godlessness
pharyngula | March 12, 2011Tune in Sunday morning at 9am Central time to Atheist Talk radio, where Jen McCreight will be warming up the Minnesota crowd for her grand tour of the state the week after next.
pharyngula | March 11, 2011Are you going to the American Atheists National Convention in Des Moines, Iowa this April? Are you bringing the family? Are you concerned that the kids might get bored listening to Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, Matt Dillahunty, Elizabeth Cornwell, me, Greta Christina, and Hector Avalos?
There's an option: Camp Quest of Minnesota will take your 8-15 year olds off on a godless adventure for a day. Here are the details:
Camp Quest of Minnesota
Mini-Camp Event!
Join us for a fun-filled mini-camp occurring one day only during the 2011 American Atheist Convention in Des Moines. There…
pharyngula | March 10, 2011Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse are coming out with a book called Reasonable Atheism, and they argued for some form of accommodationism in a recent blog entry. I left a brief comment in which I pointed out that they had misrepresented the Gnu Atheists in one section. This has prompted a rebuttal to various atheist arguments against their position, which is fine, except…well, let me show you. Here's an excerpt of their long post.
Our claim, to be clear, is that the epistemic evaluation of beliefs is a task that is conceptually distinct from the epistemic evaluation of believers. Of course, the…
pharyngula | March 5, 2011You're all going to the World Atheist Convention in Dublin, Ireland on June 3-5, right? You wouldn't want to miss it, and it's an excuse to visit Dublin, anyway. Well, go to that link and get discounted tickets right now! Save £40!
I'm also supposed to remind you, if you're Irish, that there's a census coming up, and you should be sure to be honest about your religious affiliation. I'll be curious to see if the Catholic church is going to have a bit of a setback in this one.
pharyngula | March 4, 2011I am astounded. Alister McGrath wrote something that was correct!
Reason needs to be calibrated by something external. That's one of the reasons why science is so important in the critique of pure reason — a point that we shall return to in the next article.
Of course, it's only two sentences embedded in a great gross tangle of wrong, and he does accompany it with a threat to screw it all up in his next essay, but let's give him credit for finally, after years of pretentious mumbling, managing to say one thing I can agree with.
It is exactly right. I've had the experience of putting…
pharyngula | March 3, 2011You'll have to listen to the whole thing to be sure.
[video removed]
If you're not sure yet, maybe you should listen to it a few more times.
Sorry, everyone, that was an unauthorized release of Tim Minchin's music, so it had to come down. I hear he'll be touring the US sometime, so show up for that and ask him to play this song!
pharyngula | March 1, 2011You have two jobs to do:
In the 2011 census, be sure to tick "no religion" on the form. Don't play games, don't compromise, don't even call yourself a "secular humanist" — you're just diluting the influence of the godless.
Sign this petition to stop Rupert Murdoch. He's like a parasitic invasive species who will strangle all the native competitors.
See? That's not so hard.
pharyngula | February 23, 2011Polk County, Florida has a public school board that meets in the county school district auditorium to discuss the secular, governmental functions of running the public schools. Despite their purpose, though, they insist on opening with a prayer, a practice which has encountered some criticism and which they have dealt with evasively and dishonestly.
Earlier this month, the School Board began a new practice in which the board placed a disclaimer on the meeting agenda and held a prayer before the meeting officially began.
The policy change came after a letter from the Freedom From Religion…
pharyngula | February 16, 2011The latest furious argument going on in the atheist community is over this panel at an American Atheists meeting in Huntsville, Alabama. The subject was what atheist groups can do to attract more women, which is a good and important question. Kudos for asking it.
Here, go watch the video before you read further. Try to see the problem that got some people rather irate.
Done? OK. Now go read what Sharon Moss and Lyz Liddell had to say about it, their subsequent clarification, and Ophelia Benson's comments.
Listen. To. The. Women.
I've got a simple suggestion for my fellow men. Learn to shut up…
pharyngula | February 16, 2011Ah, that feels so good…Paula Kirby really cut loose on the believers yesterday. The topic was the compatibility of religion and freedom—they're about as compatible as religion and science.
Religion claims to set its followers free, while all the time holding them in thrall and insisting they kiss the hand of their jailer. There can be no true freedom so long as religion still keeps the human mind in shackles.
You really must read the whole thing. It's probably not a good idea to do it at work, though, because afterwords you'll want to snuggle up and fall asleep.
pharyngula | February 15, 2011My university is running a year long open seminar called Asking the Big Questions, in which speakers are brought in to more or less informally discuss ideas with an audience. This year's theme is "faith and spirituality".
Yuggh.
Anyway, they've brought in people to discuss Chinese philosophy, Wicca/paganism, Islam, etc. I think it's good that students are getting exposed to diverse ideas and that proponents are given an open forum in which to discuss them, even if what it means is that often bullshit is getting presented as serious thought. Let people listen and think.
Except now they're…
pharyngula | February 9, 2011I have received a request for volunteers to assist as subjects in a research project. I was disappointed; there are no exotic drugs, no catheters, no insane experimental surgeries that will turn you into a super-being with surprising powers beyond all mortal ken, but the fellow did manage to spell my name correctly, so it must be on the up-and-up. Contact Ben Myers (hey! That's how he got the spelling correct — he cheated!) if you're interested.
Dr. Myers,
I am an assistant professor of communication studies at USC Upstate. I am in the process of starting a research project and I was…
pharyngula | February 6, 2011Last week, I made a post criticizing poor atheist arguments, and in particular, citing atheists who fall back on the limp crutch of the dictionary to justify their beliefs. This made many people upset. I have been named idiot of the week for failing to understand the meaning of atheism, and I've got one wanking manic obsessive on twitter insisting that I must make a public apology for daring to try to redefine the meaning of the word "atheism". Commenters are declaring that they are proud to be Dictionary Atheists.
They're all wrong. I'm not redefining atheism, nor am I declaring the…
pharyngula | February 6, 2011Jerry Coyne has made a strong observation, and is also hinting at an alternative, about the way the AAAS panders to religion. Once again, they're having a session at the national meeting in February dedicated to the accommodationist view, with a one-sided slate of speakers all preaching about the compatibility of science with superstition. We're all getting a little tired of this, I think; it's the same old story where a bunch of credulous apologists get to trample freely all over science in the name of putting up a façade of simpering friendship with religion, all in the name, they say, of…
pharyngula | February 6, 2011Really, we don't need them, but the best ones can be amusing.
Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.
pharyngula | February 3, 2011I forgot to mention that I did attend the local screening of The Nature of Existence, the new movie from Roger Nygard in which he traveled the world asking various people grand questions about the meaning of life, etc. It was entertaining, and it is subtly subversive of religious views, so I will recommend it. But I do have a few reservations that I was also able to bring up in the Q&A after the movie.
One thing that was alarmingly obvious when watching it is that almost all the gurus and authorities and religious figures that he interviewed were male. There were exceptions — the 12 year…