godlessness
grrlscientist | February 4, 2007Another blog carnival has been published; the 59th installment of the Carnival of the Godless. For those of you who don't know, this blog carnival focuses on the finest writing about atheism and godlessness out there.
pharyngula | February 4, 2007For this ridiculous religion thing. Let's hear it for the smart young people who are starting to wake up:
pharyngula | February 2, 2007Brent exposes an interesting Massachusetts law:
Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior.
Uh-oh. I think I…
pharyngula | February 1, 2007I've received a few interesting links on the state of religion in America, so I'll just dump a brief hodge-podge below the fold. The quick summary: one clueless twit, one poll, and one philosopher weigh in.
Let's get the ugliness over, first. Andrew Sullivan is still an obnoxious fool. He gets some letters from atheists, and quotes a few: I thought this one was nice.
I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility and will to act in this world. I have the opportunity to interact with others and to create things. I have the chance to leave this world a bit better than when I…
pharyngula | January 29, 2007Watch the Fox News announcer get all pissy about Brian Flemming's Blasphemy Challenge.
The funny thing is watching Kasich declare himself just "sick" about it and accusing Flemming of "preying on children" and getting upset because the people on youtube are not attacking Mohammed enough…and then ask a calm and smiling Flemming why he's so angry. If people choose to deny gods, what right does a sanctimonious slug like Kasich have to tell them they can't?
pharyngula | January 22, 2007The most positive, optimistic development I know of is the way many young people are coming out in defense of atheism—and the ones who do are often wonderfully eloquent. I've mentioned my daughter's testimonial before; now Brent Rasmussen finds another young lady's essay that will make you feel good about the future.
Unfortunately, in the comments to that post you'll also discover why many of us find evangelical Christianity contemptible. There are more discussions of the subject where the loathsome Christians are out in force — something that also happened with Skatje's post — and I really…
pharyngula | January 22, 2007Somebody gets it.
Now what are we to think of a scientist who seems competent inside the laboratory, but who, outside the laboratory, believes in a spirit world? We ask why, and the scientist says something along the lines of: "Well, no one really knows, and I admit that I don't have any evidence - it's a religious belief, it can't be disproven one way or another by observation." I cannot but conclude that this person literally doesn't know why you have to look at things. They may have been taught a certain ritual of experimentation, but they don't understand the reason for it - that to…
pharyngula | January 22, 2007John Horgan criticizes Francis Collins for his defeatism in thinking that human beings will always be evil to one another:
Christians castigate atheists such as Richard Dawkins for propagating a dark, nihilistic view of human existence. But Dawkins is Pollyanna compared to Christians like Collins, who has so little faith in human reason and decency that he thinks we'll kill each other until the end of time.
I'm not quite as optimistic as Dawkins—I don't think that the disappearance of religion would necessarily or rapidly lead to an improvement in the human condition. I do think it is an…
grrlscientist | January 22, 2007If you are like most people, you wonder about the existence of god, if there is an afterlife and whether there is any meaning to life. Certainly, our thoughts regarding these matters profoundly influence our behavior and our lives. But when there are so many conflicting faiths, how can any person know which one is the best? To work through these questions, you will be interested to read The Path of Reason: A Philosophy of Nonbelief by Bruce Smith (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse 2006), which tells the personal story of the author's intellectual journey from the Bible Belt to atheism.
In this well-…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007Steven Weinberg reviews The God Delusion. It's almost entirely positive—one exception is that he takes Dawkins to task for being too even-handed and well-intentioned towards Islam. I particularly enjoyed his criticisms of the critics. Here's a familiar argument:
The reviews of The God Delusion in the New York Times and the New Republic took Dawkins to task for his contemptuous rejection of the classic "proofs" of the existence of God. I agree with Dawkins in his rejection of these proofs, but I would have answered them a little differently. The "ontological proof" of St Anselm asks us first…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007Scott Aaronson has a revelation: it's OK for a "disbelieving atheist infidel heretic" to refer to a god.
What I'm trying to say, Bill, is this: you can go ahead and indulge yourself. If some of the most brilliant unbelievers in history — Einstein, Erdös, Twain — could refer to a being of dubious ontological status as they would to a smelly old uncle, then why not the rest of us? For me, the whole point of scientific rationalism is that you're free to ask any question, debate any argument, read anything that interests you, use whatever phrase most colorfully conveys your meaning, all without…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007I am committed to more brevity, so I must resist the temptation to draw out my greatsword, chop this into bloody chunks, and stomp the gobbets into gooey red smears while howling, "There are nooooo gods!!!", but I will take exception to one small piece of Francis Collins' interview in Christianity Today.
I encounter many young people who have been raised in homes where faith was practiced and who have encountered the evidence from science about the age of the earth and about evolution and who are in crisis. They are led to believe by what they are hearing from atheistic scientists on the one…
grrlscientist | January 15, 2007Ken Ham's Creationism Museum has attracted so much media attention and packed so many preview sessions that Ham is convinced that nearly half a million people a year will come to Kentucky to see his Biblically correct version of history.
The $27 million project, which also includes a planetarium, a special-effects theater, nature trails and a small lake, is privately funded by people who believe the Bible's first book, Genesis, is literally true.
For them, a museum showing Christian schoolchildren and skeptics alike how the earth, animals, dinosaurs and humans were created in a six-day…
pharyngula | January 10, 2007Critics of the godless have a powerful weapon at their disposal: prayer. I know I dread the possibility that some clever opponent might counter my arguments by dropping to their knees and mumbling at an imaginary friend.
pharyngula | January 7, 2007RJ Eskow has a set of 15 questions he wants us "militant atheists" to answer. Apparently, we've been blaming every problem in the universe on religion and religion alone, and we need to eradicate faith in order to inaugurate our new world order of peace, prosperity, and reason. That isn't really hyperbole: his questions really are exercises in the obvious. Here's one, for instance (no, I'm not going to waste my time with all 15):
Where the wars so often cited by militants (the Crusades, etc.) primarily religious in nature, or did their root causes stem from other factors such as economics,…
pharyngula | January 7, 2007I'm about to hop on a plane and fly off to New York for a few days, and now it seems like everyone is sending me op-eds from all over the place that are screaming against the "new atheism". We must be effective to inspire such denunciations, and we must be striking deeply to cause so much obvious pain. It's sad to see the agony people are experiencing as they witness the godless speaking out with such boldness, but they're just going to have to get used to it. After all, if they're really tolerant, they have to recognize people's right to believe or disbelieve as they will…but I guess we're…
pharyngula | January 6, 2007Richard Dawkins sure does a fine job of placing sticks of dynamite under people's chairs and blowing them up. I've been out of town and I haven't even had net access for the past day, so nobody can blame me for this latest round of anti-atheist outrage going on in these parts.
Dawkins' latest op-ed suggesting an alternative reason for not assassinating people like Saddam Hussein was more than enough to provoke frantic scurrying in these parts. Barbara calls him a "fundamentalist atheist" (that tired old slander), Chris is horrified that Dawkins seems to feel "justified in objectifying Hussein…
pharyngula | January 1, 2007Somebody warn Dawkins about his analogy!
Athorism is enjoying a certain vogue right now. Can there be a productive conversation between Valhallans and athorists?
Naïve literalists apart, sophisticated thoreologians long ago ceased believing in the material substance of Thor's mighty hammer. But the spiritual essence of hammeriness remains a thunderingly enlightened relevation, and hammerological faith retains its special place in the eschatology of neo-Valhallism, while enjoying a productive conversation with the scientific theory of thunder in its non-overlapping magisterium.
Militant…
pharyngula | December 31, 2006You can now read Richard Dawkins official statement on the controversial petition over at the Panda's Thumb.