godlessness
pharyngula | April 25, 2009Sunday morning at 9am Central, tune in to Atheists Talk radio for an interview with Sunsara Taylor of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who will be talking about the book, Away With All Gods!.
pharyngula | April 21, 2009The SSA is having a fund raiser. This is an excellent and fast-growing organization that promotes rational thought on college campuses — if you've got a few dollars to spare, give them a little. It's money well spent, since this organization has been marvelously successful in organizing student groups.
pharyngula | April 21, 2009Ah, what can be better than a good night's sleep, a hot shower, a cup of coffee, and finding a book review by AC Grayling on a cool spring morning? In this case, it's not so much a review as a cheerful dismemberment and deposition of the fragmented corpse into an acid bath. John Polkinghorne has written another of those books of religious apologetics that tries to claim the privilege of scientific thought while not engaging any.
John Polkinghorne's former student Nicholas Beale runs a website on behalf of his mentor, on which questions about religion, and the relation of religion to science,…
pharyngula | April 18, 2009Humanists, humanists, humanists. Sunday's Atheists Talk radio is all about secular humanism and the big AHA meeting in June. Tune in at 9am Central time.
pharyngula | April 17, 2009I'm on a list of the 50 greatest atheists of all time, which is nice, but a little uncomfortable. I really don't belong on a list with Feynman and Turing and Russell, you know.
It's also a strange list that mentions a few old Greeks at the beginning and then leaps right into the late 19th century and present. It's only nominally "all time", I'm afraid.
pharyngula | April 14, 2009August Berkshire also went to Ken Miller's talk at St Catherine's, and has now posted his review. It's familiar: Miller gives a great science talk, and then when he starts talking about religion, everyone starts wondering where his skepticism went.
pharyngula | April 14, 2009Mr B and Miz B sat upon their porch, watching the New Atheist parade go by.
It was quite a large parade, chaotic, disorganized, and enthusiastic, more Mardi Gras than Macy's. There were clowns and jugglers, serious men with bullhorns making serious speeches, small groups chanting anti-clerical slogans, people just out dancing in the streets, and the occasional well-designed float flaunting an anti-religion or pro-science message. They even had a big red steam-powered Noise Machine. Scarlet A's were waved on banners and flags and t-shirts. Some participants looked angry, most were just happy…
grrlscientist | April 12, 2009tags: Jesus Christ, The Life of Brian, easter, humor, satire, religion, holidays, holidaze, streaming video
This streaming video is from the British series Not the nine o'clock news. It comments on the controversy created by the Biblical story about Jesus Christ and how it is really a cheap rip-off of Monty Python's popular film, The Life of Brian [3:24]
pharyngula | April 11, 2009Your Sunday morning hour with the radio at 9am Central time will feature anthropologist David Eller on Atheist Talk radio. Learn about Atheist Advanced!
pharyngula | April 11, 2009I have encountered this pathetic rhetorical game so often…it's one of Ray Comfort's favorite tools. Christian goes up to a stranger, and says he'd like to play a "what if" game with you. What if there was a god, and the ten commandments were his rules? Do you agree that if they're real, you'd deserve to go to hell? But look, Jesus says you don't have to, if you believe in him! Isn't that nice of him? It's all a stupid con — they ask you to hypothetically accept their premises, then lead you through a script which they demand that you answer in agreement at every step, and then at the end of…
pharyngula | April 9, 2009I'm dumber for even listening to this: Christopher Hitchens in a debate with FIVE blithering theologians (one of them was the so-called moderator). Hitchens was excellent, but the four other guys…Jebus. They all trot out these ridiculous arguments about a first cause and fine tuning and oooh, the historical evidence for Jesus is so good. Lee Strobel, in particular, is a flaming fraud and liar.
William Lane Craig was interesting, but stupid. His argument was that people couldn't have a debate if they were the mere product of chemical reactions, because chemical reactions just fizz, they don't…
pharyngula | April 6, 2009Isn't it obvious? It's all the atheist's fault! Some goober named David Lebedoff has an article in the Strib that claims that the whole source of the problem is all those amoral, atheistic people who don't believe in an afterlife.
If you only go around once, then the main thing is to have fun. If you start by admitting that from cradle to tomb it isn't that long of a stay, then life is a cabaret, old chum, and so, by the way, is Wall Street. There is a bumper sticker favored by some of the recently rich that proclaims "he who dies with the most toys wins." This is indeed the moral philosophy…
pharyngula | April 6, 2009Rabbi Avi Shafran is a columnist who, to my mind, represents the very worst of religious dogma. He often writes about "morality", bemoaning the horrid state of godlessness, but his morality is little more than the rote obedience of the dogmatically orthodox. His usual complaint is that atheism removes the moral compass provided by a god — that one can believe that any arbitrary thing is good if you're an atheist.
Now he has written another bogus argument that shows the exact opposite: if you use religion, you can justify anything. It's a very strange piece, a study in contrasts.
On the one…
pharyngula | April 4, 2009It's a grim subject this week: Atheists Talk radio will be discussing assisted suicide at 9am Sunday morning.
pharyngula | April 1, 2009I may have to think about retiring in 15 years or so, and I may just have to move to New Zealand. The trends are all going in the right direction.
There has been a sharp rise in the number of New Zealanders with no religious affiliation, new research shows.
In a study by the University, 40 per cent of respondents say they have no religious affiliation compared to 29 per cent 17 years ago.
Just over a third of New Zealanders describe themselves as religious.
Sounds so lovely. Of course, it's not perfect yet:
Fifty-three per cent say they believe in God (although half of those say they have…
grrlscientist | March 30, 2009tags: books, memoir, religion, godlessness, losing faith, William Lobdell
Unlike most people who were raised in a religious household and grew up surrounded by religious people, I never experienced a "crisis of faith" since I never believed there was a god any more than I believed there was a Santa Claus or a Tooth Fairy. However, some of my friends are religious and because I value them as people, I have listened to them from time to time as they pondered aloud the deep questions that all of us face in the wee hours or after experiencing a significant loss or other life-changing event -- the…
pharyngula | March 30, 2009Last night's Family Guy featured an unsurprising revelation about a character.
(via Sunny Skeptic)
The full episode is on Hulu.
pharyngula | March 29, 2009Oh, no. Richard Lynn, the fellow infamous for trying to link intelligence and race, is in the news again, this time trying to claim a causal relationship between atheism and intelligence.
"Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ," Lynn told the Times Higher Education magazine. "Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God."
I am always so tempted to simply accept this kind of claim — it's…
grrlscientist | March 29, 2009tags: religion, atheism, humor, streaming video
Eternal purity requires eternal vigilance against the devil's hand. Here are some practical tips to keep you from "playing with your Genesis" [5:02]
pharyngula | March 28, 2009Don't miss this one! At 9am Sunday morning, Sean Carroll will be on Atheists Talk radio.