godlessness
pharyngula | November 2, 2006There will be a wrap-up of the atheist symbol discussion tomorrow—I'll put up a post with the most popular options and invite people to defend them—but until then, savor this amusing artwork.
(No, it's not a serious contender, it's just funny!)
pharyngula | November 1, 2006Goosing the Antithesis has Two Open Challenges for Theists—believers, please do try to address them.
pharyngula | November 1, 2006But only a start. A new poll finds an encouraging level of doubt among Americans.
Nearly half of Americans are not sure God exists, according to a poll that also found divisions among the public on whether God is male or female or whether God has a human form and has control over events.
The survey conducted by Harris Poll found that 42 percent of US adults are not "absolutely certain" there is a God compared to 34 percent who felt that way when asked the same question three years ago.
Among the various religious groups, 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics and 30 percent of…
pharyngula | October 31, 2006Matt Yglesias comments on one of Amy Sullivan's usual complaints about "secular liberal intolerance" in the most cynical, hypocritical way possible:
Now Amy's right. It would be useful, for the purposes of electoral politics, for liberals in the media to avoid expressing the view that the belief — adhered to by millions of Americans — that failure to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior will result in eternal damnation is daft. On the other hand, the evangelical view of this matter is, in fact, completely absurd.
What prompted this was Sullivan getting her back up because a writer…
pharyngula | October 30, 2006Rosenhouse plans to review the reviews of Dawkins' The God Delusion this week, and he's already off to a scathing start. Pop the popcorn, and sit back.
pharyngula | October 30, 2006The physicist Sean Carroll takes on Eagleton, and also makes a few comments on The God Delusion—key point, I think: Dawkins took on too many issues at once in the book, and opened himself up to criticisms on the weaker parts that are used to dismiss the stronger parts. I agree.
Most of the discussion takes up a weakness in theology, and it parallels the weakness in Dawkins' book: the confusion between different concepts of this god-thingie. Theologians play that one like a harp, though, turning it into a useful strategem. Toss the attractive, personal, loving or vengeful anthropomorphic…
pharyngula | October 29, 2006There are plenty of horrors to give us the heebie-jeebies, as you can learn in the 52nd Carnival of the Godless.
As for me, I'm going to be playing a mad scientist DJ on Tuesday, showing clips from horror movies at the Cafe Scientifique. I've been chopping and splicing all morning to get ready for it.
grrlscientist | October 29, 2006
Carnival of the Godless number 52 is now available for your reading pleasure. This blog carnival celebrates atheism and agnosticism in favor of living a reality-based life. This particular issue of CotG is dressed up in holiday cheer, so be sure to mouse over the text to find the hidden links.
tags: blog carnival
pharyngula | October 28, 2006Norwegianity has put out a request to design an appropriate logo for all of us godless heathen bloggers. There's a certain religious deathcult that uses an instrument of torture as its immediately recognizable logo—it's very simple, clean, easy to draw, and they've made it their own. You see one of those things on a website or on a necklace and you instantly know to a very rough approximation the predilections of the owner. Why can't we have something like that?
You might be thinking the very idea is ridiculous, since freethinkers are such a diverse group, but you know, Christians also…
pharyngula | October 27, 2006Last week, I was told that I have a "god-shaped hole in my heart." My first thought was to reply that no, I have a perfectly intact heart thick with good strong sheets of muscle, but of course, that would have proven his point, that I've willingly replaced the Holy Ghost with actin and myosin, and the sacraments with Hodgkin and Huxley's sliding filament theory. So I have to confess that my email correspondent was correct in his sentiment, at least: I lack any feeling for god, religion, and superstition. It's simply true, and freely admitted. Although if I were to digest the idea down into a…
grrlscientist | October 27, 2006
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Sheikh Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly, the mufti of Australia's biggest mosque in Sydney who described unveiled women as "uncovered meat", refused to step down after he was suspended from preaching for three months. The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, said that stronger action should be taken against Hilaly.
"I believe that unless this matter is satisfactorily resolved by the Islamic community, there is a real worry that some lasting damage will be done," said Howard.
As far as I am concerned, the mufti should never be allowed to preach again after making such a crude and inflamatory…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2006
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Does anyone have any doubts as to the extremist nature of Islam when the senior Muslim cleric in Australia and New Zealand blamed women for their own rapes?
A senior Muslim cleric compared women who go without a head scarf to "uncovered meat" left out for scavengers, drawing widespread condemnation and calls Thursday for his resignation.
First of all, as a woman, I deeply resent being compared to a piece of meat, as if women's only purpose in life is to be consumed by men.
Second, I am appalled and outraged that any rational human being would ever say that women are responsible for a…
pharyngula | October 24, 2006I've seen an email that cites that crappy Eagleton review of The God Delusion that seems to think this quote is somehow a significant rebuttal of the book, rather than an indictment of the reviewer's ability to comprehend the book without inserting his own biases against atheism into it.
Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted…
pharyngula | October 23, 2006Wired has the perfect article for you: it's called the Battle of the New Atheism, and it's message is that the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Dennett) are, well, right, but they're also obnoxious and unsettling and foolish, and gosh, but youth pastors are cool and nifty and caring.
Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I've decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism — this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism — is too much for me.…
pharyngula | October 22, 2006You should only read Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion if you enjoy the spectacle of "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching." That's the title of the review, but I think it's more a description of the contents. You can get the gist from just the first paragraph.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one…
pharyngula | October 22, 2006As some of you might have heard, the Raving Atheist has been getting increasingly wacky and wobbling towards some weirdly irrational beliefs. The latest turn in the saga is that his disaffected readers have jumped ship and have started a brand new site, Raving Atheists. It's a shame, really: the Raving Atheist was one of the earlier blogs where godlessness was loudly and proudly expressed, and he had a strong community of atheist readers who congregated there, and who are now off on their own site. If nothing else, we can all thank RA for stimulating an interesting group of people.
Another…
pharyngula | October 19, 2006You can get the audio for Dawkins' talk at the University of Kansas now.
pharyngula | October 14, 2006There was an annoying interview with Richard Dawkins in Salon yesterday, which, unfortunately, I wasn't able to read until today because…
…I was getting the story straight from the horse's mouth.
The interview is annoying, not because of Dawkins, but because of the interviewer. It leads in with this comment: "Why are we here on earth? To Richard Dawkins, that's a remarkably stupid question. In a heated interview, the famous biologist insists that religion is evil and God might as well be a children's fantasy." It also biases the argument in infuriating ways.
Not surprisingly, these kinds of…
pharyngula | October 4, 2006Via Thoughts in a Haystack, here's an article on A Smart Battle Against Intelligent Design that almost gets the right answer, but then falls into the real trap, the conventional wisdom. First, here are the parts I think it gets right.
For the last 100 years, scientists, teachers and parents have been relying mostly on lawyers to keep religion out of public school science classes in this country. So far, the lawyers have been doing a pretty good job.
But the burden is shifting to the scientists themselves, say experts involved in recent cases defending public school science curricula from…