godlessness
pharyngula | July 17, 2007It's never too early to start advertising: Skatje is starting up a new campus organization next fall, with another student, Collin Tierney, as co-chair. The group is called the Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists - Morris Chapter, and if you're an interested UMM student, they'd like you to join the facebook group at that link. The plan is to start the fall term with a respectable number of potential members, have weekly meetings, and develop a plan for education and outreach and just plain having fun.
I think Skatje and Collin are planning to have open meetings, so you don't even have to…
pharyngula | July 17, 2007The new burned-over district lies in the wreckage of Russia — take a look at the new weird cults flowering in Siberia. Jesus is hanging out on a hilltop there, even.
There's something strange in the human brain that, when people are uncertain and stripped of security and bewildered by too much change, they try to find refuge in any nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it's said confidently and is reinforced by social pressures. This is a real phenomenon that's cropped up again and again in human history, and it's sad to see it rising again.
People have been talking a lot about these…
pharyngula | July 15, 2007You better watch out, because Skatje is glaring at us, and she shoots laser beams out of her eyes.
pharyngula | July 15, 2007This week, I tossed off a casual, flippant comment that launched a thousand ineffectual bastinados. I described a map that purported to show the frequency of religious adherents in the US this way:
It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed
Fury, outrage, and massive snits ensued. Blogs were riven to their very foundations by anger — "How dare Myers insult me…I am offended!" — and the sun was…
pharyngula | July 8, 2007I'm home from our vacation, and our painfully tiring redeye flight from Seattle, and I get a treat right as I step through the door: a copy of Natalie Angier's The Canon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) arrived in the mail while I was away. What did I do? Right after we got all the luggage into the house, I flopped down on the bed with it and read it until the lack of sleep caught up with me — and it's good enough that I actually made it through the first two chapters before passing out. It's a passionate and enthusiastic survey of basic principles in science, and it's fun to read.
Then I discovered…
pharyngula | July 5, 2007Here's a curious poll: "If marriage is a sacred institution authored by God, should atheists be barred from marrying?"
One answer is sweeping the vote (and I don't think sending the Pharynguloid horde over there will change the trend), but Austin is making an interesting point. If gay people can't marry because their union violates some religious requirement, then shouldn't atheist marriages also be invalid? It seems to me that if you are arguing that marriage is a divine sacrament — and obviously, I don't think it is — then a consistent fundamentalist ought to be arguing for the denial of…
pharyngula | July 3, 2007A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend's father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!
At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.
It's ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday…
pharyngula | June 29, 2007At last, I get it. I understand what "framing" is. It's pandering to the status quo, the petty conventions, and the bigotry of the majority. It means don't rock the boat, don't be different, don't stand up for your beliefs. It means CONFORM. You will get other people to support you if you just abandon your principles and adopt theirs. That's the clear message I get from Matt Nisbet now.
Forget it. If this is "framing," it's useless—it's a tool for opposing change.
The first thing that Nisbet and DJ Grothe do is pummel a straw man for a bit. Atheism is not a civil rights issue, they say, it's…
pharyngula | June 28, 2007Australia is trying to show us up again, aren't they? Their 2006 census shows that religious believers have dropped to 79% of the population, a substantial decline from 83% in the the 2001 census. And from previous data, it looks like an accelerating trend. Come on, America, we have a godlessness gap! We have to catch up!
Of course, I'd be even more impressed with Australia if I didn't have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't caused by a rapid growth of rabid, militant, middle-of-the-road fundamentalist agnostics.
pharyngula | June 28, 2007The Washington Post had a 'conversation' on a very stupid question:
Do you believe in heaven or hell? If not, why not? If so, who's going there and how do you know?
It's a stupid question, because the only sensible answer is "no" and "because there is no evidence for it, nobody has been to either place and come back to tell us about it, and everyone who makes claims about them is using them as a carrot-and-stick to compel you to obey them". Unfortunately, What the WaPo did was gather a bunch of gullible theobabblers, and it's a collection of the most absurdly pious garden mulch this side of…
pharyngula | June 25, 2007I'm sorry to say that Stanley Fish is treading the same futile path that every defender of religion follows: there's the knee-jerk detestation of atheism, then there's the argument that atheism is nothing but faith itself, and now he's reduced to impotent handwaving about a sublime but unknowable god, and therefore religion is … what? He's not clear. He seems to be saying we can't criticize religion because we have imperfect knowledge of a perfect being.
It's very silly stuff. These are the desperate excuses of a theologian who wants to believe but knows he's got nothing of substance, so he…
pharyngula | June 24, 2007I'll be speaking at the Minnesota Atheists on 22 July, on "There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations
for the Mind and Religious Belief". Michael Egnor is welcome to stop on by.
pharyngula | June 24, 2007Well, cool — this post, "We stand awed at the heights our people have achieved", has been translated into German as "Die Höhen, die unsere Leute erreichten," in case you're more comfortable with that language.
pharyngula | June 21, 2007Catch this Hitchens interview while it's still available. He's lovably irascible. My favorite part:
Interviewer: Do you think you would win more converts to atheism if you were less dismissive of religious…
Hitchens: I have no idea, but I can't be other than dismissive. I hear someone like that sheep-faced loon from [garbled...a previous caller] I have to say it sounds like bleating to me, and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I'm not a sheep and I don't need a shepherd and what shepherds do when…
pharyngula | June 20, 2007Two videos with surprising similarities: Richard Dawkins and Digby. Both discuss being vilified by conservative forces for being "strident", and both explain that it's all about passion for a cause—Digby for progressive politics, Dawkins for godlessness.
pharyngula | June 16, 2007Don't even try to tell me that science and religion are compatible — Phil has just encountered a perfect example of why they aren't. He's irritated that the jury at a trial used prayer to help them come to a decision, and he comes right out and says it: prayer doesn't work. That's an empirical and logical conclusion, and the efficacy of prayer is something that has constantly failed any test, and further, has been the subject of some egregiously bad testing. Prayer is an excellent example of religion trying to claim their metaphysic has real world consequences, and it has been consistently…
pharyngula | June 14, 2007Well, you know it's not going to be a good article when it's found on Newsweek's goofy "Beliefwatch" section, and it has this kind of inauspicious beginning:
It may not be fair to call what's happening in the atheist community a backlash, since atheists have always been and continue to be one of the smallest, most derided groups in the country.
Right. And since we're a minority and we're derided, why, we must be wrong! Of course, the facts are on the author's side—we are a minority. We need to grow. I think we'd all admit to that. What's weird right now is how journalists report it.
In a…
pharyngula | June 12, 2007
When the Buddhas of Bamyan were dynamited, it wasn't an atheist who lit the fuse. These modern atheists that have stirred up so much resentment among the apologists for religion are not destroyers who seek to demolish the past or who want to advance a destructive ideology — they aren't philistines who reject literature and art and music, and they aren't monsters who will exterminate people to achieve their ends. We aren't out to eradicate the world of ideas or obliterate the vestiges of our religious history in art and architecture, although we have been accused of such nefarious plans; such…
pharyngula | June 10, 2007The Carnival of the Godless is full of new commandments I'm supposed to follow, but that seem to be getting broken at a frenetic pace. We don't need any more; I have a suggestion for the Christians. Pick one of the good ones in the original 10. Not an easy one, like "Thou shalt loaf about on Sunday," but one that might actually make a difference in the world. I suggest "Don't kill."
You'd think they would have gotten the message by now that they're doing something wrong.