godlessness
pharyngula | March 4, 2007I got a request for a children's book on atheism—something to counter the usual sunday school tripe kids are fed, a version of The God Delusion for the younger set. Offhand, I couldn't think of a thing. So, I thought, I'd turn to the collective wisdom and see if anyone out there knows of one or two.
You know, there is a niche here—all of us who have raised kids have wished that somewhere there was a primer on skeptical thinking, the scientific method, and religious criticism that was appropriate for early readers or junior high school kids. If you can't think of one that's already been done,…
pharyngula | March 1, 2007Robert M. Sapolsky is one of my favorite science writers — if you haven't read Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), A Primate's Memoir(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), or Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), I suggest you get off your butt right now and visit your library or bookstore. He's a primatologist who studies the endocrinology and behavior of baboons, but he always presents his work in terms of the human condition. We aren't so…
grrlscientist | February 26, 2007Below the fold is a video that is meant to be provocative. On one hand, I agree with what the kid is saying, but on the other hand, I find it repulsive that the adults involved with the making of this video are comfortable with using a kid to say such things. Why hide behind a kid? Why not take credit for your own opinions and words?
Rhetorical response from Bill O'Reilly ... *yawn* .. why wouldn't he just ignore this, instead of drawing more attention to the video by ranting about it?
pharyngula | February 26, 2007I've rarely seen it so starkly said:
"We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism," says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. "Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.
"You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman…
pharyngula | February 25, 2007Tired of the sanctimonious appropriation of all that is good in American history by the Christian right? Roger Ailes delivers a magnificent denunciation of the WSJ's attempt to claim the abolitionist movement as a blessedly Christian endeavor by quoting Frederick Douglass.
Revivals in religion, and revivals in the slave trade, go hand in hand together. (Cheers.) The church and the slave prison stand next to each other; the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the pious devotions of his religious master. (Hear, hear.) The church-going bell and the auctioneer's bell…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2007Can one be religious while simultaneously claiming to be an ardent atheist? This is what Sam Harris manages to accomplish in his rant, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004, 2005).
Throughout much of this simplistic argument, Harris uses blunt, hard-hitting prose to make his case for why abrahamic religions, particularly Islam, are the most dangerous element of modern life. According to the author, religious faith is flawed because it requires its adherents to cling irrationally to mythic stories of heaven and hell. He…
pharyngula | February 19, 2007Nathan Newman asks a good question about Mitt Romney's rejection of the godless:
And at some level, why shouldn't a person's religious beliefs be relevant?
They should be. However, when one holds a minority belief about religion, one that is widely reviled, then it is to one's interest to insist that religion be off the table. That's a purely pragmatic concern. In addition, I think there's an element of resentment: we atheists have been told so often to sit down and shut up and keep our opinions out of the debate, even by people who don't believe in religion themselves, that we tend to get a…
pharyngula | February 18, 2007Revere reminds us of the low esteem in which atheists are held, and specifically, that we are regarded as much less trustworthy than Mormons, a question brought up by the candidacy of Mitt Romney of Massachusetts (24% would refuse to vote for a Mormon for president, while 53% are against the idea of an atheist president). It's hard to feel much solidarity with our Mormon countrymen, though, when one of their more prominent representatives can say something like this.
We need to have a person of faith lead the country.
It seems to me a little odd that people can have temper tantrums over a…
pharyngula | February 14, 2007We may have to move (Skatje would approve). The new Dutch cabinet has just been announced, and look at the Minister for Education, Culture & Science:
Ronald Plasterk (PvdA), 50, molecular geneticist, staunch athiest and opponent of intelligent design.
Can you imagine the meltdown if such a person were appointed in this country?
pharyngula | February 13, 2007An atheist goes for a walk and is accosted by a couple of Christians, and he defends himself…no, more than that, he goes on the offensive. It's great to watch. This is what we all have to do: no more appeasement, no more making excuses for the foolishness of others, just smack down their yapping noises aggressively, confidently, without compromise. And he laughs good-naturedly at their crazy ideas. Perfect!
pharyngula | February 13, 2007The NYT has a nice article on Carl Sagan's new posthumous book—it was put together by his widow, Ann Druyan, and she makes a few good points:
In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. "A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren't going to take it anymore," Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.
I'll say. It was a stupid truce, anyway, entirely to the benefit of the old guardians of mythology.
pharyngula | February 12, 2007The Myers household is going to celebrate the day in half an hour — we've got the cake, we've got the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, we've got the hot chocolate — and we figure we'll party by watching CNN at 8ET to see if Dawkins and Hitchens are going to go on a rampage. I hope they do, but I also sort of expect that they're being set up by the theidiots at the Zahn show. I'll report back on how (and if) the show goes.
Hey, the CNN show went well! Dawkins was good, emphasizing the positive aspects of atheism. The panel consisted of Ellen Johnson of American Atheists (good work,…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2007The official God FAQ is now available for your reading pleasure.
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tags: godlessness, God FAQ, humor
pharyngula | February 11, 2007Lots of people have been emailing me about this: YouTube is getting weird about censoring accounts by atheists. This one fellow, Nick Gisburne, with a long history on the service had his account abruptly deleted due to its "inappropriate nature"—he'd read some excerpts of violent passages from the Koran, with no commentary at all. It's bizarre—it's apparently not that he was espousing atheism, which YouTube does not seem to object to, but that he read quotes that put Islam in a bad light.
This is a remix of the ungodly CNN panel, with refutations and arguments imbedded in response to the…
pharyngula | February 8, 2007OK, here's the latest word on tonight's show on atheists with Paula Zahn: there will be a different version of the previous report on ostracized atheists. Dawkins' interview will be four minutes long. There will also be a panel with Niger Innis (a conservative Republican), Roland Martin (a religious commentator), and Christopher Hitchens (atheist pain-in-the-ass). Apparently, they searched the entire United States of America and couldn't find a single atheist, so they had to import a couple from one of those godless foreign countries. You know, if they'd called me this morning I could have…
pharyngula | February 8, 2007Really, I don't read Debbie Schlussel's blog—a reader sent me a link, so I put on the waders and gas mask and climbed down into the sewer. I'm now completely baffled; why is this insane and deeply stupid person ever put on television? Her response to the CNN complaints is illustrative, and even if you sympathize with her, you've got to recognized the big picture here: she's not very bright.
Something happened over the last 24 hours. Beginning last night, my inbox became populated with vile hate-mail from atheists. No skin off my back.
But it is entertaining and amusing. It's hard to believe…
pharyngula | February 8, 2007That wretched excuse to bash atheists on the Paula Zahn program that I criticized must have generated some intense and voluminous correspondence, because right now they're scrambling to do damage control. I just got word from Richard Dawkins that they are going to repeat the lead segment (the part with the ostracized atheist family), and then instead of showing the bumbling bigot panel, they're planning to replace that debacle with a new interview with Richard Dawkins. That's tonight, Thursday, at 8PM EST.
For symmetry, it would have been better to have a panel with Dawkins, Dennett, and…
pharyngula | February 6, 2007Take a look at this promising poll at Daily Kos. This informal and unscientific survey of the netroots seems to be showing that a third of the readers are utterly godless, and that if you toss in the agnostics, freethinkers have got a clear majority. I anxiously await the hysterics from the wingnuts, who will be horrified at all the heretics and apostates and damned infidels lurking on the Left, with their forked tails twitching and their horns filed to sharp, pointy tips.
Maybe we need to start agitating for a godless caucus at Yearly Kos—or even a panel on standing up for secularism, and…
pharyngula | February 6, 2007I mentioned that ghastly CNN hit piece on atheists the other day; I just saw it myself, and it's far, far worse than I had imagined. You can see the whole thing with a transcript, too, and you should be appalled.
It starts off reasonably enough with a segment on a family of atheists who were ostracized in a small town; then it closes with some young Republican-looking talking head who babbles about how atheists bring it on themselves, and we should blame all the militant atheists for the fact that people feel compelled to shun those who don't believe as they do. It was a weird blame-the-…
pharyngula | February 4, 2007Scienceblogs are a hotbed of irreligiosity today. Besides my usual, expected, reflexive contumely (illegal in at least one state!), Aardvarchaeology is hosting the 59th Carnival of the Godless, and Revere rips into CNN's anti-atheist bias. Sample stupid quote:
Listen, we are a Christian nation. I'm not a Christian. I'm Jewish, but I recognize we're a Christian country and freedom of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion.
Got that? We are not free to be atheists if we choose, according to Constitutional scholar and moderate voice of reason Debbie Schlussel.