer for why their god refuses to heal amputees every single time, so they try to explain why they're god allows bad things to happen instead and hope we don't notice? This video discusses this observation and the reason why the question itself is important.
pharyngula | October 3, 2009Uh-oh. It seems membership in the Atheist Nexus Pharyngula group has been slipping, and has actually fallen behind Atheist News. I've been challenged to encourage more people to join Atheist Nexus and join the Pharyngula group, so we can take the #1 position.
You're probably all going to join Atheist News, too, and make this membership drive futile, aren't you?
pharyngula | October 3, 2009Thanks to Jim Lippard for taking this picture of two of the the Mr Deity crew:
Boy, I'm looking tired. It's been a long day, but I still have to get down to the Atheist Nexus party, and say hiya to the internet on the live stream they're running.
pharyngula | October 3, 2009They also enjoy a little something to drink.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover a bottle of OriginAle: Darwinian IPA and an imperial stout, Gudeløs, waiting for me when I checked in. The Danish contingent wants me to come out to their big meeting in June in Copenhagen…I am so there. Bribes were completely redundant.
The RDF is also giving the speakers bottles of merlot, nicely personalized with etching. Now I have to decide whether to drink it or save it…ah, I think I'll drink it and save the bottle.
In the non-drinkable category (really! That's not what we're all about, and I haven't…
pharyngula | October 3, 2009Just not a very good one, but you'll see for yourselves. I spent the morning in heaven, which consists of a well-lit white screen in Southern California, trying to master my lines for a future Mr Deity episode. That stuff is harder than it looks. We went through many takes while my brain was freezing up at inopportune moments — there's a reason not everyone is a movie star, that's for sure.
Anyway, "Lucy" and "Mr Deity" are actually Amy and Bryan, and they have a nice house with a couple of kids, two dogs, and a cat, and the episodes are filmed in the family room. I hope I haven't shattered…
pharyngula | October 2, 2009I mentioned that Dennett, Dawkins, and I had dinner together tonight. Someone — and all we know from the waiter was that it was a woman — sent a nice bottle of wine to our table. I know I speak for both Dan and Richard when I say thank you, anonymous lady! It was appreciated!
pharyngula | October 2, 2009One other exhibit in the hall was for Evolutionary Genealogy, an excellent site run by Len Eisenberg of Ashland, Oregon. I was in Ashland a while back and got a tour of the geology walk he installed there, which is phenomenal — look it up if you're ever in town.
He's selling posters and t-shirts to support his work in evolution education. One of the hooks he uses to get people interested is to talk about relationships in the great big family of life on earth, and he estimates the number of generations that separate us from any organism you might be interested in. He's got nice shirts that…
pharyngula | October 2, 2009Can I call it a ceremony? It wasn't very ceremonious at all.
We sat down first to watch a live video stream of Bill Maher's show, with special guest Richard Dawkins. It was good, it was funny, it was abrasive, and Maher didn't say anything crazy at all. Dawkins did not get much of an opportunity to say much, again; that's a problem with some of these shows, like Colbert, where the personality of the host leaves little room for the guests. Dawkins acquitted himself well, though.
After the Maher show, we got to listen to Mr Deity. This was pretty darned cool; not only did he show video clips,…
pharyngula | October 2, 2009I almost forgot! We started off the day with a panel discussion for the Dogma Free America podcast. It was me, Sunsara Taylor, and William B. Davis (the 'cigarette man' on the X-Files, skeptics!), which made for an interestingly diverse group. Check out the podcast when it is available.
pharyngula | October 2, 2009This was definitely the weirdest talk of the meeting so far.
Bisheff was discussing Tom Paine, that fascinating patriot and rabble-rouser of the American Revolution. Atheists love the guy; he wasn't one of us, since he was a deist, but he was a real firebrand in his opposition to organized religion. I think a historical analysis of this important figure in American history is the kind of thing we ought to encourage in freethought meetings; we aren't all about finding contradictions in the Bible and going rah-rah for science, you know.
Unfortunately, this was a very academic talk, following…
pharyngula | October 2, 2009I walked into this talk a little late, and was initially unimpressed. Richert was an atheist who fought in Viet Nam, and a lot of the talk was a rather rambling reminiscence with photos of the war; I didn't quite see the point. At the end, though, it was very affecting. He talked about incidents that made an impression on him: a friend who survived a harrowing firefight, and attributed his survival to a beneficent god; and a few days later, an innocent Vietnamese baby who was killed by shrapnel from a grenade. He made the point that there was no loving god who could have so cruelly thrown…
pharyngula | October 2, 2009As soon as you walk into the conference hall, you can't miss the big posters of a semi-nude Toni Marano. She's selling videos to help with pilates training, and also does "lifestyle intervention". I just have to say…good for her. It's an unfortunate fact that atheist conventions are sometimes a little too gray and stodgy, and she's bringing a little life to the meeting.
Along similar lines, I'm seeing more young people and more women in attendance; not enough of either, but still a good sign of a healthy, growing movement.
So what do you think? Should I buy one of her dvds?
pharyngula | October 2, 2009I've been very, very busy today, so I'm bringing you a few belated comments about the Atheist Alliance International convention. I have to be brief, unfortunately; tomorrow is another busy day, which will be starting with a session with Mr Deity, so I need to get some sleep sometime.
I met Russell Blackford! He's a very nice fellow, especially since he gave a talk I could agree with 100%. He was discussing the virtues of blasphemy; he actually made an argument that we have a kind of moral responsibility to blaspheme. He addressed a couple of ideas, actually; one was the issue of how we know…
pharyngula | October 2, 2009But there is a group, Alabama Atheists and Agnostics, which they can join, and I'm sure there are others around. Unfortunately, they seem to be limited in how they can advertise. When they tried to do the common campus practice of chalking — putting messages on the sidewalks to let students know what they were up to — they got an unfortunate response.
"While we were chalking somebody dumped water on what we were chalking, somebody spat at us," Sloan said. "But really, overall, most people were polite."
At approximately 6 p.m., AAA finished their chalking, Sloan said. By midnight, all the…
pharyngula | September 30, 2009It's that day when you're supposed to express your irreverence (hey, wait a minute, isn't that every day and every minute?), and if you think there is something you should do that's better than just wandering around uttering foul imprecations against gods and their priests, try supporting the Irish campaign to get their blasphemy law off the books.
But whatever is done in the spirit of weakening religious dogma is fine with me. I had some plans, but I may have to do a belated blasphemy…it's another day of travel for me.
pharyngula | September 28, 2009Premanand is a notable rationalist and publisher of Indian Skeptic magazine, and he is in a hospital dying of cancer as I write this. He is alert and fully aware of his condition, and he knows his death is imminent. He also knows that when he is dead, the contemptible ghouls of spiritualism and faith and desperate dogma will descend on his corpse to try and steal some of his dignity and integrity for their superstitions, and he has responded accordingly by composing a deathbed testimonial.
I, B. Premanand s/o late Sri Basava Prabhu, 80 years of age resident Chettipalayam Road, Podanur, sound…
pharyngula | September 27, 2009The tiff between Jerry Coyne and Robert Wright is getting even more hilarious. Wright is accusing Coyne of misrepresenting and misunderstanding his book, and is bringing up all these quotes from The Evolution of God to refute Coyne's claims. If you just read Wright, you'll have to agree — Coyne does say things that are directly contradicted by the text.
But then you miss the point. Coyne has a short reply in TNR and a longer reply on his blog where he quotes Wright several times saying exactly what Wright says he didn't say. Wright's true name seems to be Legion, and he contains multitudes.…
pharyngula | September 27, 2009We're getting advice from Christians now! Look and laugh at this list: Five things that would make atheists seem nicer. It's gone awry even with the title. I especially appreciate the word "seem," because Lord knows there's nothing that could make us actually nice, and obviously we need the suggestions of a Christian, since we're all such not-nice people. I should make a counter-list of "five things that would make Christians seem intelligent" — maybe then one of them would notice the nasty implications of this clown's title.
But I'm the wrong guy to do it. You see, I'm not nice, and proud of…