godlessness
pharyngula | March 6, 2006Seed sent me a copy of this book, What We Believe but Cannot Prove : Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I've been browsing. It's a collection of short essays (sometimes very short) on assumptions held by individual thinkers without solid evidence. It's thought-provoking, even where I think the writer is a dingbat (Ray Kurzweil) or blithering banalities (Kevin Kelly). I rather liked Brian Goodwin's essay on the fallacy of the nature-nurture problem, but so far, my favorite is one by the author Ian McEwan:
What I believe but cannot prove is…
pharyngula | March 6, 2006Amy Sullivan is not one of the people I want advising the Democratic party…unless, that is I suddenly decided I wanted to be a Republican, and was feeling too lazy to change my voter registration. She's got one note that she plays loudly over and over again: Democrats need to be more religious. Why? So we can get more religious people to vote for our candidates, and so we can steal the Republicans' identification as the party of faith.
Nationally, and in states like Alabama, the GOP cannot afford to allow Democrats a victory on anything that might be perceived as benefiting people of faith.…
pharyngula | February 26, 2006I'm sorry, Josh, but while you introduce the issue well…
There's been a minor thing brewing in the last week or so between PZ Myers, Chris Mooney, and originally Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett (and by now the rest of the blogosphere) about "hiding atheists away" in discussions of evolution, the framing issues involved in calling atheists "brights" and other tangentially related topics. It taps into the deeper issues of the connection between evolution and atheism, how that impacts the Great Creationism Wars, and on and on.
…you then go on to perpetuate the usual misrepresentation of…
pharyngula | February 26, 2006Bob Larson.
Pam has the story—he's an evil evangelist whose scam is to snooker people into coughing up wads of cash for his "exorcism" services. He's a first rate kook, a flaming wicked con artist who may well be so deluded that he actually believes in his own magic powers, but who cares? He's nuts. His followers are nuts. Most Christians aren't going to complain if you point out that he's a loon—most are going to be vaguely embarrassed by these fringe quacks flourishing within their religion.
This picture, though, is not from the Bob Larson article.
Palms upraised and eyes closed, the…
pharyngula | February 26, 2006Garry Trudeau has been on a roll lately—the BD story line has been affecting and sympathetic, and now and then, he comes out and slams unreason. There have been long stretches where it feels like he's phoning it in, but not so much recently.
pharyngula | February 25, 2006August Berkshire of Minnesota Atheists gave a talk at Northwestern College, one of our regional evangelical Christian colleges, and the Star Tribune has a story about it. He gave the students a list of very poor religious rationalizations—it's a strange and interesting story, and a little sad, since the students don't seem to have learned anything at all.
There are also peculiar little twists to everything that reflect how blinkered people can be. Berkshire was invited by the instructor in a theology class, and look how unaware this guy is:
Johnson told the group that his association with…
pharyngula | February 24, 2006For those curious about Dawkins' documentary, "Root of All Evil?", you can find a short excerpt of the segment with Ted Haggard online. Haggard is extraordinarily creepy—keep some Pepto-Bismol handy if you watch it.
(via Leiter Reports)
pharyngula | February 23, 2006You may have heard that Michael Ruse has been caught out of school, sharing a private spat between himself and Daniel Dennett with the William Dembski. This isn't too terribly surprising—Ruse's reputation has been spiralling downwards rather rapidly, what with all his sucking up to the Intelligent Design crowd in recent years, and I'm half-expecting any day now to hear that he's become a creationist. In his waning years he'll be able to replace the legitimate respect of scientists, which he's been working hard to flush down the sewer, with the fawning and lucrative love of creationists.
I've…
pharyngula | February 22, 2006You wouldn't believe how much hate mail I got from posting a little link to Mel Gibson's Passion with a different soundtrack…but maybe Chris Clarke can take some of the heat now.
pharyngula | February 21, 2006Atheists will not be mocked, and I expect much fury in response to this disrespectful joke.
pharyngula | February 19, 2006You can tell when a dogmatic theist has to review a book by an unapologetic atheist: there's a lot of indignant spluttering, and soon the poor fellow is looking for an excuse to dismiss the whole exercise, so that he doesn't have to actually think about the issues. That's the case with Leon Wieseltier's review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell—it's kind of like watching a beached fish gasp and flounder, yet at the same time he apparently believes he's the one with the gaff hook and club.
It's full of self-important declarations that reduce to incoherence, such as this one:
You cannot disprove…
pharyngula | February 16, 2006I used to live in Utah, I've read parts of the Book of Mormon, and I've always been baffled about how such a cockamamie story that is contradicted by all of the evidence could possibly be so popular. Facts don't matter to a religion, of course, and the LDS Church has its own answer: it's a conspiracy by scientists to attack their True Version of History.
Officially, the Mormon Church says that nothing in the Mormon scriptures is incompatible with DNA evidence, and that the genetic studies are being twisted to attack the church.
Uh, I think that whole business of Native Americans being…
pharyngula | February 15, 2006Just a suggestion: don't browse weblogs when you're trying to perk yourself up with a little cheery good news.
The woman who chopped off her baby's arms in the name of her god is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.
Another woman was arrested for bringing a human head into the country in her luggage—it was all part of her voodoo religion, you see. She faces 15 years in prison.
In the South Pacific, villagers worship an American named John Frum who lives in a volcano and has promised them much cargo.
Fundamentalism kills. Well, actually, ignorance and fear kill, but fundamentalism…
pharyngula | February 13, 2006Chris Clarke brought this strangely twisted article to my attention. It starts out just fine, pointing out that the Intelligent Design assault on science is based on nothing but incredulity, and has the sweeping goal of destroying naturalism—not just one theory in biology, but the whole scientific shebang. The author is against all that, which is good…thanks, Cynthia, we appreciate your support. Now if only she'd just ended it there at the two-thirds mark.
The last third is peculiar. She seems to be less interested in strong science than in strengthening religion, and the reason she's arguing…
pharyngula | February 13, 2006This has got to be a spoof site, but then I would have had to think Rapture Ready was a joke, too. Anyway, when the Rapture comes and you are ascended into heaven, you need to make sure your beloved pets are cared for, so the JesusPets service is recruiting non-Christians to take care of pets during the Tribulation or whatever.
It's a bit bizarre. One thing they have to make sure of is that the godless atheist isn't signing up just so he can get his hands on Mr Tinkles to rape and eat, so we have to sign a promise that we aren't just scheming to ravish everyone's abandoned pets.
Make hard CA$…
pharyngula | February 11, 2006…and that's exactly why he is a slimy ass-pimple, a child-abusing freak.
Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.
"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"
2300 children. 2300 young minds poisoned. Nothing new…
pharyngula | February 8, 2006I haven't mentioned the Clergy Letter Project or Evolution Sunday events before. They're nice ideas—it's an effort to get clergy to acknowledge good science, and encourage discussions about the subject on Darwin's birthday, this Sunday—but I have to admit it's rather orthogonal to my point of view. While I appreciate the sentiment and think it's a positive step on the road to reason, I prefer to cut to the chase and jettison all the old religious baggage altogether.
I may have to take a more positive view towards it, though, since I ran across this weird wingnut site (well, maybe not too…
pharyngula | February 8, 2006There are several items of note at Salon today, so if you don't subscribe, watch the little commercial, you'll get some good bang for the buck.
Garrison Keillor (who is coming to UMM this Saturday—a few tickets are still available!) rips into "little man" Bush.
There's an interview with Daniel Dennett on "Dissecting God".
Most important of all, we learn that Keith Knight's wife is OK. Hooray! They cut a teratoma out of her—I really think she ought to ask to have it in a bottle to take home (teratomas can be particularly grisly and cool.)