godlessness
pharyngula | April 23, 2006I think The Raw Story is supposed to be a progressive political web site…which, unfortunately, means I now have to be greatly embarrassed by my fellow travelers along the great liberal path. Melinda Barton has written a bizarre and poorly supported screed against atheism, or as she'd prefer to call it, secular whackjobbery, as opposed to her preferred position, which I will call theistic wank-offery.
She starts by making up a novel definition, always a bad sign. To Barton, the term "secular" refers to "those who disbelieve all religious and spiritual claims, not to those who merely support a…
pharyngula | April 20, 2006Salman Rushdie was in Minneapolis last night—I wish I could have been there, but that 3 hour drive can't be taken lightly—and it sounds like he was in excellent form:
When asked the question, "Who gets to tell our stories, and who decides who gets to tell them?" Rushdie replied, "Well, you're talking about religion, aren't you? Religion is some people deciding to tell stories for the rest of us, to us."
When asked what spiritual practice he used in his writing, if any: "I have no spiritual practice. The word spirituality should be banned from the English language for at least 50 years... Talk…
pharyngula | April 18, 2006See this map of religiosity? I'm stuck there in the brick red swath of traditional dumbassery running down the middle of the country.
I grew up in those lovely areas of Light out on the west coast.
May the benighted darkness someday fade from my current home.
(via Res Ipsa Loquitur)
pharyngula | April 16, 2006Take, for instance, Richard Harries:
This Easter, as usual, the Christian church will proclaim its central theme that, in Jesus, God shares our human anguish to the full and, through the resurrection, gives us hope that in the end all evil, including death, will be left behind. This God calls us to let the divine purpose of compassion work in and through us, to do what Jewish tradition calls repairing the world. It is the most sublime story of God ever told, the most deeply moving account of what it is for God to be God. No one doubts that there are real difficulties in believing it, but for…
pharyngula | April 16, 2006People all around the world are celebrating Easter today. I am not. Easter is a vile little holiday wrapped up in a façade of pretty dresses and chocolate eggs and happy children playing games on the lawn, but at its putrescent core lies 20 centuries of exploitation and dishonesty. Here is a hard-core atheist's perspective on this awful holy day.
I. The fact.
This is the season when our culture commemorates torture. A particularly callous sort of torture, too: a lazy and evil form of punishment that could be carried out en masse. Nail people up in intolerable postures and they inevitably and…
pharyngula | April 15, 2006Forgive me, for I am guilty of the sin of false pride. I'm wont to judge Christians by the worst of them, and in contrast, to regard atheism as the refuge of the more worthy. I am chastised by the existence of The Raving Atheist, however, who shows me that godlessness is not necessarily correlated with rationality. He's a useful reminder that a reasonable philosophy is not a guarantor that one is on the path to a truth.
If you haven't been following along, The Raving Atheist is definitely an atheist, but he's also an odd duck who has gone a bit unhinged on a few subjects. He's strongly anti-…
pharyngula | April 15, 2006Pope Ratzi was in charge of a parade yesterday, where everyone pretends to know every footfall of poorly documented Jewish rabbi's execution, so they can re-enact it and make portentous comments at every step. The whole thing is online, if you want to read it. The Seventh Station is the interesting one.
But what is it that today, in particular,
strikes at Christ's holy body?
Surely God is deeply pained
by the attack on the family.
Today we seem to be witnessing
a kind of anti-Genesis,
a counter-plan, a diabolical pride
aimed at eliminating the family.
There is a move to reinvent mankind,…
pharyngula | April 15, 2006Here's another account from the "War on Christians" conference. These people are scary and weird.
Perhaps the most explicit call to arms came from Ron Luce, the president and founder of Teen Mania, a Christian revivalist youth ministry, and the author of Battle Cry for a Generation, a multimedia campaign that deploys military images and language to recruit soldiers in Christ's army. Toward the end of his speech, Luce invoked the biblical story of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19. (In the story, the Levite's concubine is gang-raped by men who wanted to do sexual violence to the Levite.…
pharyngula | April 13, 2006Palazzo has put me in a pissy mood, now. He's mentioned those pompous god-botherers at the Templeton Foundation, who awarded 1.4 million dollars to that credulous gasbag, John Barrow.
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. "Biologists have a…
pharyngula | April 11, 2006After all, the churches are charitable institutions, with a higher calling to help the sick and weak in the name of a loving God. They have a role model in Jesus, who reached out to those rejected by society. Turn away the needy? That would be unchristian.
Unless, of course, the needy were some sick pervert. Then it's OK to kick her to the door; in fact, you're obligated to reject her, even if it costs you lots of money.
Read the charming story of faith-based discrimination in a Minnesota church. Trinity Lutheran Church had a sweet deal with county social services, getting remunerated for…
pharyngula | April 11, 2006The "neurotheologist" Michael Persinger is a fellow with an interesting idea: that the sensation of god is a product of activity in the brain. He induces activity in the brain with electromagnetic fields, and some people feel a sense of oneness with the universe or that aliens are peering over their shoulder.
Richard Dawkins is an infamous atheist who needs no introduction here.
Put the two together, have Persinger strap his electromagnetic helmet on Dawkins' head and stimulate the temporal lobes, the apparent seat of spiritual sensation, and what happens?
Nothing.
Horizon introduced Dr…
pharyngula | April 8, 2006Don't watch it if you'd rather not hear how nonsensical that book is.
By the way, the biblical scholar they've got on there, Paul Meyer, is no relation, and he's so darned wrong he doesn't even know how to spell his name correctly.
pharyngula | April 5, 2006Yes, it's true: DeLay has said something with which I find myself in accord.
Last Tuesday Mr. DeLay spoke at "The War on Christians" conference during which he agreed with the central theme - that there is, indeed, a "war on Christians" in America today. He went on to say that America treats Christianity like a "second-rate superstition."
I don't agree with the first bit, of course: there is no "war on Christians", although I think maybe there should be a rather more work on putting Christianity in its proper place (in the home and in people's entirely personal beliefs, and out of government…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2006
The 37 issue of the Carnival of the Godless is now available. It is crammed with lots of essays that you will enjoy, including one of mine. As an added bonus, this issue also includes a video of J. Huger's comedy sketch, Kissing Hank's Ass.
tags: blog carnival
pharyngula | April 2, 2006Thanks, Jody Wheeler, for poisoning my morning a little bit. You just had to mention this guy, Stephen Bennett, of Stephen Bennett Ministries, who is "Emerging as One of the Nation's Key Speakers on the Issues of Homosexuality & the Homosexual Agenda…A Man who is Not Afraid To Speak the Truth… in Love." Here's Stephen Bennett's kind of love:
As a heterosexual man who once engaged in homosexual behavior for 11 years, I've lost numerous dear friends to AIDS. While recent news in the search for a cure for AIDS is promising, I believe this possible HIV prevention pill is only going to push a…
grrlscientist | March 31, 2006"I'll pray for you."
How many times in your life have you heard that comment? Have you ever wondered what, if anything, prayer actually accomplishes? Have you occasionally felt somewhat .. uncomfortable? .. or threatened, perhaps? .. knowing that complete strangers were praying for you? A scientific study will be published next week that examines these questions regarding the so-called power of prayer.
This research studied 1800 heart bypass surgery patients. Heart bypass surgery is a procedure where a clean artery is removed from the patient's leg and is used to "bypass" an artery in the…
pharyngula | March 30, 2006What's gotten into the Huffington post? There's a flood of entries making
fun of
Christian self-pity. Two possible interpretations: liberals are all god-hating elitists, or fundamentalist fanatics have made easy targets of themselves lately. I'll let you guess which hypothesis I favor.
Laugh long and hard, everyone, and let's all sing out, "I told you so!" Prayer is worthless. Despite his job description, I think I'd rather like Dr Koenig:
Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who did not take part in the…