godlessness
pharyngula | April 5, 2007
Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that "many scientists don't really know what they're up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians" — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We're also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It's more than a cosmetological failure, though;…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007It's not nice to annoy a fellow atheist, but once again we've got someone bound and determined to promote himself by dividing atheists into artificial camps and slamming the side with which he doesn't identify. Greg Epstein, a "humanist chaplain" (whatever the hell that contradictory concatenation means), decided to disavow those horrible people like Dawkins and Harris as "fundamentalist atheists". Outrageensued.
Ho-hum.
Whenever I see someone jabbering about "fundamentalist atheists", a combination of terms that makes no sense at all and immediately reveals the speaker's ignorance of both…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2007According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 3% of Americans claim to be atheists. I know a lot of atheists, so I am wondering if I know all of the atheists in America? Do they all know each other?
Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll's respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam. Nearly half (48 percent) of the…
pharyngula | March 29, 2007We win! In a debate in London pitting Hitchens, Dawkins, and Grayling against a team of theists, Neuberger, Scruton, and Spivey, the audience voted solidly in favor of those obnoxious atheists.
I'm not sure what the consequences are, but it may mean that every Christian in England has to leave the country. Expect mobs of pious Anglicans to start washing up on beaches in Virginia and Pennsylvania any day now.
pharyngula | March 29, 2007Terry Gross's Fresh Air program had an interview with Dawkins yesterday — it's not too late to listen to it, you can either get it by way of streaming video, or download the Fresh Air podcast. Also, today she's interviewing Francis Collins, which could be very interesting, in a gruesome, messy, semi-painful way.
pharyngula | March 28, 2007Aww, I'm flattered; Richard Dawkins read aloud part of my Courtier's Reply in his recent debate with Alister McGrath. You can listen to it online—I think I'm going to have to have Dawkins read all of my posts aloud, since he makes them sound so much better.
If you want to listen to just the section where he reads my article, here's a 2.1 mp3 file.
pharyngula | March 26, 2007Juicy stuff from AC Grayling, who writes on the futility of faith and why we're all getting a bit peevish:
Religion has lost respectability as a result of the atrocities committed in its name, because of its clamouring for an undue slice of the pie, and for its efforts to impose its views on others.
Where politeness once restrained non-religious folk from expressing their true feelings about religion, both politeness and restraint have been banished by the confrontational face that faith now turns to the modern world.
This, then, is why there is an acerbic quarrel going on between religion…
pharyngula | March 26, 2007Greta Christina has an excellent and lengthy defense of the idea behind the Blasphemy Challenge— that exercise on YouTube that received a lot of criticism from certain quarters because it wasn't serious or respectful enough. She gets it exactly right: that was the point, to show that religion receives a lot of unwarranted deference. If you're one of those people who got irate because the challenge mocked and ridiculed religion, thanks for making the case for us: your irritation is what was being pointed to as part of the problem.
pharyngula | March 24, 2007The residents of Fargo have had to put up with one of those Ten Commandments monuments for a long time (well, "put up with" may be the wrong phrase—it's North Dakota, after all). Now in a smart move, the Red River Freethinkers, who have to be especially canny to live in the Dakotas, are proposing a fair alternative to getting rid of the dodgy nonsense of the Ten Commandments: they're proposing to put up their own monument to secularism.
Once it goes up, we ought to start a betting pool on which one gets vandalized first, and how long it will be.
pharyngula | March 20, 2007H. Allen Orr and Daniel Dennett are tearing into each other something fierce over at Edge, and it's all over Orr's dismissive review of Dawkins' The God Delusion. It's a bit splintery and sharp, but the core of Orr's complaint, I think, is that he's unimpressed with Dawkins' 'Ultimate 747' argument, which is basically that postulating an immensely complicated being to explain the creation of an immensely complicated universe doesn't actually explain anything and is self-refuting — if you need an intelligent superbeing to create anything complex, then the superbeing itself is an even greater…
pharyngula | March 18, 2007Have you ever noticed that just about any atheist article will get labeled as a "rant", no matter how thoughtful it might be? I guess that means you'll find the Carnival of the Godless #62 loaded to the gills with howling, savage, unbridled ranting.
I like it.
pharyngula | March 15, 2007Wow. Pete Stark has been raked over the coals by the Christian Seniors organization—what a wicked man he must be.
"It is sad but not surprising that the current Congress has produced this historic first—one of its members has denied God," said CSA Executive Director James Lafferty. "The liberals in Congress want to throttle any school child who bows his or her head in prayer, but they want to establish a right for liberals to bash Christians and berate God around the clock.
Well, you know there is a real shortage of schoolchildren to throttle. If we liberals went at it at the pace we wanted…
pharyngula | March 14, 2007Here's a good interview with Brian Flemming, the documentarian behind The God Who Wasn't There, who also irritated a lot of prissy reactionaries who have too-tight pants with his blasphemy challenge on youtube.
Simon Owens: Do you think the "blasphemy project" is an effective way for atheists to come out of the closet?
Brian Flemming: The Blasphemy Challenge has certainly encouraged quite a few godless folks to unequivocally state that they aren't afraid of Satan. I think it's hilarious that this is actually a controversial statement to make -- as if Satan were not a purely mythological…
pharyngula | March 13, 2007The demonization of Pete Stark begins. Wouldn't you know it would be Michelle Malkin ("imprisonment for being brown is OK!"), and it would be in WorldNutDaily (your daily source of raving right wing lunacy), and she's appalled that he has called someone a "fruitcake" in the past. Why, that's a homophobic slur! He's as bad as Ann Coulter!
She's really reaching. I've never heard "fruitcake" used against gays, although I imagine practically every word has been used as an insult against them—I've mainly heard it to express one's opinion of another's sanity, as in "nutty as a fruitcake". It's too…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2007At first glance, I thought this book was too slim to accomplish its stated goal, but I was wrong. In God: The Failed Hypothesis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), Victor J. Stenger critically examines both empirical data and scientific models for the existence of a supreme, transcendant being -- God -- and finds them to be inadequate.
Stenger begins by defining God according to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic scriptures and asserting that the existence of God is a hypothesis that can be tested scientifically. Thus, as with all hypotheses, this allows us to make predictions of what we should…
pharyngula | March 12, 2007So today we learn that Rep. Pete Stark admits to being godless.
There is only one member of Congress who is on record as not holding a god-belief.
Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a senior member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, Chair of the Health Subcommittee, and member of Congress since 1973, acknowledged his nontheism in response to an inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America.
Although the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, the Coalition's research reveals that Rep. Stark is the first open nontheist in the history of the Congress. Recent polls show…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2007This streaming video (below the fold) boldly declares that you ain't no monkey's great grandson, by Ron Zimmerman.
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tags: streaming video, evolution, creationism
grrlscientist | March 5, 2007Are humans hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen? Certainly, many great thinkers believe this is the case. "A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies," Charles Darwin wrote in his book,The Descent of Man, "seems to be universal."
Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
According to anthropologists, religions that share certain supernatural features -- belief in a noncorporeal God or gods…
pharyngula | March 5, 2007Here's another special interest wiki: Athpedia, die säkulare Enzyklopädie. It's a wikipedia for secularists, and as you might guess from the description, it's so far all in German. There isn't a lot there right now, so make it grow; a moment's browse with my slow and clumsy recollections of German suggests that it isn't a bad site—at least the articles don't read like they were scribbled by third-graders and cribbed from some bottom-tier homeschool rag—but it clearly needs more contributors. More English would be helpful, too, but I mustn't be a language imperialist, I know.