godlessness
pharyngula | June 16, 2006I'm sorry, BigDumbChimp, but you've been beaten to this discovery: God Hates Shrimp. It's old news. It's also wrong in its emphasis. I read Leviticus…
Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.
…and what I see is that God hates cephalopods, the bastard.
pharyngula | June 13, 2006Tomorrow night, Wednesday, I'll be glued to NBC: Leno is having both George Carlin and Ann Coulter on. One can only hope that the old hippie will have an opportunity to eviscerate the hateful, dishonest cretin.
Do check out that link above for another example of Carlin's routines on religion.
pharyngula | June 12, 2006Francis Collins is a very smart, very disciplined, very hardworking man. He was the head of the Human Genome Project, and now he has written a book, The Language of God : A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I have to tell you, it doesn't look promising.
He talks about his ideas in an interview. It's the usual dreary stuff we get from the god-botherers, and it's clear that this is a subject on which he willingly turns his intellect to off.
Collins was an atheist until the age of 27, when as a young doctor he was impressed by the strength that faith gave to…
pharyngula | June 12, 2006George Carlin is a national treasure—his "Touched By An Atheist" skit is beautiful. Hank Fox's commentary isn't bad, either.
Maybe it's time for me to start ministering down at the hospital. The usual frauds there could use some competition. If only "evangelical" weren't such a nasty, evil word!
pharyngula | June 7, 2006This is very good news, but don't you wish we had a few more prominent American secularists to put on this advisory board? Welcome, Richard. Help us out!
Famed Scientist Richard Dawkins Joins the Advisory Board of the Secular
Coalition for America
Washington, DC — The Secular Coalition for America is
pleased to announce the addition of Richard Dawkins to its Advisory Board.
The Secular Coalition for America is the first lobbying organization
representing the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other
nontheists in the nation's capitol.
Richard Dawkins is a well known…
pharyngula | June 5, 2006Let's test the proposition.
"The man shouted 'God will save me, if he exists', lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said.
The answer?
No.
pharyngula | June 5, 2006There were some interesting responses to my post on the god worm. There were some that were just annoying. I'm not impressed with the ones that make excuses for religion by calling me "naive" and lacking an impression of the diversity of religious belief out there; one bothersome strategy that I also saw in Barbara O'Brien's post was an attempt to defocus religious belief.
Here's how that works. Criticize some attribute of religion, such as its reliance on "faith", that uncritical acceptance of cosmic baloney. Concerned defender of religion rushes to assert that a) there is evidence for their…
pharyngula | June 4, 2006Barbara O'Brien is doing a guest post for Glenn Greenwald, and she's chosen to talk about religion—you can guess what her position is from the opening paragraph.
…sometimes I find myself defending Christians from the religion haters among us lefties.
I confess. That's me, religion hater. Go ahead and read the whole thing. It's interesting. It argues that we should tolerate Christians (I'm all for that), and that some Christians have very sensible secular views, and that some American Christians have been responsible for social progress. Sure thing! No argument!
However, nowhere in the…
pharyngula | May 31, 2006Isn't it charming how the most contemptibly corrupt scoundrels are so pious?
pharyngula | May 30, 2006Are you ready for the hot new game of the 2006 Christmas season, Left Behind: Eternal Forces?
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and…
pharyngula | May 30, 2006I almost forgot: there was another comment in the Karen Armstrong interview that I found irksome…but my complaint is mainly with the interviewer. Here's one question he asked her, and her answer.
But certainly there are a lot of people -- both scientists and religious people -- who speculate about whether there's some cosmic order. For the evolutionary biologists, the question is whether there's some natural progression to evolution.
Who knows?
Her answer is a kind of weak cop-out, but it's acceptable…avoiding a question on which you are ignorant is not a problem. The question, though…jebus…
pharyngula | May 30, 2006Salon has an interview with Karen Armstrong, and I don't know whether the interviewer just did a poor job or whether her ideas really are that sloppy and confused. She definitely has interesting ideas about religion, but while she's dismissing simplistic ideas about gods and the afterlife on the one hand, she's also clinging desperately and irrationally to nebulous beliefs about religion and spirituality and the art and poetry of myth. Armstrong is smart enough to see the hokum in dogma, but she's still so strongly wedded to the idea of religion that she struggles to contrive fuzzy…
pharyngula | May 30, 2006I've received a personal email from Rabbi Avi Shafran—the fellow whose graceless and ignorant opinion piece I criticized a while back. It's a peculiar thing: he wrote a public editorial, I criticized it publicly, and now he asks that we have a private discussion on the matter. I won't post his whole email, but I will put up the main point, what he plainly says is the main point and a restatement of the thesis of his original editorial, and address that here.
If Rabbi Avi Shafran wants to continue the discussion, he should do it publicly. I'm not going to convert him, and he's not going to…
pharyngula | May 28, 2006Confirming my obvious un-Americanism, let me praise two things: Godlessness and Socialism. And here, watch a video that ties the two together.
(Actually, I'm not against America. I'm just for a godless America that cares about the welfare of its citizens.)
pharyngula | May 25, 2006This Casciola case in Italy is still going on? I mentioned it a while back, with an ennui-laden tone, I'm afraid—suing the Catholic church to demand they provide evidence for the existence of Jesus is a futile endeavor, I think, and isn't going to change anyone's mind.
He also seems to be a bit of a kook. It looks like Anderson Cooper might be doing a show on him, and this sounds wrong.
He says he has dedicated his life to bringing down the Catholic Church, and he's spent years of his life researching his subject. He says there was, in fact, no Jesus, but a military man named John of Gamala…
pharyngula | May 23, 2006Forget the Sermon on the Mount. Forget the Golden Rule. Turning the other cheek? That's for sissies. Real Christians are militaristic thugs.
This is what happens when you build your beliefs on a foundation of nonsense, and refuse to examine it critically—you end up as willing prey to the next evil, bullying creep willing to lie to you.
pharyngula | May 21, 2006August Berkshire, the other atheist in Minnesota (well, there are a few others), has a fine piece in the Strib on that frothy mix of morality and religion—Rabbi Shafran ought to read it.
The Bible is like a Rorschach inkblot test: you can see just about anything you want in it. That is why Christians themselves cannot agree on such things as masturbation, premarital sex, contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, stem cell research, euthanasia and the death penalty. The Bible or religion as a moral guide? With all this disagreement, how is that possible?
pharyngula | May 21, 2006There is no more reverent way to wake to a fine Sunday morning than to discover another religious zealot punching himself in the face. Repeatedly. The Rabbi Avi Shafran is waxing indignant in a syndicated article that is popping up all over the place, in which he tries to denounce Zizek's most excellent article on the virtues of atheism. The best he can do, though, is whimper at length that atheists are just plain bad people—it's an argument to appeal to bigots who already have a prejudiced view of those who don't share their religion, but it's not very persuasive to people who can think.
It…
pharyngula | May 19, 2006Huh. I'd been wondering why I've been getting so much complaining email lately, defending Pensacola Christian College.
Pz Myers,
I'm A Christian. I came across your blog when searching for PCC in Pensacola FL. This web site was the first on the list. I of course disagree with you, but I do know why you as a "professor" at a University can not understand why someone would go to that college. I mean think about it? no fun, not accredited, religious? What sparks the endurance for a average 18 year old to go were the rules are so strick? Is it their parents? the answer is no. Is it the society?…
pharyngula | May 18, 2006The hype machine for that drecky novel and movie, The DaVinci Code, is rather appalling: I simply don't see what the appeal is in a poorly written and unbelievable conspiracy theory about Jesus, and the protestations from Catholics are accomplishing nothing other than to fuel further interest in a very silly story. All I can imagine is that it's feeding the same hunger for religious fables that drove the sales of those ghastly Left Behind books. Anyway, the only good thing I've seen emerge from the schlockfest yet is Ian McKellen and his comments on the Today show, written up in US magazine…